Does God exist? That is a question that is always in the air. Believe or not if there is no why so many religions, many men who believe and glorify a certain "God."
Freud says that religion is an illusion, which is derived from human wishes. The man full of pain, afraid of a destination with a certain awe of his right purpose or for its society to impose their instincts certain restrictions, creates a God who can do everything, where they can have a relief, comfort, support and forgiveness for all suffering in this real world. The man returns to its infant stage where, longs for a father figure, God - Father
Feuerbach reduces theology to anthropology, he says that God is the mirror of man, for man projects his needs and desires of a metaphysical being, created by man, then God is nothing more than raise the man himself to God for man .
Work In The Gay Science, Nietzsche announces that God is dead, little by little Western society was moving away from God and so signed, was himself who assassinated. But killing God eliminated all the values that formed the foundation for our life and therefore loses - if any point of reference. But is the death of God, Nietzsche announces the good news to overcome the man himself, the new man, the "superman".
With the birth of science God begins to die, the man who was once expelled from paradise for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, past, expels God from the center of the universe. According to Kant, the world can only be known through a scientific reason, and not through a language in which God gives us the rules of what can be done and what can not be done.
God became a man of a stopgap, it is in places where science has not yet explored. Religion would be a search for happiness, solace and comfort in this world where there suffering and strife, where the existence of a certain god is an expression of solidarity with human suffering, because this is where suffering and misery of man, it Marx tells us how to make opium of the people.
Theological anthropology
The death of God has become a symbol to express that human experience that other times he used the symbol "God" to articulate.
Like it or not, we are partly inherited from the past. This is what makes us historical beings. The tradition of Greek - Hebrew - Christian who formed us, consciously or unconsciously, is part of our being. And the word 'God' plays a crucial role in their structure. When we talk about the death of God, we can not avoid that dip images showing the collapse of a cultural tradition: the universe loses its center, a funeral procession passing through the cosmic and metaphysical spaces, once full of sense, now cold, empty, silent, with the deleted from its sun, the silent requiem that the heavenly hosts sing away before the death of life itself.
What is at stake is the realization that the structures of thought and language that theism offered collapse. Came to an end a certain vision of the universe. One way of thinking about life, to face their problems, and therefore speak. Christianity, in fact, have disappeared long ago not only reason, but the very life of humanity, says Feuerbach, in the preface to his The Essence of Christianity. "Christianity is nothing more than a fixed idea, a flagrant contradiction our companies with life insurance or fire insurance, our railroads ... our galleries of paintings and sculptures, our military and engineering schools, science museums and our theaters ".1 In fact, a world that has realized that nature is predictable, manipulable, rationalized, have buried a reality 'at the mercy of miraculous intervention Finger of God. The diagnosis of the heretical Feuerbach is taken up by Bonhoeffer in his letters in prison "... becomes increasingly more evident that everything works fine without God. Already admits that the knowledge and life are perfectly possible without him. Since Kant it has been relegated to the realm beyond experience ".2
The problem of the death of God is metaphysical, no doubt. But the metaphysical, it is not the product of asking the man about the reality? Answers can only be understood in light of questions that are raised. So the death of God is first and foremost, an anthropological problem. It indicates that there are certain questions that are asked more and more nothing, an anthropological problem. It indicates that there are certain questions that are increasingly less often. The death of God thus appears as a turgid Silence of anthropological and social meanings. We live in an era that has prohibited the mystery, which relegated the primitive, ignorant and sick. Because the great dogma of the world that we call science is that reality is self-explanatory, and that reason has the tools to decipher the riddle that will be offered. Perhaps, instead of talking about the death of God, would be more correct to speak of the eclipse of God. We entered into the problem, and to that end I believe that anyone, better than Feuerbach as master of ceremonies.
Feuerbach was a strange combination. Religious and atheist at the same time. For our mental habits here are two attitudes that are excluded. For him, the contrary, assume that if they are attitudes: an atheist because religion.
The man, according to Feuerbach, is to be divided. This is what distinguishes him from animals. Divided by not lend itself to the concrete conditions in which it is released. Permanent conflict between existence and essence. So transcends itself. And this transcendence - expressed in their mental life. Man, unlike animals, not just a reduplicated data. Man designs, creates images that do not correspond to the facts of the outside world. He projects what is repressed and latent in its nature, its potential unrealized in their historic experience. According to Feuerbach, this division is given by the man to have a fundamental difference of animal consciousness, taken in the strict sense. At this point, has two kinds of consciousness, one's own human consciousness, in the strict sense, and another that is also present in animals at large.
Consciousness in the broadest sense would be the sense of himself, sensory discrimination, which also characterizes the animals. According to Feuerbach, the animal may be an object for himself, not as a genre, but just as an individual. Consciousness, however, in the strict sense exists only when, for a being, is subject to their gender, their quididade.3
Consciousness is related, according to Feuerbach, to knowledge. Man, unlike animals, has a double life, one indoor and one outdoor, due to their conscience. The inner life of man is life related to their gender, in essence, states:
"The man is for himself while U.S. and TU, he can stand in the place of others just because their gender, their essence, not only his individuality, he is to object" .4
Religion has as a precondition, as here Feuerbach tells us, consciousness in its specificity and, therefore, the human essence is the foundation of religion. But beyond that, if consciousness is the ground of religion only in its human specificity, ie as an object has its own genre, that "the essence of man, in contrast to the animal, not just the foundation but also the object of religion, "5 for consciousness, as the founding of the religion, it takes the object itself, is self-awareness, awareness of the genre.
