What then has faith in common with love,
religion with ethics? Nothing; they have no more in common than have the God to
whom man is bound by faith and the fellow man with whom he is united by love;
for according to religious faith, there is the most violent opposition between
man and God: God is a nonsensuous being, man a sensuous being, God is perfect,
man is wretched, pitiful, worthless. How then can love flow from faith? It
cannot, any more than wretchedness can spring from perfection, want from
abundance. Yes, ethics and religion, faith and love are
exact opposites. He who has once loved a God can no longer love any
human being; he has lost his feeling for mankind. But the converse is also
true: he who has once loved man, truly and from the bottom of his heart, can no
longer love a God, he can no longer permit his living humanity to seep away in
a vacuum of infinite objectlessness and unreality.
— Ludwig Feuerbach,
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