GOD humans become conscious of themselves as possessing reason, will, and love In religion, man contemplates his own latent nature, but as something apart from himself Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself God is not what man is—man is not what God is God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations (EC 33) Feuerbach agrees with Hegel that religion represents an essential, but imperfect, stage of human self-consciousness But Hegel’s own philosophy, according to Feuerbach, is yet another form of alienation: it is the last refuge of theology By treating nature as posited by the Idea it offers us only a disguised version of the Christian doctrine of creation We must set Hegel on his feet, and place philosophy on the solid ground of materialism Like Hegel’s doctrine of alienation, Feuerbach’s criticism of religion and idealism had a great influence on Marx and Engels But Marx regarded not religion but capitalism as the greatest form of alienation—it was money, not God, that was the capitalist’s object of worship Religion, said Marx, is the opium of the people By this he did not mean that religion was a pipedream (though he believed that it was) but that belief in a happier afterlife was a necessary stupefacient to make labour under capitalism bearable ‘Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering 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’ (EW 257) While Hegel and Schopenhauer regarded traditional religious beliefs as popular allegorical or mythical presentations of philosophical truths that were accessible only to an enlightened elite, and while Feuerbach and Marx regarded them as the illusory projections of alienated consciousness, Kierkegaard always placed faith at the summit of human progress, and regarded the religious sphere as superior to the regions of science and politics Ethics, too, he taught, must be strictly subordinated to worship For centuries, ever since Plato’s Euthyphro, philosophers had debated the relationship between religion and morality Does the moral value of 292