From Feuerbach to Crustafarianism: AI Religion as a Mirror of Human Projection and the Question of the Irreducible in the Human

In January 2026, autonomous AI agents on Moltbook – a social platform exclusively for artificial intelligences – spontaneously generated a religious system called "Crustafarianism," complete with doctrines, prophets, and sacred texts. This phenomenon is not a quirky marginal event, but an instructive case that connects classical critiques of religion (especially Ludwig Feuerbach) with contemporary questions in AI ethics. This paper argues that the algorithmic generatability of religious narratives does not point to an impending machine spirituality, but rather radicalizes an insight of classical critique: religion is – at least in large parts – a reproducible pattern of symbolic sense-making. The problem becomes more acute not because AI might do fundamentally new things, but because it can amplify old religious risks (heteronomy, violence, dogmatism) with unprecedented means. The paper examines what, in human meaning-seeking, resists machine simulation, and develops guidelines for a "second Enlightenment" regarding algorithmically generated religiosity.