Frued Illusion

  • humanization of nature:

    • humans are afraid of nature and feel helpless because they face powerful uncontrollable forces, creating fear, anxiety, and helplessness

    • so people try to make nature easier by humanizing/personifying it, like adding diety like qualities so that they see nature as people

  • religion has a strong connection to childhood

    • peoples ideas about gods are related to their experiences as children.

      • like a kid might feel helpless compared w adults, and they may fear their parents like their dad, and also expect the dad to protect them

      • as adults humans are still helpless in nature, death, and fate, and freud argues that people transfer the feelings they had toward their father onto gods and so gods become a powerful father figure who can protect

        • sorta like in christianity

  • Freud claims that gods originally served the purpose of:

    • protecting from danger of nature

    • help people to accept of suffering and death

    • make up for suffering and sacrifices required by civilization

    • then, when people learned more about how nature worked, they ended up tying religion less to explaining nature and more to morality

  • Religion makes peoples’ helplessness in life more tolerable through its ideas that:

    • higher purpose in life

    • God that watches over people

    • morality of evil being punished and good being rewarded

    • death not being end of existence

  • Freud thinks that religious ideas come from human wishes.

    • not conclusions they reach from logical thinking but instead illusions that humans make up to satisfy their deep wishes like protection

      • basically that humans want religion to be true so that they can have comfort and answers and etc

    • however, he does not consider an illusion as an error, and distinguishes between the two

      • error= incorrect belief

      • illusion= belief influenced strongly by a wish (could turn out to be true) (no means of proving or disproving it)

    • he calls religious beliefs an illusion that cant be proven and argues people cant be forced into believing or not believing in them

      • says that the fact something cant be disproved does not give reason to believe it

    • he thinks science is the way to answer questions, not inward illusions