Sigmund Freud's views on religion

During the development of early civilization, God and religion were necessities to help restrain our violent impulses, which in modern times can now be discarded in favor of science and reason.

He notes that taboos (such as that regarding incest) still play a significant role in modern society but that totemism "has long been abandoned as an actuality and replaced by newer forms".

Freud believes that an original act of patricide—the killing and devouring of "the violent primal father"—was remembered and re-enacted as a "totem meal...mankind's earliest festival" which was "the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion".

"[11] In An Autobiographical Study Freud elaborated on the core idea of Totem and Taboo: "This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity, in which, it may be added, the ceremony of the totem-feast still survives with but little distortion in the form of Communion.

In his estimation, religion provides for defense against "the crushingly superior force of nature" and "the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt".

Bloom suggests that psychoanalysis and Christianity are both interpretations of the world and of human nature, and that while Freud believed that religious beliefs are illusions and delusions, the same may be said of psychoanalytic theory.

[24] Freud suggests that the "oceanic feeling", which his friend Romain Rolland had described to him in a letter, is a wish fulfillment, related to the child's egoistic need for protection.

In it, Freud makes certain guesses and assumptions about Moses as a historical figure, particularly that he was not born Jewish but was adopted by Jews (the opposite of the Biblical story) and that he was murdered by his followers, who then via reaction formation revered him and became irrevocably committed to the monotheistic idea he represented.

[30][31][32] Mark Edmundson comments that in writing Moses and Monotheism, Freud, while not abandoning his atheism, perceived for the first time a value in the abstract form of monotheism—the worship of an invisible God, without Jesus or saints—practiced by the Jews.

[34] According to Jay Geller, Moses and Monotheism is full of "false starts, deferred conclusions, repetitions, rationalizations, defensive self-justifications, questionable methods, and weak arguments that are readily acknowledged as such by Freud.

Among them it asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working over of carefully scrutinized observations, and none that is derived from revelation, intuition or divination.

[36] In a 1949 essay in Commentary magazine, Irving Kristol says that Freud exposed what he believed to be the irrationality of religion without evidence, but has not substituted anything beyond "a mythology of rational despair".

"[39] Tony Campolo, founder of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education, observes that "With Freud, God, and the need for God-dictated restraints, had been abolished,"[40] resulting in an increase in social chaos and unhappiness which could have been avoided by adherence to religion.