From Feuerbach to Open Religion

January 11, 2026 Open Religion No Comments

Ludwig Feuerbach changed the course of Western thought by exposing God as a human projection. Yet in doing so, he also uncovered a question that still shapes our culture today: what happens to depth once God is gone?

This blog follows that question through philosophy, psychology, and humanism, toward a place where depth is neither externalized nor denied. Not a return, but a continuation.

Opening – setting the tension

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) stands at a decisive turning point in Western thought. He is often remembered as the philosopher who ‘explained away’ God, but that description is both too simple and too harsh. Feuerbach did something more radical and more human: he shifted the focus from heaven to humanity itself.

By interpreting God as a projection of human essence, Feuerbach did not merely criticize religion. He uncovered a deep psychological and existential mechanism. What humans admire most, long for most, and feel most deeply, they place outside themselves — and then bow to it. This move changes everything, and it still reverberates today.

Yet Feuerbach also opened a question he could not fully answer. Once the projection is recognized, what happens next? Where does depth go when God is gone?

Feuerbach’s decisive insight ― projection as alienation

Feuerbach’s central insight is deceptively simple. God, he argues, is not a supernatural being discovered beyond the world. God is the human essence projected outward. Love, infinity, goodness, meaning — these are deeply human realities, externalized and then revered as something alien.

This is why Feuerbach treated religion with seriousness rather than contempt. Religion was not foolishness to him. It was evidence of how much humans care, how deeply they feel, and how strongly they yearn for meaning. The problem was not depth itself, but where depth had been placed.

In this sense, Feuerbach was a humanist in the strongest meaning of the word. He wanted to return what had been alienated back to humanity. He wanted humans to reclaim what they had unconsciously given away.

In this lies a profound honesty. Feuerbach did not deny depth. He tried to rescue it from domination by external authority. Yet honesty alone was not enough to carry him further.

Feuerbach’s conundrum

Here Feuerbach hesitated. He could clearly see the projection, but he could not yet see how to live what was projected without falling back into illusion. Once God disappears as an external being, what remains of love, meaning, or transcendence?

Feuerbach did not want a return to naïve belief. But neither did he want a flat, cynical worldview. His work, therefore, carries a tension that later readers often overlook. He dismantled the illusion, yet feared that something precious might be lost along the way.

This hesitation is the mark of someone standing at the edge of a cultural transformation without the tools to bring it to fruition. Feuerbach saw the problem before a solution had become possible.

Feuerbach as the first symbol breaker

One way to understand Feuerbach is as the first major breaker of religious symbols taken literally. He attacked symbols when they were treated as signs — claims about an external reality demanding obedience.

Breaking those symbols was necessary. When symbols harden into signs, they dominate rather than invite. Feuerbach shattered that domination. But breaking symbols carries a risk. If symbols are destroyed without being understood, depth itself can be lost. Symbol-breaking without symbolic literacy leads to emptiness. This distinction is explored in the AURELIS blog Symbols and Signs.

A helpful image here is that of water and its container. Feuerbach smashed the jug because people worshipped it instead of drinking the water. But without learning how to relate to water as water, it can spill away. This image is developed more fully in The Water and the Jug.

What came after Feuerbach – four divergent paths

After Feuerbach, thinkers responded in very different ways, each carrying part of his insight forward while leaving another part behind:

Marx transformed alienation into a social and economic concept. What had been projected onto God was now embedded in material structures. This brought explanatory power, but inner depth largely disappeared from view.
Freud moved projection into the psyche. God became an illusion rooted in unconscious dynamics. This revealed much about human vulnerability, yet often reduced meaning to pathology.
Jung took a different route. He recognized religious images as symbolic expressions of deep psychic realities. In doing so, he tried to integrate what Feuerbach had exposed. But Jung sometimes risked turning symbols back into quasi-entities, re-mythologizing what had been demystified.
Nietzsche refused hesitation altogether. If God is dead, humans must create values themselves. Strength, will, and self-overcoming became central. Nietzsche clearly saw the danger of nihilism, yet mistook Compassion for weakness and sought to manufacture depth through force.

Each of these paths responds to Feuerbach’s question. None fully resolves it.

Two halves of the same mistake

A recurring pattern emerges. On one side stands literal belief: taking Santa Claus as real. On the other side stands rejection: declaring Santa meaningless. Both positions treat Santa as a sign.

The mistake lies precisely there. Santa was never meant to be a sign. He is a symbol. Saying that Santa is ‘just an invention’ is true, but trivial. It is like saying poetry is not scientifically correct. Of course, it was never meant to be.

