Despite being ultimately slammed for fatal flaws in some of his theories, psychoanalytical pioneer Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) offered other concepts of mind— such as why people harbor religious illusions—that have better stood the test of time.

Some of these concepts are discussed in an excellent article in the December 2017 edition of Skeptic magazine by Raymond Barglow, Ph.D., a former instructor at University of California, Berkeley.

In the article, Barglow quotes Freud as saying, “A great part of my life’s work has been spent to destroy my own illusions and those of humankind,” regarding everything from illusory religious beliefs to ill-founded homophobia to illogically prejudicial treatment of soldiers traumatized by warfare (they were dismissed by many as weak). But, since this blog investigates religious topics, I will focus on those relevant parts of the article.

Barglow compares Freud to such lionized skeptical humanists as Socrates, Voltaire and Hume in that he believed “reason could help people undo the hypocrisies and deceptions in their lives, permitting a recovery of sanity and a measure of happiness.” Freud believed people’s minds were often more “influenced by unacknowledged motives and unspoken memories” than a rational sense of reality. He meant we generally have little conscious knowledge of why we believe what we believe (although we think we do), while subconscious dynamics (the psychological effects of upbringing, indoctrination and culture, etc.) shape our thinking in hiding, as it were.

According to Freud, science inflicted “two great outrages” upon humanity’s “naïve self-love,” the deep sense that we occupy an exalted place at the center of the universe. The first such “outragte” was Nicolaus Copernicus’ 16th-century discovery that the earth orbited the sun and not the other way around, and the second came three centuries later when Charles Darwin proposed evolutionary theory. The latter, Freud wrote, “robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him.” Many people of faith, particularly Christians, continue to cling without evidence to the idea that human beings were originally created as the sophisticated beings they are now by an omnipotent divine being.

Freud believed that people irrationally believe in God because they instinctively “seek a benevolent, all-powerful protector who will shelter them from suffering and uncertainty and assure an orderly world.” People are reassured, he wrote, when they feel able to “entreat them [supernatural beings], to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them … rob them of part of their power.”

Adults in some ways retain child-like ways and thoughts, Freud believed, as religious illusions of adults are partly a continuation of their vivid “make-believe” fantasies in childhood. As children believe without verifiable evidence that their imaginary friends are real, adults accept the existence of invisible divinities.

Everyone has illusions, Freud admitted, but he stressed that the difference between temporal and religious illusions, is that the latter are “incapable of correction” even if debunking evidence emerges in the future.

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