Feuerbach puts it this way, in radical opposition to positivism that identified the real with the objects offered to contemplation, and which necessarily reduces the imagination to a role alienating. Man thinks its real not through an act of conforming to its terms. This is what characterizes the rough: its inability to transcend. The man, in contrast, expresses his humanity in the act by which their psychological functions put before him even its essence, negated by the conditions of existence. This is what religion is. "Religion", he tells us, "is the act whereby man separates from himself and in which he contemplates the nature of latent" 6 God is the symbol for the answer to the question "Who am I?" "The man says about God, he actually says about himself" .7 If religion is a mirror image that God is man, this act of transcending himself, projecting himself. We can thus say: "And God created man in His image and likeness."
So far there is almost nothing radically new interpretation of Feuerbach. The theology in the past, often referred to God as the summum bonum, as the answer to man's thirst for longer. From St. Augustine this idea was common in orthodox Christian thought. But Feuerbach goes a step further and breaks the whole structure of the system. And this happens when he asks about the source of ideas, and hence about the significance of language.
What is language? Whence the ideas that form? Unlike the philosophers who built worlds apart from our ideas, which mediate the reality of thought in direct proportion to their immateriality, which "tore their eyes to see better," Feuerbach eight states: an analysis of the genesis ideas shows that ideas do not descend from heaven to the earth but rise from the earth but rise from the earth to heaven. "Religion is a dream of the human mind. But even in dreams do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven but on earth, the realm of reality "in September. The symbols of the imagination do not exist independently. They must be systematically reduced to its roots vital. And this is the fundamental point of criticism of Feuerbach: Theology ignores the genesis of ideas. As a result it gives a separate and independent reality of God, as if it were an object itself. Do not you realize that behind the symbol God is a projection mechanism of man, not the revelation of a world beyond. God is "where the man's diary records their highest thoughts and feelings, the album where they herd enter the name of things that are more expensive and sacred '10. The conclusion of his analysis is inevitable: "theology is anthropology" in November. "The theism is the secret of religion itself '12.
Feuerbach's atheism is something totally different from classical atheism. He understands that thought can not transcend the limits that are imposed for existence. On the lines of Kant's critical philosophy, believes that language can only refer to the world of experience. Therefore, its hermeneutics requires that all symbols that seem to point to besides being translated here as projections. But more than this, as opposed to positivist, Feuerbach believes that language is not a mere copy of what is contemplated.
Religion would be nothing but a fantastic creation of the human mind, totally destroyed meanings, not to refer to objects outside the subject. Feuerbach says that religious language, although it is not external objects as a point of reference, has a meaning for being an expression of an object at a time inside and universal: the essence of man. That's why fantasies and dreams have meaning. They express this essence, and it even takes the form of transcendence over the conditions of existence. So religion is a dream of the human mind, and if God is an actor who creates the mind to represent this theater of the imagination, it is the cryptic message that the essence of the man who might be in the future, to the man there in the present.
The fact is that language can not be understood as a collection of snapshots of the world, and not as a series of snapshots of the psychological essence of man. It reflects rather a relationship between man and the world. This is because the world is never accessible to itself, 13 as Descartes thought, except as man-in-relation-to-world. Language is not photographic art: it is interpretation.
"Against positivism which stops before phenomena saying 'there are only facts', I (Nietzsche) would say no, are precisely the facts that do not exist, only interpretations ..." 14
As being in the middle-of-the-world man perceives this world as a problem, a message, a challenge, but never as a simple image. It is man who understands and interprets the world and through this act to build it themselves. It is this relationship that language articulates. One can not therefore accept that religious language is the result of a projection of inner essence and innate to man (and therefore ahistorical), because consciousness is not a self-sufficient entity, but the result of a relationship . If so we understand the birth of language, we understand this very act the birth of God.
The birth of God
According to Freud and Jung, one of the main functions of religion (after the creation of God), is to defend the civilization of human hostility. The suffering that people endure on the outside, the forces of nature, and within, the restrictions that society imposes on its instincts are to some degree offset on one side, the personification of these opposing forces in gods is not so different from us, that religion does, and the other by his transmutation of libidinal and aggressive desires arising from the id in the love of neighbor and the ethics of conscience. These ideas will converge in the final and now more powerful than religion meet: the longing for the figure of pai15.
It has been pointed out by the function of consciousness. The authority exercised by the superego on the ego and the ambivalent feelings of dependency and concern that this raises are, according to Freud, resuscitation of the relationship with his father. I mean, the superego the ego faces as a stern father confronts the son. But more than that, the guilt, the superego is apparently necessary for the construction of consciousness is not simply derived from the individual's inability to find the libidinal and aggressive instincts of his id, he also comes from a unique and remorse by a collective act that involves the original parent. We thus return to an old theme. Guilt is also a historical legacy, a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life acquired by the human race as a psychic inheritance handed down from generation to generation.