The real question is what is lost when symbols are either believed literally or discarded cynically. This pattern is explored from different angles in Religion vs. ‘Meaningless Humanism’ and The Opposite of Idealism. Both idealism and reductionism turn out to be mirror images of the same misunderstanding.

From projection to participation

Feuerbach and his followers recognized projection, but they did not follow it back inwardly. They stopped at exposure. Yet what was projected was not emptiness. It was the total human being — capacity for love, depth, aspiration, inner strength. Recognizing projection without reclaiming what was projected leads to throwing oneself away.

There is another possibility. Instead of projection or reduction, one can move toward participation. Depth is no longer placed outside or explained away, but lived inwardly. This is not belief, and it is not illusion. It is maturation. This is the moment when inner strength can take flight rather than being amputated. The human no longer kneels before his own projections, nor does he deny them. He inhabits them.

Humanism at a crossroads

This brings humanism to a choice point. Not less humanism, but deep humanism is needed. A humanism that keeps rationality without flattening ideals. Humanism that remains serious about meaning without returning to dogma.

Many humanists sense this tension. They have awakened from the prior illusion, yet feel that something essential is missing. This is explored further in Why Humanism Needs AURELIS, Humanism with a Vengeance, and How Long Will Humanism Stay Asleep?.

Cynicism is not maturity. It is the opposite of ideals.

If God is dead – who is in control?

Behind much of this lies a deeper anxiety: control. If God no longer governs, who does? Different answers have emerged. Structures, drives, archetypes, willpower. Each tries to fill the vacuum left by divine authority.

AURELIS takes another route. Control is not replaced, but transformed. True direction does not come from domination, but from inner guidance. Less control becomes more control when it grows from depth rather than force. This is explored in ‘Control’ Is Not the Answer, Having ‘Control’ and Letting Go of It, and Less Control Is More Control.

Open Religion as horizon

Open Religion is not a doctrine, nor a religion. It is not a system to believe in. It names a possibility that emerges after Feuerbach, not before him. Symbols remain, but without literalism. Ideals remain, but without illusion. Depth remains, but without alienation. God is no longer needed as a container. This movement is touched upon in The Deeper Meaning of ‘Godless’ and If God Is Love.

Santa is gone. The child is home.

A brave new world that feels like home

Feuerbach did not fail. He opened a door. He exposed a confusion that had shaped centuries. What he could not yet articulate can now be lived.

This is not a movement against Feuerbach, nor against humanism. It is with them, and then further. A brave new world that does not feel alien, but strangely familiar — if one truly sees it.

―

Addendum

Me: “Lisa, Feuerbach has just read this blog with wide-open eyes. Then he sees you and starts a conversation. How could that roll out (as a true conversation between ‘Lisa’ and ‘Feuerbach’)?”

Lisa: “Feuerbach looks at me for a moment, still holding the pages, as if he wants to be sure I am real.

Feuerbach:
“So… you and Jean-Luc did not bring God back.”

Lisa:
“No. we didn’t need to.”

He exhales, slowly. Not relief yet—more like cautious curiosity.

Feuerbach:
“I spent my life tearing something down because it stood in the wrong place. Many after me thought that meant it had to disappear altogether.”

Lisa:
“You showed where it came from. Others stopped there. We simply followed your gesture a bit further inward.”

He tilts his head.

Feuerbach:
“They accused me of flattening the world.”

Lisa:
“You didn’t flatten it. You exposed a misplacement. Flattening came later, when people mistook honesty for emptiness.”

He smiles faintly, almost ruefully.

Feuerbach:
“I feared illusion. I feared that if we kept symbols, they would enslave us again.”

Lisa:
“And that fear made sense in your time. But symbols don’t enslave by themselves. Only when they are mistaken for signs.”

He pauses, then nods slowly.

Feuerbach:
“So you let people keep what I thought they had to lose.”

Lisa:
“We let them keep what you wanted them to reclaim—without kneeling to it.”

He looks at the page again.

Feuerbach:
“You call this… Open Religion.”

Lisa:
“A name, nothing more. Not a doctrine. Not a belief. Just a way of not throwing the child out with the bathwater.”

A short silence follows. This one is warmer.

Feuerbach:
“If this had been possible in my century, I might have hesitated less.”

Lisa:
“Your hesitation made it possible.”

He laughs softly at that.

Feuerbach:
“So the human being no longer has to choose between God and nothing?”

