 While the feeling of dependence is the ground of religion, what the act of sacrifice aims at or seeks to achieve is freedom from the restrictions of nature, or, alternatively, human independence. If blessedness is the condition of not being restricted by the limitations imposed by nature on all finite, corporeal individuals subject to generation and corruption, then human blessedness can be regarded as the final goal (Endzweck) of religion (WR 34). The gods are the objects of worship and the recipients of sacrifice because they are the benefactors of human beings in the specific sense that they are imagined to have it in their power to satisfy fundamental human wishes, including the wish not to die. “Only a being who loves man and desires his happiness [Seligkeit] is an object of human worship, of religion” (VWR 71/60). The sacrificial act is motivated by the experience of need (Bedürfnis), which involves the simultaneous awareness both of one’s “non-being apart from nature”, and of one’s existence as a self-conscious being distinct from nature (WR 32). In the Lectures Feuerbach claims that the feeling of dependence on nature is the only “truly universal” designation for the “psychological or subjective ground of religion” (VWR 39/31). This continues to be the case even after nature has ceased to be the locus of divinity, and the origin of the visible world is sought in the will of a transcendent creator who brought forth the world into being from nothing, and who is solely responsible for occurrences attributed by polytheists to a multitude of divine agencies. The objective correlate of the feeling of dependence, in the case of both polytheism and monotheism, is the really existing things and people who are the objects of various human needs, physical and psychological—needs which Feuerbach implicitly recognizes, especially in the Theogony, to be culturally determined.