In this way we look at the theory of the primal horde, Freud and religion lies in the circle of the complex father. The requirement of God as a father figure follows a prototype children's repetition (ontogenetic) powerlessness they feel about each one's own father, and this requirement is both a repetition (phylogenetic) relationship of father and son in the horde primitive. Thus, it is a situation that can be anything but new, and has continuity when a person matures. When they pass from childhood to adulthood, individuals perceive that they are powerless and need continuous protection. Now, however, the feeling of powerlessness is created by nature and by restrictions imposed by society. So they revert to the solution of childhood, creating a supreme being endowed with all the attributes of a parent:
"When he discovers he is destined to remain a child forever, that can never live without protection against strange superior forces, the individual attributes the growth in these forces the relevant characteristics of the father figure, he creates for himself the gods who fears the which seeks to please and to whom, however, trust your own protection. So its a longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection from the consequences of his human weakness. The defense against childish helplessness lends the characteristics of the adult reaction to the helplessness which he has acknowledged, a reaction that is precisely the formation of religion ".16
It is worth stating the reason why the image of God the Father has such a compulsive character particular. She is the fulfillment of a wish, wish fulfillment and brings satisfaction, but the peculiar power of the satisfaction gained by religious belief is the fact that it feeds the mind's desires and fantasies derived from childhood libidinal and aggressive instincts repressed in relation to father. In this sense, belief in God - Father doubles the neuroses of children and, like them, comes from the Oedipus complex. In the first case, the father is what one would like to be, in the latter prevents the father has what I would like to have. This ambivalence is projected directly on the concept of God. On one hand, God the Father is the object of love and admiration, the ideal of man, one who has the power to perform every wish and, on the other, it is a negative authority, the censor who sees everything, which prohibits our desires and severely punishes those who transgress his commandments. This projection, the believer is thus reliving the emotional relations from the period of his repressed childhood, as it is transferred to the divine father figure, attitudes and dispositions that are also part of the collective memory of humanity. God father becomes the reincarnation of the relationships that each of us has with his father and also with the ancestral father of the primal horde, and the strength of the desire to believe it derives from the strength of instinctual wishes and repressions involved in this relationship . The belief, so to speak, draws to itself those repressed desires and guilt associated with them is that the designs in the world and a figure whose will and whose commandments we submit willingly, in part because of the security it brings, and part, because we can thus fix the crimes committed against him and every parent. Religion is, in consequence, a fantasy born of the desire to obey, an obedience celebrated in rituals and obsessive religious practices. This is how God is born.
The death of God
God is dead. But he was also born there. Was born as part of human history as a symbol that cultures have created to make sense of their world. His death is therefore an event, not the history of the gods, but the history of man himself. He was the man who changed. Face your world differently, perceive it differently. It was not God who died, but the man once made use of this word to orient themselves in the world. This means that another man is building, a man who sees with different eyes, seeking different horizons.
The "death of God" in Feuerbach and Freud and Marx also appears as tasks, in Nietzsche becomes the mere announcement of good news.
"We feel like a new day was dawning upon receiving the good news that" the old God is dead ', our hearts overflowing with gratitude, awe, anticipation and expectation. At last the horizon appears again open to us, although it is not very clear: at last our ships may venture out at sea and to face any danger; all boldness of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, is open again "17
Nietzsche was, above all, a lover of the earth, life, freedom. With the vision of a prophet who characterized it, he may realize that the history of Western civilization was a fantastic story of repression. According to Nietzsche, this meant that familiarity with the roots more spontaneous life (Dionysian characteristics of the style of life), was repressed by Apollonian style: the triumph of form, the limit on the vitality and spontaneity. All his work is thus a protest against repression and a celebration of life. This requires that the land be turned into a recovery site where men can be returned to the "erotic sense of life", ie the release of the body to a happy relationship with the world around him, the world of color, sound , scents, tastes, caresses. However, Nietzsche realized that this whole structure of repression that has worked in Western civilization was inseparably linked to a religious structure. In the name of God is denied at will, the spontaneity, the Christian ideal is obedience, the camel that accepts that accepts all loads without complaint. In the name of God is denied the time, because your world is the world of eternity. In the name of God is denied the freedom to man to create a new future, because all values have already been coded in the past. That's why he announced the superman, the man who has the courage to assert his life and liberty against all structures of repression that our civilization has created. The crown of all this structure was the name of God. Thanks to this name suppression became sacred and the condition of the oppressed became due. Therefore, the "death" of this name brought with it the beginning of the end of the structures of repression. They lose their sacred character, and man, hitherto provided camel, is free to become the lion will destroy the dragon that oppresses him. After this, then, the horizons are opening up. The man is reconciled with the earth and fertilizes with his love. That is why Nietzsche to the announcement of the death of God has the status of a "good news" because it means permission for life to the world for the future.
With the death of God, man is born free and with the courage to know and dominate this world. Fundamental transformation. From scientist to saint.
