[...] no religious truth actually is essentially, eternally true. Rather, as Marx's great influence Ludwig Feuerbach was pointing out in the 1840s: they are a particular ossification of the values of the society from which they have emerged – human truths, obscured by being placed in the mouth of God. This ossification makes it difficult for people to think critically about them – it gives the ideas of some other society, perhaps one from way back in the ancient past, a peculiar power over us, an alien force. We might not want to throw all these ideas away wholesale – but we need to bring them back down to earth, where we can really think about them for ourselves.