the freudian take on religion

"coincidence begets mysticism, which begets religion, which begets sin and retribution;begetting repression guilt and neurosis/psychosis.
by giving significance to random events we impute a hidden logic which leads to the creation of a hidden power controlling our lives....prompting propitiation......we begin to pray."
freud, 'future of an illusion'-00-


isnt that a final summation of all thats false with religions?
how can thinking adults actually still subscibe to religion, when freud has so simply exposed it for what it is..........nothing.... a chimera.

 

his words remind me of the buddah, who taught about the chain of causation which led to all misery... and most eastern religions teach all about the concept of illusion

personally, (and this is just me, which is to say i don't know if it is necessarily ultimately true, neither do i think others should subscribe to it), i like the jungian take. asked if he believed in god, he replied. "no, i no longer believe in god. i know god." :dance:

 

freud was a douche bag
that being said and put aside, religion is simple, people are simple...people believe in religion because it's something to believe in...some form of religion has always been in circulation within humans, paganism was one of the earliest religions, it's still a religion, although alot better than christianity...people need a belief system, even science is a belief system
if people didn't believe in something be it religion, spirituality, atheism, science...it's just a need to believe, a need to believe that we are not ment for nothing, a need to believe we are not ment for the mundane, that there is something more
if people didn't believe we would not live

believe what you choose to believe, and live the life you choose to live

i think i may have gone off topic...

 

sweet, baby...life is for living, and going off topic is all part of the fun

 

sometimes people get riled up for going off topic :&

 

Ken Wilber has an interesting response to this question. He calls it the "pre/trans fallacy" explaining that Freud was looking at religion in the prerational (or prepersonal) states of awareness, as opposed to the transrational (or transpersonal) states. It is an error of reducing the higher transrational state to the lower prerational state, and not taking into account our evolutionary progress.

Here is a link if you are interested:

www.praetrans.com/en/ptf.html

 

coincidence(synchronicity) interpretation does not have to impute a "higher" power controlling life. There are thousands of interpretations. Why not use the dream analogy? Maybe it is something being played out in your psyche that is represented. Like it or not, George Bush is part of the play that is contributing to the salvation of your soul.

 

imagination...... is the factor which led us to become better at adapting than all other species.
allowed us to view not only ourselves but to imagine others,even where there were no others.
belief systems are structures built by the imagination and held in the older brain, where they are responsible for prompting future actions and/or inactions based on those beliefs.
as the previous correspondent said, even science is such a belief system.

it is when the belief system is or can be utilized as a control mechanism, that it becomes dangerous and indubitably, religious belief sytems can be so described.

 

Allan Bloom on the intellectual difficulty with Freud,

"... Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex or power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e. motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends."

The Closing of the American Mind.

 

Freud also said:



"The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life"
S.Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents", 1930

 

[+++QUOTE=Waking Life]Allan Bloom on the intellectual difficulty with Freud,
so that takes care of the catholic priests and some of those tele-evangelists but there are a lot of us who after getting laid wonder if there is more to life than just this?
"... Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex or power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e. motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends."

The Closing of the American Mind.[/QUOTE]

 

I really don't think - when it comes to things spiritual, whichever path you choose to follow, or not - that you ought to base your entire spiritual opinion on a couple quotes of one person. Everyone needs to find their own spiritual path and take their own direction, rather than invest time in trying to debunk other people's beliefs.

 

Thats the perfect way to ensure years of intellectual stagnation.

Remember that line from that song ... "I'd like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony .... a symphonic blank stare."?