In "Theorizing Religion" this morning, we got all tied in knots by this passage in Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841):
Each planet has its own sun. The Sun which lights and warms Uranus has no physical (only an astronomical, scientific) existence for the Earth; and not only does the Sun appear different, but it really is another sun on Uranus than on the Earth. The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature, for the measure of the size and of the intensity of light which the Sun possesses as the object of the Earth is the measure of the distance which determines the peculiar nature of the Earth. Hence each plane has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.
Feuerbach uses this illustration to make a point about theism: that everything human beings have said or thought about God is really about human nature.
Some of the students claimed to love the analogy, and the point. Somewhat more critical students noted that the analogy doesn't work, since Feuerbach is arguing there is no God, while there'd not be even the distance of Earth to Sun without the Sun (not to mention all the other things we'd be without, without the Sun): "he's a crappy atheist," said one student.
("Sans Soleil," by the way, is the name of a brilliant and iconoclastic film by Chris Marker, substantially but not perhaps primarily about Japan, which has no relation whatever with Feuerbach - but which has recently come out on DVD.)
