Like Bauer, Feuerbach characterized religion as a form of alienation. God, he wrote, is to be understood as the essence of the human species, externalized and projected into an alien reality. Wisdom, love, benevolence—these are really attributes of the human species, but we attribute them, in a purified form, to God. The more we enrich our concept of God in this way, however, the more we impoverish ourselves. The solution is to realize that theology is a kind of misdescribed anthropology.
