Among them was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose reading of Hegel led him along with a number of self-styled ‘Young Hegelians’ to the conclusion that Christianity must be superseded because it represented a form of ‘false consciousness’. Humanity’s sense of its intimacy with God arose from the fact that humanity itself had created God in its own image: ‘the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject’s own nature taken objectively. Such are a man’s thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.’40 That which was called divine
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