With the birth of the scientist, God begins to die. Although scientists often refuse to confess, they must accept his complicity in the murder. Everyone remembers the conflict between Galileo and the church. All are unanimous in condemning the church. The question was not a scientific truth the less or more. Galileo was demolishing their own house of God. After him God never had housing right. Expelled from the center of the universe, it has no date no place else in the margins of existence, where science has not yet arrived. The man who was once expelled from paradise for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, revenge is now eating the tree of knowledge of the universe, and it expels God of the universe that he inhabited.
The new man is born then, but who is this new man? He is a man who experiences an exhilarating sense of freedom and permission. If the universe is no longer part of a sacred structure, if the church no longer has the right to proclaim himself the guardian of the structures of hierarchical order, the world is no longer taboo. He is profane. There is nothing in it that prevent the exercise of human freedom to know it and master it. Secularized the world and is secularization of knowledge.
Conclusion
All the traditional arguments to prove the existence of God, has no scientific validity. God is expelled from the scientific world and the existence of secular man. If the world we live in world space and time, according to Kant, is the world that can only be known and dominated in terms of scientific reason, the language about God becomes increasingly audible in intellectual circles. The God who with his finger worked miracles and answered prayers came under the rubble of the medieval building. Thus, prayer is nothing more than a superstitious illusion in a world that is not vulnerable to our desires become anthropological as Feuerbach says, and religion can only survive as morality, in the acknowledgments of God. Universal order almost nothing left. She is replaced by a horizontal world, profane and formless being built by the scientific reason and the moral dispositions of man.
Behold the man he believes has the tools to know and be able to accomplish! No matter that the building ready, built by God, have fallen. The task now is to build the city of men. And the reason will come out not only the form of our order but also the determination to accomplish it. This hope has formed the French Revolution to destroy the last vestiges of an old order to inaugurate a new era. We see here a secularization of the Christian eschatological hope, as formulated by Augustine. If Augustine is possible and necessary to have hope because the story is a prison drama by God which will lead to consummation, now God is no longer necessary because the reason is immanent in history. The man can have hope because the reason is stronger than the animal, the most powerful moral imperatives that the stimulus imposed. And to give even more impetus to this triumphalist view of history that goes ahead without the help of God, comes to the theory of organic evolution that makes the imagination burst of euphoria. If the organic realm of instinct shows a pattern of upward progress, if only to improve screening and it is immanent, the man can be sure that the order he builds will evolve to become the city of God. Here the rational and vital exuberance of man goes hand in hand with the exile of God. God must be thought of only as a stop-gap. Insofar as man advances victorious, with his knowledge, God makes new strategic withdrawals for those boundaries have not yet exploited by man, in the hope that there maybe he can return to play the role he played in the medieval world.
What is religion? It is not a creation of man's fantasy. Its roots lie in the real world conditions. Therefore it is the expression of a real condition of suffering and a protest against real suffering. So to conclude, in this famous phrase from Marx:
"Religious suffering is, on one hand the expression of real misery and, secondly, the protest against this misery. Religion is the moan of the creature overwhelmed by evil, is the soul of a heartless world, and is the spirit of an age without spirit '.18
I see that Marx was strongly influenced by Feuerbach, when he says:
"God is the optative of the human heart make this time, or blissful certainty, is the unbiased sense of omnipotence, it begs the patients the feeling that listening to yourself, is the echo of our cry of pain ( ...). Here he expresses the secrets the secrets that the choke, this is where he relieves his own heavy heart. That comfort the heart, this secret which can prove, that this suffering can be expressed, that is God. God is a tear of love which poured into the deep secrets about the human misery '.19
So Marx concludes that "... religion is the opium of the people ".20
Whenever there is any problem, using a protective father, in which the figure of God fits perfectly. We need someone to protect us, a child need a father in the dams, so the figure is born of God.
But with the arrival of science, where we explain the world with scientific proofs, we need not resort to myths to explain the birth of the things we do not need God to protect us, we already have life insurance, we need medicine to help us in our health problems. Thus, God is dumped on the margins of society where the science has not yet come, say that God is dead and buried just yet, are making sure your body awaiting his resurrection.
1 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988, p. 46.
2 BONHOEFFER, Dietrich. Letters and paper from prison. New York: MacMillan, 1962, p. 194-5.
3 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988, p. 43.
4 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p.44.
5 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 44.
6 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit.,p. 33.
7 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988p. 29.
8 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p 34.
9 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 39.
10 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 59.
11 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 38.
12 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 36.
13 DESCARTES, René. Discurso do método. Os pensadores. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979, p. 33.
14 KAUFMANN, Walter. The portable Nietzsche. New York: The Viking Press, 1965, p. 458.
15 PALMER, Michael. Freud e Jung: Sobre a religião. São Paulo: Loyola, 2001. p. 58.
16 FREUD, Sigmund. O futuro de uma ilusão. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1978. p. 204-5.
17 NIETZSCHE, Frederich. A gaia ciência. São Paulo: Martin Claret, 2003. p.117.
18 MARX, Karl. Contribuições à crítica da filosofia do direito de Hegel. In: Manuscritos econômicos
filosóficas. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989. p. 84.
19 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo.Campinas; Papirus, 1988,p.89-90.
20 MARX, Karl. Contribuições à crítica da filosofia do direito de Hegel. In: Manuscritos econômicos
filosóficas. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989. p. 84.