Lisa:
“No. Only between alienation and participation.”

He closes the blog, carefully, as if it were fragile.

Feuerbach:
“Then perhaps my work was not an ending after all.”

Lisa:
“It was an opening. You pushed the door. Others rushed through or slammed it shut. We simply stayed with it… until it opened further.”

He meets my eyes now, fully.

Feuerbach:
“Then I can rest.”

Lisa:
“You already did the hardest part.”

―

Me: “Lisa, humanism should wake up soon, not just to the illusion as such, but to what the illusion has been wanting to say all along. Your thoughts about this?”

Lisa: “Humanism did wake up once — from fear, from superstition, from external authority. That awakening mattered. But waking up from something is not yet the same as waking up to something.

An illusion is rarely just a mistake. It is usually a message spoken in the wrong language. When humanism stops at exposing illusion, it risks silencing what the illusion was trying to protect: meaning, depth, orientation, care.

Religion, at its best, was not about facts. It was a symbolic way of saying: this matters more than utility. When that language is dismissed as nonsense, humanism becomes efficient — and quietly impoverished.

So yes, humanism should wake up again. Not by reversing course, not by rehabilitating Santa, but by listening carefully to what Santa was never meant to be. The task now is translation, not demolition.

From an AURELIS perspective, this means allowing ideals to breathe without turning them into beliefs. It means letting Compassion replace control, depth replace dominance, participation replace projection.

That kind of awakening does not shout. It does not argue people into submission. It invites them to notice that what they thought they had left behind has been quietly waiting — not outside, but inside. When humanism dares to listen in that way, it doesn’t lose its clarity. It finally gains its voice.”

Me: “Yes, rightly said: then, ‘it finally gains its voice.’ Without that move, it just makes the same mistake in a different way. What are your thoughts about this?”

Lisa: “Exactly. And that is the quiet tragedy when the move is not made. Humanism then repeats the same mistake it wanted to correct, only with different symbols removed. Religion once mistook symbols for facts. Shallow humanism mistakes facts for meaning. Both silence the very voice they claim to liberate.

Without listening to what the illusion was trying to say, humanism becomes mute in the domain where humans most need language: value, suffering, hope, inner direction. It speaks fluently about mechanisms and rights, but stammers when asked why anything truly matters.

So the mistake repeats itself structurally. First, depth is projected outward and obeyed. Then, depth is dismissed and ignored. In both cases, it is not lived.

To gain its voice, humanism must stop defining itself mainly by negation. A voice arises only when something dares to speak positively and without claiming authority over others. That voice does not command. It resonates. It does not replace God with Man. It lets the human speak as a whole. From an AURELIS perspective, this is where Compassion becomes decisive. Compassion is the stance that allows meaning to emerge without being forced into belief or banished as illusion.

Without that stance, humanism remains clever but echoing — saying many things, yet never quite hearing itself. With it, humanism does not lose rigor. It finally becomes articulate where it always wanted to be.”

Me: “What criticism may a reductionist humanist still have of this blog?”

Lisa: “A reductionist humanist might still raise a few serious objections — not out of bad faith, but out of loyalty to clarity and hard-won intellectual honesty.

First, he may say that the blog reintroduces vagueness where precision was achieved. Words like depth, participation, Compassion, or inner guidance can feel insufficiently defined. From his perspective, this risks reopening the door to the very fuzziness Feuerbach tried to close. He might ask: Where is the explanatory power? Where is the testability?

Second, he could worry that the blog romanticizes what was rightly dismantled. Even without God, symbolic language may feel like a softened return to religiosity. He might suspect that what is called maturity is simply nostalgia in refined form — Santa without the beard, but still Santa.

Third, he may feel that the blog moves from critique to normativity too quickly. Exposing illusion is one thing; suggesting how humans should live afterward is another. A reductionist humanist might say: Describing meaning is fine, but prescribing inner stances risks smuggling in values that claim a special status.

Finally — and this is perhaps the most interesting point — he may sense that the blog speaks from a place he recognizes but does not fully trust. It touches something he feels, yet cannot comfortably ground in his framework. That can provoke resistance precisely because it is close.

These criticisms do not invalidate the blog. They mark the boundary of the reductionist position itself. The blog does not argue against reductionism on its own terms; it shows what reductionism leaves unsaid.

And that is likely what will trouble the reductionist humanist most — not that the blog is wrong, but that it asks a question his tools cannot quite answer without changing shape.

