 Stirner might be said to pick up this, perhaps idiosyncratic, characterisation of “true atheism” and run with it. Stirner maintains that religion, properly understood, is characterised by the subordination of the individual to “spirit” in any of its guises. Consequently, the rejection of God as a transcendental subject leaves the essential character and failing of religion intact. Feuerbach’s perfectionist problematic, Stirner remarks, might have altered “the tinsel” (the divine subject) but it leaves “the main thing” (the divine predicates) unchanged (56). (Page references in parenthesis are to the 1995 Cambridge edition of The Ego and Its Own cited in the Bibliography below.) The sacred is allowed to remain, if not as God, then as “Man with a capital M” in Byington’s inspired English rendering of Stirner’s “Der Mensch”. In short, rather than describing human nature as it is, Feuerbach is said to have deified a prescriptive account of what being human involves. As a result, the real kernel of religion, the positing of an “essence over me” (46), has been left intact. Indeed, Stirner suggests that Feuerbach’s achievement was to have effected a “change of masters” (55) which actually made the tyranny of the divine over the individual even more complete. First, it extends domination, because this new deity is no longer the preserve of the faithful, but can possess everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. And, second, it intensifies domination, because the scrutiny of our own conscience is much harder to evade than that of a transcendental subject that a flutters “over our heads as a dove” (86).