On Religion/Sigmund Freud Quotes Flashcards
In Age of Science, Is Religion ‘Harmful Superstition’?
God is not only dead, author avers. He never lived. Not to mention the deaths of kids treated with faith instead of science-based medicine.
BY SIMON WORRALL, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
PUBLISHED MAY 31, 2015
Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible was in high school listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album when he had an epiphany: God does not exist. The thought terrified him. But his subsequent work as a geneticist and evolutionary biologist gave him a scientific foundation for his teenage conversion.
Talking from the University of Chicago, where he is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, he explains why new scientific discoveries are undermining the claims of religion; why Stephen Jay Gould was wrong; and how U.S. law is not doing enough to protect children from being martyrs to their parents’ faith.
Your journey towards atheism started with an epiphany, at age 17, listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album. Take us back to that moment.
I was raised as a reform Jew, which is a hair’s breadth from atheism. We went to synagogue, but I didn’t do Bar Mitzvah. Occasionally, God would be mentioned, especially when I was a bad boy. [Laughs] I was in high school when the Sgt. Pepper’s album came out. I was lying on my parents’ couch listening to this new album and all of a sudden it just popped into my mind that everything I’d been taught about God and religion had no evidence behind it. I started sweating, but not because of the heat. I always thought there must be an afterlife. And the sudden realization that that probably wasn’t true made me start shaking and sweating. Ever since then I’ve been an atheist.
You are now an evolutionary geneticist. How does your day job inform your views on religion?
If you teach evolution, you’re teaching the one form of science that hits Abrahamic religions in the solar plexus. You can teach chemistry and physics and physiology and other forms of science-based inquiry, like archaeology and history, and religious people don’t have any problem with that. But, for evolution, they do.
About 42 to 43 percent of Americans are creationists. Another 30 percent are theistic evolutionists, who think that God impelled the evolutionary process. This is an uptick of about 50 percent over the last 20 years.
But there are a number of things about evolution and science that undermine religion. First of all, the fact that the Genesis story is wrong. There’s no evidence that there’s any qualitatively different feature about humans from other species, except maybe for language. But that’s something that could have evolved via culture. We’re not special products of God’s creation.
How have new developments in science like neurobiology or cosmology affected our understanding of the universe and our place in it?
They support what Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, said: “The more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how pointless it is.” We’re learning a lot about the universe and what we are seeing is that it’s all a naturalistic process.
One of the theories about how the universe came to be, the big bang theory, is that it happened naturally in a quantum vacuum. That undercuts religion right there [Laughs]. People say, “You can’t get a universe from nothing. You’ve gotta have God.” But you can, if you conceive of nothing as the quantum vacuum of outer space.
TODAY’S
Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us.
This is the dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains. We are creatures of physics, made of molecules. Therefore, our thoughts and behaviors are also the results of molecular motions.
In a nutshell, why are religion and science incompatible?
They’re incompatible first of all, because they both compete to find truths about the universe. There are some fundamental truths about the universe that believers have to accept in order to be religious. Many Muslims see the Koran as literally true. To question any of that is to bring a death sentence on yourself. The reason why people are so concerned with harmonizing science and religion, as opposed to, say, science and architecture, or science and baseball, is because science and religion are competitors in the field of esoteric truths about the cosmos.
But we use different methods to ascertain what’s true. Science has an exquisitely refined series of methods honed over 500 years to find out what’s real and what’s false. Richard Feynman gave the best definition of science I ever heard, “It’s a way to keep you from fooling yourself, because you’re the easiest person to fool.”
Religion doesn’t have a methodology to weed out what’s false. In fact, it’s a way of fooling yourself. They have authority, revelation, dogma, and indoctrination as their methods and no way of proving their tenets false.
There are thousands and thousands of religions and all of them make incompatible claims about the universe. The reason that that’s the case is because they don’t have any way of testing those claims.
You call religion “the most widespread and harmful form of superstition.” Make your case.
One of the meanings of superstition in the Oxford English dictionary is a belief that is unfounded or irrational. Since I see all religious belief as unfounded and irrational, I consider religion to be superstition.
It’s certainly the most widespread form of superstition because the vast majority of people on Earth are believers.
Other forms of superstition, like astrology, belief in UFOs or telekinesis, are nowhere near as widespread. And the damage that religion has done to humanity is far more than the damage that astrology or the belief in Bigfoot has done. This is the problem with ISIS and other Islamist organizations. It used to be the problem with Christianity, as well. People get killed because they don’t share your beliefs.
Are all religions as bad as each other?
Oh, no. I think anybody that says that is on some tendentious gambit to discredit religion. Clearly, religions differ in how harmful they are and that’s proportional to how much they proselytize and how perfidious their beliefs are. There are religions that I would consider either harmless or maybe even beneficial. Quakers barely believe in God at all and are dedicated to social justice. The less a religion has to do with a tangible God, the less it hands out moral dictates and the better it is.
