Freud’s View on Religion

Freud maintained interests in the subjects of God and theology throughout his long c areer. Freud considered the practice of devotion and phantasmal rites to be some sort of neurological obsession. Taking the concept from Feuerbach, he also saw religious ideology as a bump of infantile wishes. If religious belief was a anatomy of neurosis, it is marked by an flatulent dissociation between unriv totallyedself and trulyity. If organized religion was a continuation of the electric shaverish course to project one(a)s imagination unto naive realism, it is marked by an supernormal association between ones fantasies and the objective ground.Either mien, religion is a sickness that take aims to be cured. Freud gave the clearest expression of his views on religion in his book The Future of an Illusion. In order to explore Freuds conception of religion, we must jump clarify certain points. When Freud speaks of religion, he is usually talk of the town about the impostal, fe ar- base, authoritarian, organized religion. There are other openhearteds of religion too. For instance, when William crowd duologue about religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience and when Freud talks about religion in his The Future of an Illusion they are referring to on the satisfying different approaches to God.James is talking about mystical experiences, while Freud is and then talking about infantile beliefs. Unlike James profound investigations into sublime apparitional matters, Freuds observations are more or less commonsensical. Freuds theories of origins of religion are some clock times criticized for organism unscientific speculations, but in truth on that point is non such(prenominal) of a need for scientific corroboration of Freuds views because they are just commonsensical.When one looks objectively at the various religions and religious beliefs in our world, one is beach to reach to conclusions somewhat similar to those of Freud. Freud may rush c ouched his observations in a more scholarly language, but basically what he is saying is actually simple and easily relatable. When he says religious rites are man raceifestations of obsessive neurosis, he simply means religions are somely ridiculously lunatic affairs. And when Freud says religions are infantile projections, he means they are simply sisterish non sense experience.It is rough to come to any other conclusion when we look at the whole pheno custodyon of organized religion from a rational perspective. Freud mostly has Judeo-Christian tradition in mind when he condemns religion. Though Freuds observations could be mostly applicable to more other world religions of the past and the map, they would make most direct sense when we keep the Jewish and Christian religions in mind. Freuds main proposition is that religion is a projection of world longings and desires. except desires and longings for what? for aegis of course.The Future of an Illusion and its seque l finish and its Discontents are Freuds reflections on the origins and nature of shade. Freud talks about religion in the linguistic context of civilization. Before the advent of civilization, man lived in wilderness. In our modern times, skirt by the innumerable comforts of science and technology, i. e. , civilization, we may non be able to properly appreciate the fact, but situations of emotional state posed unalterable threat and continual hardship for wandering groups of early gentlemans gentlemans, and this was how we lived for literally hundreds of thousands of years.Civilization is relatively a actually recent manifestation. Religion in its central forms most likely predates civilization by tens of thousands of years. Freud constantly ties up religion with civilization since they essentially serve the same function provide security against fearsome, elemental forces of nature. The principal task of civilization, its actual raison detre, is to defend us against natur e, says Freud, and nobody would dispute this assertion.Now, the principal task of religion too is the same, though it approaches this issue of security from a different angle. And while civilization provides real security, religion provides solo imaginary one, zilch more than an illusory feeling. orthogonal the setting of civilization, the basic question before an individual human being as he tried to live his life and cope with his surround was how to survive, how to defend himself against the superior powers of nature, of Fate? The first meter toward security is what Freud calls, humanisation of nature A great deal is al s lavatoryy gained with the first step the humanization of nature. Impersonal forces and destinies rout out non be approached they remain eternally remote. But if the elements have passions that rage as they do in our own souls, if death itself is not something spontaneous but the violent act of an evil Will, if e reallywhere in nature there are Beings around us of a soma that we know in our own society, then we can breathe freely, can feel at home in the uncannyThis was how the first very primitive religions began, long before the advent of civilization. Say, if civilization began roughly 5 6000 years ago, and agriculture began some 10 12000 years ago, there is state for religious rites to have taken place as far keister as 80,000 years or in fact much earlier, spillage back to the dim beginnings of the species Homo sapiens. Religion was therefore the first lawsuit of man to establish a rapport with nature.The intention was wholly a noble one to connect with the greater existence but human minds were understandably extremely primitive so long ago in time, their lifestyle was totally brutish, there was no language either, and so preferably of a poetic or philosophical reverence for Nature, men could scarce develop a routine of arbitrary, superstitious rituals in an causal agent to last out nature. Knowledge of our evolution ary beginnings was not well-developed in Freuds time, however his speculations were based on the intrinsic logic of things and so some of them were neatly corroborated by scientific disc everywhereies that were made much later.Superstitious religious beliefs did not really make man secure, but they at least provided an illusory sense of confidence We are still defenceless, perhaps, but we are no long-term lostly paralysed we can at least react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not still defenceless. We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bounty them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power. Freud says, life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors. This was the big project man was on. However, there was no fashion man could achieve this at a time when he could not flat build a primitive tax shelter for himself and had to live inside the ca ves. Even in the modern times, with such crazy advances in science, we are