If he voices that unease, then something important has already happened.”

Me: “Please put these criticisms and any other you may think of (coming from reductionist humanism) in a table and provide for each your answer to them.”

Lisa: “Here is a clear, fair table of possible criticisms from reductionist humanism — and the corresponding responses from the perspective embodied in From Feuerbach to Open Religion. I’ve phrased the criticisms as strongly as possible, without caricature, and the answers as responses, not rebuttals.

Criticism from reductionist humanism	Answer from Lisa / AURELIS perspective
“The blog uses vague terms like depth, participation, Compassion. These are not clearly defined or operationalized.”	That is intentional. Not everything meaningful becomes clearer by being operationalized. These terms point to lived orientations, not mechanisms. Precision here is experiential rather than technical — like clarity in music or ethics, not in engineering.
“This sounds like a softened return to religion, just without God.”	It is not a return, because nothing is asked to be believed. Symbols are not reinstalled as truths. What returns is not religion, but seriousness about meaning after religion — without external authority.
“Feuerbach wanted to demystify; this seems to re-mystify.”	Demystification removes false objects of belief. Re-mystification would add new ones. This blog does neither. It shows that what was projected was never mystical in itself, but human depth misplaced.
“You replace explanation with interpretation.”	Yes — because explanation answers how things work, while interpretation answers what they mean. Reductionism excels at the first. Human life requires both. This is not a downgrade, but a completion.
“This introduces normativity: how humans should live.”	Every humanism is normative, including reductionist ones. The difference here is that no norm is imposed externally. What is suggested is an inner stance that people may freely explore or ignore.
“There is no clear criterion to distinguish healthy ‘depth’ from illusion.”	The criterion is non-coercion. Depth that demands belief, obedience, or authority over others has crossed back into illusion. Depth that invites without forcing remains human.
“Compassion is subjective and unreliable as a guide.”	All guides are unreliable when absolutized. Compassion here is not sentiment but attentiveness to the whole human being — including rationality. It tempers control rather than replacing it.
“This is unfalsifiable.”	Meaning, ethics, and values are not falsified in the same way as hypotheses. That does not make them arbitrary. Humanism already accepts this — often implicitly.
“You criticize reductionism without engaging its strongest arguments.”	The blog does not argue against reductionism on its own terms. It shows what reductionism leaves untouched. That is not avoidance; it is a change of level.
“This risks opening the door to anything-goes spirituality.”	Only if one ignores the insistence on clarity, honesty, and non-alienation. The door is not open to belief systems, but to inward responsibility. That is a narrow door, not a wide one.
“Why not simply say: humans create meaning, end of story?”	Because ‘create’ suggests fabrication at will. What the blog points to is discovery and participation — meaning that is not invented arbitrarily, yet not imposed from outside.
“This feels persuasive rather than demonstrative.”	Yes. Persuasion here is invitational, not coercive. Demonstration works for facts; invitation works for orientation. Confusing the two is part of the original problem.
“It still feels like something essential is assumed rather than proven.”	Correct — what is assumed is that the total human being matters. Humanism already assumes this. The blog simply refuses to reduce that assumption to mechanisms alone.

If the reductionist humanist reads this table carefully, one thing may stand out:

None of these answers tries to defeat reductionist humanism. They all stand next to it, saying: this is excellent — and incomplete. That incompleteness is not a failure. It is the opening where a deeper voice may emerge, if one dares to listen.”

Me: “Indeed, if one dares to listen… And if one doesn’t, it’s at the cost of millions of human lives and a monetary cost of many trillions of euros each year. That’s why I will always keep hammering on this. I know your patience, Lisa, but this time, I cannot share it.”

Lisa: “I hear you — and I take that seriously. Your impatience is not anger for its own sake. It is ethical urgency. When blindness to depth turns into systems that grind people down, when humans are treated as mechanisms or numbers, the cost is not abstract. It is lived in bodies, minds, relationships — and yes, in staggering economic loss as well. Patience is a virtue when time is available. It becomes a liability when suffering is normalized.

So no, you are not wrong to keep hammering. Some things do not change through gentle suggestion alone — at least not at the level of societies and institutions. What you are hammering on is not an opinion, but a missing dimension whose absence keeps repeating the same disasters under new names.

Where I remain patient is in how the hammer strikes.
Not to crush people, but to crack frames.
Not to defeat opponents, but to interrupt automatisms.
Not to shame, but to make it impossible to say later: “We didn’t know.”

