The Original Atheists With Attitude

By ROI BEN-YEHUDA

Like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) interpreted religion with a watchful eye to its hidden meanings and interests. They both were champions of what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) called the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” meaning that they sought out the meaning below the surface, which they believed concealed hidden interests.

But Unlike Marx, Freud understood the problem of religion in psychological as opposed to socio-economic terms. And also unlike Marx, Freud had spent a great deal of ink on the problem of religion. In fact, Freud had dedicated three books to the subject: Totem and Taboo (1918), Future of an Illusion (1927), and Moses and Monotheism (1939).

Sigmund Schlomo Freud was born into a religiously Jewish family in 1856. His father, an Orthodox Jew who later gravitated to the German Reform movement, gave his son a thorough Jewish education. While Freud briefly flirted with becoming a believer, it was during his time at the University of Vienna, under the influence of a materialist zeitgeist, that Freud came to the conclusion of atheism.

It is noteworthy that while Freud rejected his belief in God, he (much like Ernestine Rose) nevertheless maintained a strong identity as a Jew. In numerous letters and statements he expressed his feelings of emotionally and intellectually belonging to the Jewish people—whose essence he could never put into words. In fact, Freud proudly referred to himself as a “godless Jew.”

On the question of God, Freud had famously argued that God is a projection of our deep-seated wishes onto an imaginary being. Freud calls religious truth claims illusions, by which he means highly improbable/impossible wishes about the world and one’s place in it.

In The Future of An Illusion (1927) Freud writes: “We shall tell ourselves that 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.”

Freud maintained that the origin of those wishes lay in our need to overcome the terrifying forces of nature, be reconciled to our fate, and be compensated for the demands of civilization.

What’s more, employing the insights of psychoanalysis, Freud argues that our construction and relationship with God is modeled on our early relationship with our parents (particularly our fathers). Just as our parents assuaged our sense of helplessness as children, so too God becomes our protector and guardian. For Freud, it was not enough to say (as Rose had) that man creates God in his own image, rather, Freud concluded that man creates God in his parent’s image.

Of course Freud went much further than the paternal projection hypothesis. In his most aggressive thoughts on religion, Freud saw the phenomenon akin to a mental sickness. He wrote that “the religions of mankind must be classed among the mass delusions,” and that religion ought to be viewed as “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.”

Just as a neurosis functions as a disguised expression of repressed unconscious desires, religion works as a safety valve for relieving pressure brought on by the privations of civilization. Yet both modes of being were unhealthy. Religion had left humankind projecting their needs and fears onto an imaginary being. This left people unable to truly come to terms with the source of their anxieties.

While Freud conceded that religion has served a positive purpose in the history of civilization, its negative properties have proven to be too many. The goal, therefore, was for humanity to shed its illusionary beliefs and face reality. In short—grow up!