Quotes About Freud Religion

#1. Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity

Sigmund Freud

#2. When we attempt to imagine death, we perceive ourselves as spectators.

Sigmund Freud

#3. In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.

Rollo May

#4. Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.

Sigmund Freud

#5. At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.

Sigmund Freud

#6. figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he

Jonathan Haidt

#7. The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.

Sigmund Freud

#8. Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not question.

Sigmund Freud

#9. We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

Sigmund Freud

#10. Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.

Sigmund Freud

#11. Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.

Sigmund Freud

#12. The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such ...

Sigmund Freud

#13. Religion belonged to the infancy of humanity. Now that humanity had come of age, it should be left behind.

Sigmund Freud

#14. It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

#15. Religion originates in the child's and young mankind's fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.

Sigmund Freud

#16. In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.

Sigmund Freud

#17. The defense against childish helplessness is what lends its characteristic features to the adult's reaction to the helplessness which he has to acknowledge - a reaction which is precisely the formation of religion.

Sigmund Freud

#18. I am obsessive always, even as a child. On one side is this strict orthodox religion, on the other is communism, and I am this little girl pulled between the two. It makes me who I am. It turns me into the kind of person that Freud would have a field day with, for sure.

Marina Abramovic

#19. Religion may have been the original cure; Freud reminds us that it was also the original disease.

Philip Rieff

#20. In The Future of an Illusion, Freud made the obvious point that religion suffered from one incurable deficiency: it was too clearly derived from our own desire to escape from or survive death. This critique of wish-thinking is strong and unanswerable,

Christopher Hitchens

#21. A religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.

Sigmund Freud

#22. The Mosaic religion had been a Father religion; Christianity became a Son religion. The old God, the Father, took second place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just as in those dark times every son had longed to do.

Sigmund Freud

#23. Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.

Sigmund Freud

#24. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.

Lewis Mumford

#25. Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis

Sigmund Freud

#26. There is no doubt that religion had already waned under the onslaught of the Enlightenment, but it was Freud who provided the radically new understanding of human nature that made any religious explanation of the whats and whys of our personhood seem naive.

Tony Campolo

#27. I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion

Sigmund Freud

#28. When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.

Sigmund Freud

#29. It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

Sigmund Freud

#30. And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

Chaim Potok

#31. In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

#32. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

#33. Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

Sigmund Freud

#34. Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

Sigmund Freud

#35. Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong, and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

Tony Campolo

#36. When a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and even to overlook the contradictions between them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

Sigmund Freud

#37. Religion is the process of unconscious wish fulfillment, where, for certain people, if the process did not take place it would put them in self-danger of coming to mental harm, being unable to cope with the idea of a godless, purposeless life.

Sigmund Freud

#38. Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.

Sigmund Freud

#39. Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.

Sigmund Freud

#40. It is easy to show that the ego ideal answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved.

Sigmund Freud

#41. Once again, only religion can answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly be wrong in concluding that the idea of life having a purpose stands and falls with the religious system.

Sigmund Freud

#42. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Sigmund Freud