Good morning, I have just started studying Hegel with the oldest work I could find, On the Propspects for a Folk Religion, also called Tübinga Fragments I believe. In the second paragraph it already says:
But do people reflect as they become older on the nature and attributes of the being toward whom their sentiments are directed – or in particular on the relation of the world to that being? Human nature is so constituted that the practical element in sacred teaching, that in it which can motivate us to act and which becomes a source of consolation for us as well as the source of our knowledge of duty, is readily manifest to the uncorrupted human sensibility. On the other hand, the instruction (i.e. the concepts as well as everything only externally connected with [the practical]) that we receive from childhood on, and which accordingly makes such an impression on us, is something that is, as it were, grafted onto the natural need of the human spirit. Although this relation is frequently immediate enough, it is, alas, all too often capricious, grounded neither in bonds indigenous to the nature of the soul nor in truths created and developed out of the concepts ...
What I understand is that it says, with the highlighted text, that man has a natural need for a religion of some kind, but that how this religion was taught and the relation established between the individual and religion at that moment was not appropriate. Is he pointing to a reform of the said relation between the individual and religion? Is this some kind of attack on the church?
