If atheism was most at home among French thinkers in the late 1700s, it moved to Germany in the next century. And the first leading German atheist was a man who said that human beings created God in their own image.
Ludwig Feuerbach, born in 1804, was pretty weird for an atheist: he didn’t attack religion much. He was more interested in where it came from. Humanity’s ideas of God, he said, came from its ideas about itself. “[You] believe that God is a wise and benevolent being because you know nothing better in yourself than wisdom and benevolence,” Feuerbach wrote in his most famous work, The Essence of Christianity.[1]
The claim that man created God rather than vice versa was so unsettling that it dropped Feuerbach into the same mess as Hume. He wanted work as a professor, and his views made schools push him away.
But they hit other atheists like the light from a sunrise. When one of Feuerbach’s younger fans wrote an essay that attacked religion, he sent a copy to Feuerbach with a letter that said, “I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and -- if I may use the word -- love, which I feel for you.”[2]
The young fan became probably the most famous atheist of all time -- and the most infamous: Karl Marx.
Marx launched his best-known assault on religion in the essay that he sent to Feuerbach. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx said. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”[3]
Marx is trouble for atheists. His main doctrine, communism, is basically an economic plan that involves wiping out private business; but it’s inspired governments worldwide to stomp nearly all freedoms, including freedom of religion. Communist governments in Russia, China, and elsewhere have outlawed churches and killed believers. In anti-communist countries like the United States, many people came to feel that atheists -- even non-communist atheists -- might be associated with communism and in any event couldn’t be trusted.
Marx’s comments on religion appeared in just three years after Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity. A few months later, in October 1844, Friedrich Nietzsche was born.
Nietzsche is another problem for atheists, because one of his fans was Adolf Hitler. In books such as Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche preached disgust for both religion and rationalism. He praised the monstrous, masterful “superman” or “overman,” whose indomitable will and passion for power entitled him to rule people who suffer from such weaknesses as pity and morality.[4]
Nietzsche’s most famous statement is “Gott ist todt” -- “God is dead.”[5] Neither God nor religion should control the superman, he thought. The Marquis de Sade would probably have agreed.
[1] Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction part 2 (“The Essence of Religion in General”) (1841), http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/essence/ec01_2.htm
[2] Karl Marx, letter to Ludwig Feuerbach (August 11, 1844), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/letters/44_08_11.htm
[3] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Introduction, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher (February 1844), translated by Joseph O’Malley, Oxford University Press (1970), http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Right.pdf
[4] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Book One, Chapter 4 (“The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich”) (1960), New York, Simon & Schuster
[5] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3, Section 125 (1882), translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books (1974) http://atheism.about.com/library/weekly/aa042600c.htm
