The Essence of Religion

'The essence of religion is the projection of human essence as other. The essence of theology is the "absolutization," the metaphysical hypostatization of this other, as real, or as the only essentially real Being. Imagination plays the role of providing the object of this hypostatization, or of this entification. But imagination, in Feuerbach's view, is not "imaginary." It is the real reflex of real existence--of that existence which constitutes the distinctly human. It is the expression of human needs, human desires, human feelings. What makes this distinctively human is that it is the consciousness of an object of feeling. But this "unhappy" consciousness is the veiled, unconscious or unknowing form of the consciousness of one's own feeling, that is, it is selbstfuhlende Gefuhl. To the extent that one is aware of one's own feelings, in the sense of having feeling itself as an object of feeling, one is a conscious being in the human sense, for this self-conscious feeling has as its object not merely this or that particular feeling, as a form of sensibility or irritability in the organic sense--an itch or a feeling of hunger, whose objects are in fact outward, physiologically particular objects. Rather, this self-conscious feeling has the nature of feeling itself as its object, that is, the species nature of feeling. Such a feeling is given only to human beings who are at the same time the subjects and the objects of the feeling. It is a feeling toward that which is human in another, and thus entails, unknowingly, the species concept of humanity itself. It is feeling toward another who is like oneself, and thus it transcends the particularity of mere sensibility; it has a universal as its object--that is, an essence' Marx W. Wartofsky, Feuerbach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1977), 217-218.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance.

When our aspirational thoughts return to us with a certain alienated majesty, we celebrate God's arrival. When we empathize with other human beings, we encounter "humanity" as a shared possession. We entitle the former experience "religious," the latter "religious ethics."