Quotes About Religion

Israel is the historical definition of the specific nature of the religious consciousness, save only that here this consciousness was circumscribed by the limits of a particular, national interest. Hence, we need only let these limits fall, and we have the Christian religion.

Of all the attributes which the understanding assigns to God, that which … especially in the Christian religion … has … pre-eminence … is moral perfection. But God as a morally perfect being is nothing else than the realised idea, … the moral nature of man posited as the absolute being; … how could he otherwise tremble before the Divine Being, accuse himself before him, and make him the judge of his inmost thoughts and feelings?

M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]

God … has no more significance for religion than a fundamental general principle has for … science[.]

The course of religious development … consists … in … that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. … That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God.

It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this; it is not I, an insignificant individual, but religion itself that says: God is man, man is God

W]hile you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extra-naturalism of your own self.

Obedece aos sentidos! Onde começam os sentidos cessam a religião e a filosofia, mas em compensação a verdade simples e nua te é dada.

Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual.

I by no means say … God is nothing, the Trinity is nothing, the Word of God is nothing, … . I only show that they are not that which the illusions of theology make them[.]

This [love] ought to be a furnace that should melt us all into one heart, and should create such a fervour in us … that we should heartily love each other.' But that which in the truth of religion is the essence of the fable, is to the religious consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing.

R]eligion has the conviction that its conceptions, its predicates of God, are such as every man ought to have, and must have, if he would have the true ones – that they are conceptions necessary to human nature; nay, further, that they are objectively true, representing God as he is.

Religion annexes to its doctrines a curse and a blessing … Blessed is he that believeth, cursed is he that believeth not. Thus it appeals not to reason, but to feeling, … to the passions of hope and fear. … [T]he fear of hell urges me to believe. Even supposing my belief to be in its origin free, fear inevitably intermingles itself[.]

Christianity has spiritualised the egoism of Judaism into subjectivity (though … this subjectivity is again expressed as pure egoism), has changed the desire for earthly happiness, the goal of the Israelite religion, into the longing for heavenly bliss, which is the goal of Christianity.

Everybody makes his own god(s).

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, … The divine being is … human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective … All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.

Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. … God is … infinite, man … finite … ; God … perfect, man imperfect; … God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful.

The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not. … [R]eligion renders this disunion all the more painful … [I]t sets man's own nature before him as a separate being.

Religion … denies goodness as a quality of human nature; man is wicked, corrupt, incapable of good; … on the other hand, God is only good[.]

The doctrine of immortality is the final doctrine of religion; … it speaks out what it has hitherto suppressed. If elsewhere the religious soul concerns itself with the existence of another being, here it openly considers only its own existence[.]

God as an object of thought … is always a remote being; the relation … is an abstract one, … So long as we have not met a being face to face, we are always in doubt whether he is really such as we imagine him; … Christ … is the … certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. … [O]nly in Christ is the last wish of religion realised, … [W]hat god is in essence, … Christ is in actual appearance.

T]hese days illusion only is scared, truth profane. … [S]acredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to highest degree of sacredness. Religion has disappeared, … for it has been substituted … the appearance of religion[.]

The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.

God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, the truth of man; … God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives his nature, … These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also … existence itself.