Freud says that religion is an illusion, which is derived from human wishes. The man full of pain, afraid of a destination with a certain awe of his right purpose or for its society to impose their instincts certain restrictions, creates a God who can do everything, where they can have a relief, comfort, support and forgiveness for all suffering in this real world. The man returns to its infant stage where, longs for a father figure, God - Father
Feuerbach reduces theology to anthropology, he says that God is the mirror of man, for man projects his needs and desires of a metaphysical being, created by man, then God is nothing more than raise the man himself to God for man .
Work In The Gay Science, Nietzsche announces that God is dead, little by little Western society was moving away from God and so signed, was himself who assassinated. But killing God eliminated all the values that formed the foundation for our life and therefore loses - if any point of reference. But is the death of God, Nietzsche announces the good news to overcome the man himself, the new man, the "superman".
With the birth of science God begins to die, the man who was once expelled from paradise for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, past, expels God from the center of the universe. According to Kant, the world can only be known through a scientific reason, and not through a language in which God gives us the rules of what can be done and what can not be done.
God became a man of a stopgap, it is in places where science has not yet explored. Religion would be a search for happiness, solace and comfort in this world where there suffering and strife, where the existence of a certain god is an expression of solidarity with human suffering, because this is where suffering and misery of man, it Marx tells us how to make opium of the people.
Theological anthropology
The death of God has become a symbol to express that human experience that other times he used the symbol "God" to articulate.
Like it or not, we are partly inherited from the past. This is what makes us historical beings. The tradition of Greek - Hebrew - Christian who formed us, consciously or unconsciously, is part of our being. And the word 'God' plays a crucial role in their structure. When we talk about the death of God, we can not avoid that dip images showing the collapse of a cultural tradition: the universe loses its center, a funeral procession passing through the cosmic and metaphysical spaces, once full of sense, now cold, empty, silent, with the deleted from its sun, the silent requiem that the heavenly hosts sing away before the death of life itself.
What is at stake is the realization that the structures of thought and language that theism offered collapse. Came to an end a certain vision of the universe. One way of thinking about life, to face their problems, and therefore speak. Christianity, in fact, have disappeared long ago not only reason, but the very life of humanity, says Feuerbach, in the preface to his The Essence of Christianity. "Christianity is nothing more than a fixed idea, a flagrant contradiction our companies with life insurance or fire insurance, our railroads ... our galleries of paintings and sculptures, our military and engineering schools, science museums and our theaters ".1 In fact, a world that has realized that nature is predictable, manipulable, rationalized, have buried a reality 'at the mercy of miraculous intervention Finger of God. The diagnosis of the heretical Feuerbach is taken up by Bonhoeffer in his letters in prison "... becomes increasingly more evident that everything works fine without God. Already admits that the knowledge and life are perfectly possible without him. Since Kant it has been relegated to the realm beyond experience ".2
The problem of the death of God is metaphysical, no doubt. But the metaphysical, it is not the product of asking the man about the reality? Answers can only be understood in light of questions that are raised. So the death of God is first and foremost, an anthropological problem. It indicates that there are certain questions that are asked more and more nothing, an anthropological problem. It indicates that there are certain questions that are increasingly less often. The death of God thus appears as a turgid Silence of anthropological and social meanings. We live in an era that has prohibited the mystery, which relegated the primitive, ignorant and sick. Because the great dogma of the world that we call science is that reality is self-explanatory, and that reason has the tools to decipher the riddle that will be offered. Perhaps, instead of talking about the death of God, would be more correct to speak of the eclipse of God. We entered into the problem, and to that end I believe that anyone, better than Feuerbach as master of ceremonies.
Feuerbach was a strange combination. Religious and atheist at the same time. For our mental habits here are two attitudes that are excluded. For him, the contrary, assume that if they are attitudes: an atheist because religion.
The man, according to Feuerbach, is to be divided. This is what distinguishes him from animals. Divided by not lend itself to the concrete conditions in which it is released. Permanent conflict between existence and essence. So transcends itself. And this transcendence - expressed in their mental life. Man, unlike animals, not just a reduplicated data. Man designs, creates images that do not correspond to the facts of the outside world. He projects what is repressed and latent in its nature, its potential unrealized in their historic experience. According to Feuerbach, this division is given by the man to have a fundamental difference of animal consciousness, taken in the strict sense. At this point, has two kinds of consciousness, one's own human consciousness, in the strict sense, and another that is also present in animals at large.
Consciousness in the broadest sense would be the sense of himself, sensory discrimination, which also characterizes the animals. According to Feuerbach, the animal may be an object for himself, not as a genre, but just as an individual. Consciousness, however, in the strict sense exists only when, for a being, is subject to their gender, their quididade.3
Consciousness is related, according to Feuerbach, to knowledge. Man, unlike animals, has a double life, one indoor and one outdoor, due to their conscience. The inner life of man is life related to their gender, in essence, states:
"The man is for himself while U.S. and TU, he can stand in the place of others just because their gender, their essence, not only his individuality, he is to object" .4
Religion has as a precondition, as here Feuerbach tells us, consciousness in its specificity and, therefore, the human essence is the foundation of religion. But beyond that, if consciousness is the ground of religion only in its human specificity, ie as an object has its own genre, that "the essence of man, in contrast to the animal, not just the foundation but also the object of religion, "5 for consciousness, as the founding of the religion, it takes the object itself, is self-awareness, awareness of the genre.
