Psychological Theories Of Religion

Edgar Allen Poe said “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination and poetry.”In Molloy we were presented with many different theories, some similar and some different, to the effect that religion helps people feel more secure in an unfeeling universe. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were several theories proposed about the nature of religion. The people who proposed these theories include philosopher Karl Marx; psychologists Sigmund Freud, William James, and Carl Gustav Jung; anthropologists E.B. Tylor and James Frazer; and theologian Rudolf Otto. All of the theories that were proposed explain that religion is psychological, emerging as a flaw in the human condition; helping people to …show more content…
The theories about religion, that were proposed in the nineteenth and twentieth century, are all based on the fact that religion is psychological. Something that people have thought up in order to deal with difficulties they face in life, to help understand their place place in the universe, and to help them understand the power of the universe and to give them peace of mind that they can potentially control it. The need for religion is psychological, the adversity that people face in life, and the feeling of being small in such a large universe, is easier to deal with when they believe in some God or other form of religion. The theory that I found most useful was the one presented by Frazer, that religion is the immediate stage between magic and science. I think that early civilizations would have seen natural events and death that they couldn’t explain, and in order to deal with the unknow religion was developed. Without knowledge of science and the evidence that we have today to explain natural phenomenons, I think it would have been advantageous to believe in a higher power. Especially when it comes to death, a subject that even today is very hard to deal with, back before there was health sciences that could explain death I think the idea of a finality to life had to have been terrifying. The idea that there is a higher power and an afterlife would have given some relief to people when thinking about death, that instead of dying and vanishing from existence people go somewhere better. Religion is something that arose in people’s minds, something that humans have been using as a coping mechanism to deal with life and emotions. Religion will always be a present force in society because all the challenges that people have to face in life, as proposed by these scholars, are not going