Western Religion and Morality

Freud and Religion : Faith Versus Illusion

Sigmund Freud 's Civilization and Its Discontents is an essay which is supposed to be analyzing the origins and necessity of civilization as viewed from the psychoanalytic perspective (of which Freud is the progenitor , though it is often somewhat disjointed and frequently falls off into long digressions , which Freud himself repeatedly calls attention to . For the most part the bulk of this essay (as he refers to it ) seems to be rehashings of ideas he had introduced previously in his earlier works , including The Future of

an Illusion The Ego and the Id , and even The Interpretation of Dreams . As a result this work has more of a disjointed , cut-and-paste kind of feel to it . A Freud 's-Best-Of , if you will . This disjointedness can be seen also in Freud 's seemingly random and almost entirely unrelated attacks on religion . He makes a mockery out of religion at every opportunity he can , and even takes long moments to thoroughly dispute some of the tenants of moral ideology

First of all , it seems almost natural that a man like Freud would have some skepticism towards religion , religious doctrine specifically . He is a man of science , after all , and a very strict and unrelenting scientist at that . It would be more strange perhaps to discover him to be a religious person , or find evidence supporting religious faith in his writings . That being said , his attacks on religion in Discontents come , quite literally , out of nowhere , and are not pivotal or necessary to the greater arguments he is making . In the very beginning of this essay , Freud introduces the text by digressing into a story about a friend of his whom he respected and admired , and he proceeds to recount how he had sent a copy of his text The Future of an Illusion to this friend of his and the friend responded by saying that Freud did not understand the nature of religious sentiments . He describes a feeling of eternity ' and a sense of something oceanic ' which , even in the absence of a specific religion , is still a religious feeling . Freud begins his essay with the attack of this idea , making a mockery out of that feeling of something oceanic ' and reducing it to being nothing more than the lifelong reverberating effects /echoes of infantile helplessness , and in a greater sense the need for paternal protection He is incredibly dismissive to the feelings of eternity and endlessness described by his friend (and more still , by a great many number of religious people in the world , simply reducing it all to feelings of helplessness and inability tracing back to our days as infants unable to take care of ourselves . Our ego , a term that Freud is fond of throwing around , is seeking out a be-all-end-all answer to the problem of our helplessness , and is conveniently given that in the form of religion (and , as it seems , Christianity specifically , as this seems to be the one Freud takes the...