Feuerbach puts it this way, in radical opposition to positivism that identified the real with the objects offered to contemplation, and which necessarily reduces the imagination to a role alienating. Man thinks its real not through an act of conforming to its terms. This is what characterizes the rough: its inability to transcend. The man, in contrast, expresses his humanity in the act by which their psychological functions put before him even its essence, negated by the conditions of existence. This is what religion is. "Religion", he tells us, "is the act whereby man separates from himself and in which he contemplates the nature of latent" 6 God is the symbol for the answer to the question "Who am I?" "The man says about God, he actually says about himself" .7 If religion is a mirror image that God is man, this act of transcending himself, projecting himself. We can thus say: "And God created man in His image and likeness."
So far there is almost nothing radically new interpretation of Feuerbach. The theology in the past, often referred to God as the summum bonum, as the answer to man's thirst for longer. From St. Augustine this idea was common in orthodox Christian thought. But Feuerbach goes a step further and breaks the whole structure of the system. And this happens when he asks about the source of ideas, and hence about the significance of language.
What is language? Whence the ideas that form? Unlike the philosophers who built worlds apart from our ideas, which mediate the reality of thought in direct proportion to their immateriality, which "tore their eyes to see better," Feuerbach eight states: an analysis of the genesis ideas shows that ideas do not descend from heaven to the earth but rise from the earth but rise from the earth to heaven. "Religion is a dream of the human mind. But even in dreams do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven but on earth, the realm of reality "in September. The symbols of the imagination do not exist independently. They must be systematically reduced to its roots vital. And this is the fundamental point of criticism of Feuerbach: Theology ignores the genesis of ideas. As a result it gives a separate and independent reality of God, as if it were an object itself. Do not you realize that behind the symbol God is a projection mechanism of man, not the revelation of a world beyond. God is "where the man's diary records their highest thoughts and feelings, the album where they herd enter the name of things that are more expensive and sacred '10. The conclusion of his analysis is inevitable: "theology is anthropology" in November. "The theism is the secret of religion itself '12.
Feuerbach's atheism is something totally different from classical atheism. He understands that thought can not transcend the limits that are imposed for existence. On the lines of Kant's critical philosophy, believes that language can only refer to the world of experience. Therefore, its hermeneutics requires that all symbols that seem to point to besides being translated here as projections. But more than this, as opposed to positivist, Feuerbach believes that language is not a mere copy of what is contemplated.
Religion would be nothing but a fantastic creation of the human mind, totally destroyed meanings, not to refer to objects outside the subject. Feuerbach says that religious language, although it is not external objects as a point of reference, has a meaning for being an expression of an object at a time inside and universal: the essence of man. That's why fantasies and dreams have meaning. They express this essence, and it even takes the form of transcendence over the conditions of existence. So religion is a dream of the human mind, and if God is an actor who creates the mind to represent this theater of the imagination, it is the cryptic message that the essence of the man who might be in the future, to the man there in the present.
The fact is that language can not be understood as a collection of snapshots of the world, and not as a series of snapshots of the psychological essence of man. It reflects rather a relationship between man and the world. This is because the world is never accessible to itself, 13 as Descartes thought, except as man-in-relation-to-world. Language is not photographic art: it is interpretation.
"Against positivism which stops before phenomena saying 'there are only facts', I (Nietzsche) would say no, are precisely the facts that do not exist, only interpretations ..." 14
As being in the middle-of-the-world man perceives this world as a problem, a message, a challenge, but never as a simple image. It is man who understands and interprets the world and through this act to build it themselves. It is this relationship that language articulates. One can not therefore accept that religious language is the result of a projection of inner essence and innate to man (and therefore ahistorical), because consciousness is not a self-sufficient entity, but the result of a relationship . If so we understand the birth of language, we understand this very act the birth of God.
The birth of God
According to Freud and Jung, one of the main functions of religion (after the creation of God), is to defend the civilization of human hostility. The suffering that people endure on the outside, the forces of nature, and within, the restrictions that society imposes on its instincts are to some degree offset on one side, the personification of these opposing forces in gods is not so different from us, that religion does, and the other by his transmutation of libidinal and aggressive desires arising from the id in the love of neighbor and the ethics of conscience. These ideas will converge in the final and now more powerful than religion meet: the longing for the figure of pai15.
It has been pointed out by the function of consciousness. The authority exercised by the superego on the ego and the ambivalent feelings of dependency and concern that this raises are, according to Freud, resuscitation of the relationship with his father. I mean, the superego the ego faces as a stern father confronts the son. But more than that, the guilt, the superego is apparently necessary for the construction of consciousness is not simply derived from the individual's inability to find the libidinal and aggressive instincts of his id, he also comes from a unique and remorse by a collective act that involves the original parent. We thus return to an old theme. Guilt is also a historical legacy, a fundamental phenomenon of our emotional life acquired by the human race as a psychic inheritance handed down from generation to generation.
