Atheist Ludwig Feuerbach: what's not in Wikipedia (Der Lutheraner 1872)

      An early correspondent suggested that I contribute content to Wikipedia, but I did not take his suggestion.  And it becomes more evident with time that that decision was a good one because it has repeatedly become apparent that the liberal socialist thinkers will always insert material questioning any material that refutes their arguments. — 

    And so this became evident again as I discovered Walther's comments about one of the most influential atheist socialist thinkers of the last 200 years: Ludwig Feuerbach.  Walther fully understood his influence in the world, and Wikipedia fills in the details – that he influenced the following notable men who fought against Christianity:

• Charles Darwin (English naturalist, evolutionist)
• Karl Marx (German philosopher, socialist revolutionary
• Sigmund Freud (Austrian psychoanalyst)
• Friedrich Engels (German revolutionary socialist)
• Richard Wagner (German composer, theatre director, polemicist)
• Friedrich Nietzsche (German philosopher, cultural critic)

 Again, one may read many details of Feuerbach in Wikipedia.  But one looks in vain, just as with Thomas Paine, for the full story on them.  So we get that from Der Lutheraner, vol. 28, (Feb. 1, 1872), p. 70:

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Ludwig Feuerbach, the atrocious atheist, now lives in Nuremberg, from where an appeal is now going out “to the democrats of all countries” for the purpose of “giving him joy in the last days of his sorrowful life.” The appeal says: 

“Here in Nuremberg he lives outside the city wall in a lonely little house – poor and ill – an old man of 66 years, physically completely broken, but still so powerful of his spirit to despise the ingratitude of his people and to take the consciousness with him into the grave that the German nation holds ready to give for its greatest (!) men a monument of stone after death, instead of bread during their life.” 

It is indeed strange that this devil’s-martyr complains that the world, which once celebrated him highly, now abandons him to his misery, since during his life he did nothing but try to eradicate religion and morality to the last germ from the hearts of men. Man has served the devil faithfully, so he must not be surprised if he now receives the reward already here, which the devil pays to his servants.      W. [Walther]

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Feuerbach died a few months later, in September 1872, a complaining man with a "sorrowful life".  And so we get to hear the appropriate epithet from the "American Luther" on one of the greatest German atheist socialists.