Is Religion An Illusion?
In the presidential election between George Bush and John Kerry people of faith, it is said, made the difference sending George Bush back to the White House. In the course of the debates both candidates explained what their religion meant to them sensing the importance of this topic for the American public. But is there a point of view that doesn’t see religion as a good thing?
Perhaps no one espoused such a point of view more forcefully than the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. To him religion was an illusion. We have anxiety, he said, because we live in a world where harm can come to us from other people and from nature in catastrophes that can befall us, where we can be hurt, get sick, die.
The allure of religion is the creation of a moral order were ultimately justice will prevail, where our fears about the dangers of life are allayed, and where even death is conquered with the promise of eternal life. Just as in childhood when we needed the protection of a father through love to help us with our feelings of helplessness, adults can feel helpless, too, and belief in a Provident God can help quell their anxiety.
The teachings of religion, Freud believed, aren’t based on experience or reason, but on illusions that represent the “most urgent wishes of mankind.” Freud doesn’t say religion is false, only that it is based on illusion. The illusion of a Provident God, he said, in his book The Future of Illusion, comes from our human wishes: what is believed is what people wish to be.
Those who fight so hard for their religion do so because without it, for them, there would just be despair. Religious consolation was like a narcotic, Freud said, like a childhood neurosis. It gives a human face to the superior power of nature and helps us to feel at home in the world, makes us feel we aren’t defenseless. To give up religion would bring the realization one is not the center of the universe, one cannot depend on the love of a creator to save us. Freud saw “profound affinities between ceremonies of obsessive neurotics and ceremonies of religious believers.”
He believed the masses, as he put it, were lazy and unintelligent. “They have no love for instinctual renunciation,” he said. All men, Freud thought, have destructive trends which are anti-social and anti-cultural and in many people these trends “are strong enough to determine their behavior.”
So what was Freud’s hope for the salvation of mankind, a mankind he believed was ruled by their passions? It is only with intelligence that we can control our instinctual wishes. His hope was for an age when intellect would gain primacy over instincts.
He hoped to get from intellect what those who believed in religion hoped to get from God – “namely the love of man and the decrease of suffering.” Freud distinguished himself from the believers of religion by saying, “You would have the state of bliss begin directly after death,” while I would be content to see mankind “do it very gradually, only in the foreseeable future, and for a new generation of men.” This new generation of men would have children who had not been raised with the illusion of religion.
As adults they would have shed the remnants of their infantilism and learned how to negotiate a hostile life. We must become educated to reality, said Freud. We have minds developed to explore the external world. We could use our intelligence to control our passions. Our mental advance, Freud contended, happens when “external coercion gradually becomes internalized.” We are thrown into adulthood on our own resources. Thus it is, we must learn to make proper use of them. Mankind could surmount its neurotic phase dominated by passions and infantilism, just as a child could grow out of neurosis, said Freud.
We created civilization to protect ourselves from the harshness of the state of nature. It was civilization that makes communal life possible. The most any society could accomplish, Freud believed, was to reduce in the majority of people asocial trends. There will always be some who because of “pathological disposition or an excess of instinctual strength” will be asocial.
For Freud it was science that was man’s beacon of hope. It was only through science that we can attain knowledge of that which is outside ourselves. He saw science and religion as enemies. Science was based on observation and skepticism, ever marching forward, not static but ever advancing.
Science progresses slowly, said Freud, making laws today, discovering gradually under what conditions those laws do or do not apply, discovering which of other laws limit its applicability, replacing approximations of truth eventually with more “carefully adapted ones” which one knows will be further perfected in the future. Scientific knowledge for Freud was man’s great help in life.“As for the great necessities of Fate,” Freud wrote in his book The Future of Illusion, “against which there is no help,” we must learn to endure them with resignation.
Freud could hold out only the progress of science and nothing else for those who suffered in life. Freud would have us withdraw our expectations from the spiritual and direct our energies to improving life on earth, to make life better for everyone. His goal for humankind was to live life without illusions and to focus our energy on making life on earth more tolerable for all.
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