In this way we look at the theory of the primal horde, Freud and religion lies in the circle of the complex father. The requirement of God as a father figure follows a prototype children's repetition (ontogenetic) powerlessness they feel about each one's own father, and this requirement is both a repetition (phylogenetic) relationship of father and son in the horde primitive. Thus, it is a situation that can be anything but new, and has continuity when a person matures. When they pass from childhood to adulthood, individuals perceive that they are powerless and need continuous protection. Now, however, the feeling of powerlessness is created by nature and by restrictions imposed by society. So they revert to the solution of childhood, creating a supreme being endowed with all the attributes of a parent:
"When he discovers he is destined to remain a child forever, that can never live without protection against strange superior forces, the individual attributes the growth in these forces the relevant characteristics of the father figure, he creates for himself the gods who fears the which seeks to please and to whom, however, trust your own protection. So its a longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection from the consequences of his human weakness. The defense against childish helplessness lends the characteristics of the adult reaction to the helplessness which he has acknowledged, a reaction that is precisely the formation of religion ".16
It is worth stating the reason why the image of God the Father has such a compulsive character particular. She is the fulfillment of a wish, wish fulfillment and brings satisfaction, but the peculiar power of the satisfaction gained by religious belief is the fact that it feeds the mind's desires and fantasies derived from childhood libidinal and aggressive instincts repressed in relation to father. In this sense, belief in God - Father doubles the neuroses of children and, like them, comes from the Oedipus complex. In the first case, the father is what one would like to be, in the latter prevents the father has what I would like to have. This ambivalence is projected directly on the concept of God. On one hand, God the Father is the object of love and admiration, the ideal of man, one who has the power to perform every wish and, on the other, it is a negative authority, the censor who sees everything, which prohibits our desires and severely punishes those who transgress his commandments. This projection, the believer is thus reliving the emotional relations from the period of his repressed childhood, as it is transferred to the divine father figure, attitudes and dispositions that are also part of the collective memory of humanity. God father becomes the reincarnation of the relationships that each of us has with his father and also with the ancestral father of the primal horde, and the strength of the desire to believe it derives from the strength of instinctual wishes and repressions involved in this relationship . The belief, so to speak, draws to itself those repressed desires and guilt associated with them is that the designs in the world and a figure whose will and whose commandments we submit willingly, in part because of the security it brings, and part, because we can thus fix the crimes committed against him and every parent. Religion is, in consequence, a fantasy born of the desire to obey, an obedience celebrated in rituals and obsessive religious practices. This is how God is born.
The death of God
God is dead. But he was also born there. Was born as part of human history as a symbol that cultures have created to make sense of their world. His death is therefore an event, not the history of the gods, but the history of man himself. He was the man who changed. Face your world differently, perceive it differently. It was not God who died, but the man once made use of this word to orient themselves in the world. This means that another man is building, a man who sees with different eyes, seeking different horizons.
The "death of God" in Feuerbach and Freud and Marx also appears as tasks, in Nietzsche becomes the mere announcement of good news.
"We feel like a new day was dawning upon receiving the good news that" the old God is dead ', our hearts overflowing with gratitude, awe, anticipation and expectation. At last the horizon appears again open to us, although it is not very clear: at last our ships may venture out at sea and to face any danger; all boldness of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, is open again "17
Nietzsche was, above all, a lover of the earth, life, freedom. With the vision of a prophet who characterized it, he may realize that the history of Western civilization was a fantastic story of repression. According to Nietzsche, this meant that familiarity with the roots more spontaneous life (Dionysian characteristics of the style of life), was repressed by Apollonian style: the triumph of form, the limit on the vitality and spontaneity. All his work is thus a protest against repression and a celebration of life. This requires that the land be turned into a recovery site where men can be returned to the "erotic sense of life", ie the release of the body to a happy relationship with the world around him, the world of color, sound , scents, tastes, caresses. However, Nietzsche realized that this whole structure of repression that has worked in Western civilization was inseparably linked to a religious structure. In the name of God is denied at will, the spontaneity, the Christian ideal is obedience, the camel that accepts that accepts all loads without complaint. In the name of God is denied the time, because your world is the world of eternity. In the name of God is denied the freedom to man to create a new future, because all values have already been coded in the past. That's why he announced the superman, the man who has the courage to assert his life and liberty against all structures of repression that our civilization has created. The crown of all this structure was the name of God. Thanks to this name suppression became sacred and the condition of the oppressed became due. Therefore, the "death" of this name brought with it the beginning of the end of the structures of repression. They lose their sacred character, and man, hitherto provided camel, is free to become the lion will destroy the dragon that oppresses him. After this, then, the horizons are opening up. The man is reconciled with the earth and fertilizes with his love. That is why Nietzsche to the announcement of the death of God has the status of a "good news" because it means permission for life to the world for the future.
With the death of God, man is born free and with the courage to know and dominate this world. Fundamental transformation. From scientist to saint.
With the birth of the scientist, God begins to die. Although scientists often refuse to confess, they must accept his complicity in the murder. Everyone remembers the conflict between Galileo and the church. All are unanimous in condemning the church. The question was not a scientific truth the less or more. Galileo was demolishing their own house of God. After him God never had housing right. Expelled from the center of the universe, it has no date no place else in the margins of existence, where science has not yet arrived. The man who was once expelled from paradise for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, revenge is now eating the tree of knowledge of the universe, and it expels God of the universe that he inhabited.