still far from achieving this. The primitive man could only project beings with whom he could relate unto the abstract Nature, and achieve some kind of consolation through such an effort.This was not an altogether futile effort besides consolation, it could also have led to other practical benefits. A replacement like this of natural science by psychology not only provides immediate relief, but also points the counseling to a win mastering of the situation. From these very primitive beginnings, religions too went on evolving along with mans growing awareness of his world. Freud continues with his logically derived conception of the evolution of religion. Freud has nada against the way primitive religions evolved, because obviously human kind was in its puerility for all that time. Therefore it was only natural. What Freud is against are the present- mean solar day monotheistic religions of the world.Mono theism first evolved after a few thousands of years of civilization. Freuds birth religion, Judaism, was one of the pioneers of monotheism. Although the monotheistic religion was a tremendous leap of abstraction over the primitive pantheistic religions, it was still an evolution of the primitive religions. Religion in whatever form, including the deeper spiritual and mystic modes, is a search for security, as is civilization. Whereas civilization has a valid base, religion continued to be a stringently imaginary enterprise.Civilization is a reflection of intelligence, maturity and capability of man, whereas religion is its exact opposite, although civilization and religion have been going together for so long. With monotheism, religion attained a kind of maturity, but unfortunately all the deep childishness still remained with it, being only thinly concealed. Freud remarks the chase about the evolution of religion And thus a store of ideas is created, born(p) from mans need to m ake his helplessness tolerable and built up from the material of memories of the helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the human race.This store of childish ideas continued to serve as a basis for the supposedly monotheistic religions too. Religion turned out to be an essentially childish pursuit. The parallels between religious tendencies and child psychology run deep. A very young child lives in a space where realness and dream/imagination constantly merge. In other words, he is not capable of clearly distinguishing between reality and imagination. For him, fairies in the stories he read could be as real as his friends at school. Freudian analytic thinking traces all the mental labyrinthinees of an adult person to his childhood. This is the essential modality of analysis.The vogue of large number to believe in religious doctrines is thus traced back by Freud to the movement of children to confuse between reality and imagination. One needs this tendency or readiness first to indulge in any kind of mythmaking which is at the core of all religions, whether monotheistic or pantheistic this ability to take ones own and collective mental projections for reality. in one case this is in place, a person can go on intercommunicate whatever suits him. A human child is so utterly helpless if he had to live on his own in this enormously complex world, unlike juvenile animals which come more or less prepackaged.The childs overwhelming need is security. This security is provided by his parents. The child realizes his total dependence on the parents consequently, the attachment to the father-figure or the mother-figure has deceased very deep in the collective psyche of humanity. Security is very deeply associated with the father figure, especially in Western cultures and the ancient civilizations they evolved from. And although the child grows up into a man, and becomes much more capable and stronger in fending for himself, he still remains we ak and helpless in face of many situations of life.The search for security continues, and the need for greater security is ever present. A benevolent and compassionate God watching over human affairs from his heaven if he existed would have been the ultimate protection for humans. But even if he does not exist, and no one has ever seen him, it need not present much of a problem because humans possess the faculty of confusing reality with imagination, and can easily make their own gods as well their own God. This faculty was particularly pronounced in people who lived in the early stages of civilization which corresponded to the intermediate stages of evolution of religion.These men belong to the ancient cultures of the world created thousands of gods and elaborate mythological stories featuring them all of them being nobody more than products of their fertile but childish imagination. In the subsequent ages, men became more mature, their rational faculties developed, and they s ought to make meaning of their world in a more focused manner, instead of just pursuit security and comfort. This development was helped by the fact that enough of security and comfort were present already, therefore a higher need to make sense of his world developed in man.Religious cults continued to emerge and evolve they were not simply arbitrary mythological stories anymore but contained more retentive narratives that answered philosophical questions and provided a framework of meaning to human existence. These latter day religions were apparently much more civilise than most of the primitive religions, nevertheless they were still highly childish and nonsensical. Science is a legitimate way of seeking comfort and security, and philosophy is a legitimate way of seeking meaning of human existence, but religion is a pseudo way of seeking all these three.Religion is like a drug that can provide a false sense of happiness and elation without in any way actually leading to greate r happiness and joy. That was way why Freud was so much opposed to the existence of religions, they essentially belonged to a childish, outmoded phase of human evolution, even the apparently more sophisticated ones. Religions are nothing but an illusion. They provide comfort, solace, security, meaning and significance to human life but they only seem to do so, in reality they only provide fake substitutes for all these.An illusion means an look without substance, and it is a very apt word to describe religions. There is nothing wrong in seeking greater meaning and security in our lives, in fact this search is what makes us human, this is a healthy need of human existence. But there is a much more plethoric neurotic version of this need which is easily satisfied by unadulterated appearances and falsities, and which is easily catered for by the religions of the world. Religions are an outcome of neurosis, they are a sickness of the human mind, and Freud genuinely hoped that relig ions could be cured by the spread of psychoanalysis some day in the future.