 For Feuerbach, the primary error of Christianity was that it took human predicates and projected them into another world as if they constituted an independent being. He saw religious belief as a necessary step in the progress of humankind to self-understanding. More precisely, it was through transformative criticism — recovering the correct relation of subject and predicate from its inversion in Christianity — that we first come to understand what human nature is. Moreover, Feuerbach maintains that, once liberated from their otherworldly form, these essential human characteristics — and especially perhaps our love for others — would come to form the basis of the unalienated social and political life of the future. This emancipatory ambition also helps to clarify Feuerbach’s insistence that he should be seen as a friend, and not an enemy, of religion; in particular, he sought not to destroy Christianity, but to liberate its content from otherworldly forms. This claim is also at the heart of his distinctive — and perhaps idiosyncratic — denial that he was an atheist. Feuerbach maintains that true atheism requires the rejection not only of God as subject, but also of those predicates — love, wisdom, justice, and so on — traditionally associated with divinity.