The new man is born then, but who is this new man? He is a man who experiences an exhilarating sense of freedom and permission. If the universe is no longer part of a sacred structure, if the church no longer has the right to proclaim himself the guardian of the structures of hierarchical order, the world is no longer taboo. He is profane. There is nothing in it that prevent the exercise of human freedom to know it and master it. Secularized the world and is secularization of knowledge.
Conclusion
All the traditional arguments to prove the existence of God, has no scientific validity. God is expelled from the scientific world and the existence of secular man. If the world we live in world space and time, according to Kant, is the world that can only be known and dominated in terms of scientific reason, the language about God becomes increasingly audible in intellectual circles. The God who with his finger worked miracles and answered prayers came under the rubble of the medieval building. Thus, prayer is nothing more than a superstitious illusion in a world that is not vulnerable to our desires become anthropological as Feuerbach says, and religion can only survive as morality, in the acknowledgments of God. Universal order almost nothing left. She is replaced by a horizontal world, profane and formless being built by the scientific reason and the moral dispositions of man.
Behold the man he believes has the tools to know and be able to accomplish! No matter that the building ready, built by God, have fallen. The task now is to build the city of men. And the reason will come out not only the form of our order but also the determination to accomplish it. This hope has formed the French Revolution to destroy the last vestiges of an old order to inaugurate a new era. We see here a secularization of the Christian eschatological hope, as formulated by Augustine. If Augustine is possible and necessary to have hope because the story is a prison drama by God which will lead to consummation, now God is no longer necessary because the reason is immanent in history. The man can have hope because the reason is stronger than the animal, the most powerful moral imperatives that the stimulus imposed. And to give even more impetus to this triumphalist view of history that goes ahead without the help of God, comes to the theory of organic evolution that makes the imagination burst of euphoria. If the organic realm of instinct shows a pattern of upward progress, if only to improve screening and it is immanent, the man can be sure that the order he builds will evolve to become the city of God. Here the rational and vital exuberance of man goes hand in hand with the exile of God. God must be thought of only as a stop-gap. Insofar as man advances victorious, with his knowledge, God makes new strategic withdrawals for those boundaries have not yet exploited by man, in the hope that there maybe he can return to play the role he played in the medieval world.
What is religion? It is not a creation of man's fantasy. Its roots lie in the real world conditions. Therefore it is the expression of a real condition of suffering and a protest against real suffering. So to conclude, in this famous phrase from Marx:
"Religious suffering is, on one hand the expression of real misery and, secondly, the protest against this misery. Religion is the moan of the creature overwhelmed by evil, is the soul of a heartless world, and is the spirit of an age without spirit '.18
I see that Marx was strongly influenced by Feuerbach, when he says:
"God is the optative of the human heart make this time, or blissful certainty, is the unbiased sense of omnipotence, it begs the patients the feeling that listening to yourself, is the echo of our cry of pain ( ...). Here he expresses the secrets the secrets that the choke, this is where he relieves his own heavy heart. That comfort the heart, this secret which can prove, that this suffering can be expressed, that is God. God is a tear of love which poured into the deep secrets about the human misery '.19
So Marx concludes that "... religion is the opium of the people ".20
Whenever there is any problem, using a protective father, in which the figure of God fits perfectly. We need someone to protect us, a child need a father in the dams, so the figure is born of God.
But with the arrival of science, where we explain the world with scientific proofs, we need not resort to myths to explain the birth of the things we do not need God to protect us, we already have life insurance, we need medicine to help us in our health problems. Thus, God is dumped on the margins of society where the science has not yet come, say that God is dead and buried just yet, are making sure your body awaiting his resurrection.
1 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988, p. 46.
2 BONHOEFFER, Dietrich. Letters and paper from prison. New York: MacMillan, 1962, p. 194-5.
3 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988, p. 43.
4 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p.44.
5 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 44.
6 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit.,p. 33.
7 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo. Campinas: Pairos, 1988p. 29.
8 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p 34.
9 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 39.
10 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 59.
11 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 38.
12 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. Op., cit., p. 36.
13 DESCARTES, René. Discurso do método. Os pensadores. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1979, p. 33.
14 KAUFMANN, Walter. The portable Nietzsche. New York: The Viking Press, 1965, p. 458.
15 PALMER, Michael. Freud e Jung: Sobre a religião. São Paulo: Loyola, 2001. p. 58.
16 FREUD, Sigmund. O futuro de uma ilusão. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1978. p. 204-5.
17 NIETZSCHE, Frederich. A gaia ciência. São Paulo: Martin Claret, 2003. p.117.
18 MARX, Karl. Contribuições à crítica da filosofia do direito de Hegel. In: Manuscritos econômicos
filosóficas. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989. p. 84.
19 FEUERBACH, Ludwig. A essência do cristianismo.Campinas; Papirus, 1988,p.89-90.
20 MARX, Karl. Contribuições à crítica da filosofia do direito de Hegel. In: Manuscritos econômicos
filosóficas. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1989. p. 84.
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