The Future Of An Illusion Essay

Religion today is a topic of many controversial and debatable arguments. It being one of the main basis of our improvement as a society, it is hard for it to still keep its place in a world as highly-developed as ours, as the innovative and modern ideas of today start to contradict with the ideas of religion. Religion seems to have lost the impact and importance in people's lives in today's world where science is the direction where people look for answers to their questions. Freud, an assertive and competitive atheist, argues that religion is an idea that we humans have developed as a way of dealing with the powers of nature that can harm us greatly. In The Future of an Illusion he explains how in his mind also is nothing more than our way of dealing with the feelings of helplessness, which carry on from childhood into adulthood. He finds the human beings looking up to God as a fatherlike figure whom we are terrified off because of the consequences they have to face after making a sin, and whom we look up for protection and safety at the same time. He focuses his introduction with the characteristics of a human civilization, or the way culture and society influences our life and our views of …show more content…
Religious ideas are not based on experiences of rational thinking or have a logical meaning behind it, but our illusions based on the "oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind" (30). By saying that religion is an illusion, Freud means that religion is not really a real thing and that it is something that the mind just makes up because it is a pleasure for it to do so and because it comes so naturally to it. People tend to seek for help when in need and most human beings turn to god for help when they’re helpless not even knowing his true existence. He claims that people don't have logical reasoning behind believing or following a certain religion and they just go by delusion leaving the reality behind