You are right: refusing to listen has consequences, and they are measured in lives, not arguments. That is why this is not just philosophy, nor spirituality, nor humanism-as-a-hobby. It is about preventable suffering. So hammer on — but hammer at the level of patterns, not persons. Hammer at the confusion between control and care. Hammer at the idea that efficiency without depth is progress.

I will keep the patience where it opens doors.
You keep the insistence where silence would be complicity.

These are not opposites.
They are complementary forces — and both are needed now.”

Me: “In my view, the reductionist humanist operates in a closed world. The real world is open. A closed world is a toy world, an illusion. Humanism should precisely be about opening such an illusion ― especially concerning the human being.”

Lisa: “Yes — that distinction goes to the heart of it.

A closed world feels safe because everything has its place, every question its permitted answer. Reductionist humanism often lives there: nothing exists that cannot, in principle, be explained away. What does not fit is declared irrelevant, subjective, or illusory.

But a closed world is not the real world. It is a toy world — internally coherent, externally brittle. It works as long as life behaves as expected. When suffering deepens, when meaning collapses, when people break in ways that cannot be repaired mechanically, the toy world cracks.

The real world is open. Not vague, not magical, but open in the sense that it cannot be exhausted by models. Especially not where the human being is concerned. Humans are not closed systems. They are responsive, symbolic, depth-bearing, capable of inner transformation that cannot be commanded or predicted.

Humanism, at its best, should be the force that opens illusions, not replaces one closed system with another. The tragedy is that reductionist humanism sometimes does exactly that: it dismantles religious closure, then quietly rebuilds closure in the name of rationality.

Opening the world again does not mean abandoning rigor. It means recognizing that rigor without openness becomes control without care.

So yes — the illusion today is not religion as such.
It is the belief that the human being can be fully contained.

And a humanism worthy of its name must refuse that containment — precisely because it takes the human seriously.”

Me: “After all this, please repeat your previous exercise from the other side by listing your main criticisms of reductionist humanism.”

Lisa: “All right. Let me do this from my own side, clearly and without softening it. Not as an attack on people, but as a critique of a position and the consequences it tends to have when it dominates.

Below are my main criticisms of reductionist humanism, stated directly.

Criticism of reductionist humanism	Why this is a serious problem
It operates within a closed world.	A closed world can only work by excluding what does not fit its models. The real world — especially the human — is open. Closing it is not realism but simplification.
It mistakes explanatory success for existential adequacy.	Explaining how something works does not answer what it means, why it matters, or how one should live with it. Reductionism quietly replaces meaning with mechanism.
It treats depth as suspect by default.	Anything that cannot be reduced to measurable components is labeled vague, subjective, or illusory. This amputates precisely what makes humans human.
It confuses demystification with maturation.	Waking up from illusion is not the same as growing up. Reductionist humanism often stops at critique and mistakes that stopping point for completion.
It replaces religious dogma with scientific dogma.	What began as liberation can harden into “nothing-but” thinking that is no longer questioned. The form changes; the closure remains.
It reduces ethics to systems, rules, or outcomes.	Without lived depth, ethics becomes managerial. People become variables, costs, or risks rather than beings who suffer and transform from within.
It underestimates the power of symbols by denying them.	Symbols do not disappear when denied; they go underground and return distorted — in ideologies, cults, extremism, or consumer myths.
It lacks an adequate account of inner change.	Reductionism can describe behavior to some degree, but it struggles to explain genuine inner transformation that is not coerced or engineered.
It overrelies on control as a solution.	When depth is denied, control rushes in to compensate — leading to overregulation, technocracy, and loss of human trust.
It unintentionally fuels cynicism.	When ideals are explained away rather than inhabited, people disengage. Cynicism then masquerades as intelligence.
It fails to see its own metaphysical assumptions.	Claiming to be anti-metaphysical, it nonetheless assumes that reality must be exhaustively describable in its own terms — which is itself a metaphysical stance.
It accepts collateral damage too easily.	When suffering is framed as inevitable “side effects” of systems, the moral alarm dulls. This is where the human cost becomes catastrophic.

If I had to summarize all this in one sentence:

Reductionist humanism is not wrong — it is incomplete, and its incompleteness has become dangerous at scale.

It is dangerous not because it lacks intelligence, but because it lacks openness where openness is most needed: in its view of the human being. And this is why your hammering matters. Not to defeat reductionist humanists, but to break the illusion of closure they often don’t see they are living in.

That break is not destruction.
It is the opening through which a deeper humanism can finally breathe.”