Once you believe in an absolute authority that tells you what to do, you’re heading down the road to perdition, I think.
Images of the cosmos such as these by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope help scientists understand the formation of stars. “Science and religion,” the author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible says, “are competitors in the field of esoteric truths about the cosmos.”
The evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, developed a theory known as NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria), in which science encompasses the domain of facts about the universe, while religion deals with the realm of meaning and moral values. Isn’t that a compromise you accept?
Well, no! [Laughs] It’s not only a compromise I can’t accept. It’s a compromise that’s been rejected by most theologians, who insist that morals and values be anchored in statements about how the universe is. In that sense, they’re opposed to the limitations of religion that Gould set for them. Philosophers have also rejected Gould’s idea that meaning, morals and values are the purview of religion. There’s a long tradition of secular humanism in philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and passing through Kant, John Stewart Mill and Hume to contemporary thinkers like Peter Singer. So, on both counts, I think NOMA fails.
A purposeless, purely physical universe, in which human life is accidental and human consciousness is what you call “a neuronal illusion,” is a bleak vision, isn’t it?
I suppose it might be to some people. I live with it and most Europeans live with it. It’s a vision that there’s nothing beyond the laws of physics and matter. Whether you find that bleak or not depends on your psychological constitution.
Are people in Scandinavia or France dragging their heels with their heads down because they find a life without God bleak?
No. In fact, you could make the opposite claim. For many Muslims fun is not allowed. Music is prohibited. I would find that kind of life far bleaker than a life without God.
Watch: Neil deGrasse Tyson, always provocative, sat with National Geographic News and talked about kids, the role of scientists, and the debate about teaching creationism in schools.
One of the most moving sections of your book is about Ashley King. Tell us her story and how it illustrates the dangers of religion?
It illustrates the dangers of what I call, “vertical proselytizing faith,” where you enforce your beliefs of religion on your kids when they’re too young to know otherwise. This religion is Christian Science, in which disease is seen as having spiritual causes. Christian Scientists reject science-based medicine in favor of prayer and spiritual healing.
Ashley King was the daughter of two well-off Christian Scientists in Arizona. Not the toothless Bible thumpers you think of when you think of fundamentalists. Ashley developed a lump on her leg, which turned out to be bone cancer. Instead of taking her to a doctor, they took her out of school and tried to treat her with prayer. The lump eventually got to be as big as a watermelon. Child services finally took her away from her parents.
Ashley went to the hospital and the doctor said, “It’s too late. This tumor’s too big. But we can give her some time by amputating her leg.” Her parents refused and stopped her being given pain-killing medicine.
Instead, they put her in a Christian Science sanatorium, which, by the way, is subsidized by the U.S. government. Her medicine consisted of giving her water and prayer. She started shrieking and crying out. The thing was incredibly painful. But all they did was pray. Finally, she died.
Her parents were prosecuted and convicted, but they were only given unsupervised probation. In 43 out of 50 American states, faith healing that harms your children is not a civil or criminal problem. Thousands of kids have died through Christian Science and the Followers of Christ in Oregon and Idaho. There are graveyards filled with dead kids who were given faith healing.
Do you have a spiritual life? If so, what does it look like?
Spiritual is an amorphous term. I study evolution and every day I read something that strikes me as amazingly wonderful. If you call that spiritual, then, yeah, I’m spiritual. Richard Dawkins says the same thing. Spirituality can run the gamut from amazement at nature to a feeling that there’s something beyond the material universe.
A scientist must equally try to disprove a theory as much as he attempts to prove it! Theology just says, because I said so, and you will go to hell if you question it. Isn’t it obvious which is the better system for finding the truth? Ref: my note from book “Future of an illusion.”
If you must not kill your neighbour, solely because God has forbidden it and will sorely avenge it in this or the other life, and you then discover that there is no God so that one need not fear his punishment, then you will certainly kill without hesitation. Ref Future of an illusion.
Shows why civilizations need religions. Recall Napoleon stated that religion is the only thing keeping the poor from murdering the rich people.
The religions of humanity, too, must be classified as mass-delusions of this kind. Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion recognizes it as such. Ref. Civilization discontents. Freud
https://www.latimes.com/
Los Angeles Times
Question to Siri: “Did man make God?”
Science and religion: God didn’t make man; man made gods
By J. ANDERSON THOMSON AND CLARE AUKOFER
JULY 18, 201112 AM
Before John Lennon imagined “living life in peace,” he conjured “no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too.”
No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without “divine” messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to “God’s will.” Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.
In recent years scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion’s “DNA.” They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including “imaging” studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to “no heaven … no hell … and no religion too.”
Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.
For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers.
Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.
Scientists have so far identified about 20 hard-wired, evolved “adaptations” as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behavior — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.
Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce “out-group” hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our “groupish” tendencies.
In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people’s minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It’s an easy jump to say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.
Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.
Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that “it is often beneficial for humans to work together … which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals.” In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.
Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist who co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also done work related to morality and very young children. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates children’s capacities for altruism. He argues that we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest.
Beyond psychological adaptations and mechanisms, scientists have discovered neurological explanations for what many interpret as evidence of divine existence. Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger, who developed what he calls a “god helmet” that blocks sight and sound but stimulates the brain’s temporal lobe, notes that many of his helmeted research subjects reported feeling the presence of “another.” Depending on their personal and cultural history, they then interpreted the sensed presence as either a supernatural or religious figure. It is conceivable that St. Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus was, in reality, a seizure caused by temporal lobe epilepsy.
The better we understand human psychology and neurology, the more we will uncover the underpinnings of religion. Some of them, like the attachment system, push us toward a belief in gods and make departing from it extraordinarily difficult. But it is possible.
We can be better as a species if we recognize religion as a man-made construct. We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind’s greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.
Imagine that.
J. Anderson Thomson is a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He serves as a trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Clare Aukofer is a medical writer. They are the authors of “Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.”
“People who believe in religion cannot think logically.” Ref: Psychology today.
MN: Look at all the gods and saviors worldwide. Jedi, Scientologists, Ghost dancers, Nation of Islam aliens, etc. Gods and religions are a cultural inheritance dependent mostly on geography.
If religions were real there would be billions of provable modern day miracles like no sickness, murder, no dying, no hospitals, no cemeteries, everyone would stay young and rich.
“Religion =Cultural inheritance.”
“Religion is the biggest con ever invented!” BN
Start quotes of Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 - September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. The man is famous for inventing and developing the technique of psychoanalysis and for influencing scientific and popular conceptions of human nature. Due to his remarkable contribution to the field, Sigmund Freud quotes are just as popular as the man himself.
Sigmund Freud is world famous and distinguished as the “Father of modern psychology.”
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.
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
At bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father.
Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.
Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.
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.”
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. If one wishes to form a true estimate of the full grandeur of religion, one must keep in mind what it undertakes to do for men. It gives them information about the source and origin of the universe, it assures them of protection and final happiness, and it guides - by - precepts - backed by the full force of its authority.
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.
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.
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. Civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up.
No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.
Cruelty and intolerance to those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion.
In the long run, nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction religion offers to both is palpable.
The effect of the consolations of religion may be compared to that of a narcotic.
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.”
Freud suggests that religion and neurosis are similar products of the human mind: neurosis, with its compulsive behavior, is “an individual religiosity”, and religion, with its repetitive rituals, is a “universal obsessional neurosis.”
In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud refers to religion as an illusion which is “perhaps the most important item in the psychical inventory of a civilization”. In his estimation, religion provides for defense against “the crushingly superior force of nature” and “the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt”. He concludes that all religious beliefs are “illusions and insusceptible of proof.”
Freud then examines the issue of whether, without religion, people will feel “exempt from all obligation to obey the precepts of civilization”.
He notes that “civilization has little to fear from educated people and brain-workers” in whom secular motives for morality replace religious ones; but he acknowledges the existence of “the great mass of the uneducated and oppressed” who may commit murder if not told that God forbids it, and who must be “held down most severely” unless “the relationship between civilization and religion” undergoes “a fundamental revision”.
Freud asserts that dogmatic religious training contributes to a weakness of intellect by foreclosing lines of inquiry. He argues that “in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable.”
The book expressed Freud’s “hope that in the future science will go beyond religion, and reason will replace faith in God.” MN: This happened to me.
On prayers:
Thus we call a belief an illusion when wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, while disregarding its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself does.
On believing religious dogma:
The riddles of the universe only reveal themselves slowly to our enquiry, to many questions science can as yet give no answer; but scientific work is our only way to the knowledge of external reality. Again, it is merely illusion to expect anything from intuition or trance.
On Religious doctrines are illusions:
Having recognized religious doctrines to be illusions, we are at once confronted with the further question: may not other cultural possessions, which we esteem highly and by which we let our life be ruled, be of a similar nature?
On religion fails promoting civilization:
For many thousands of years it has ruled human society; it has had time to show what it can achieve. If it had succeeded in making happy the greater part of mankind, in consoling them, in reconciling them to life, and in making them into supporters of civilization, then no one would dream of striving to alter existing conditions. But instead of this what do we see? We see that an appallingly large number of men are discontented with civilization and unhappy in it, and feel it as a yoke that must be shaken off; that these men either do everything in their power to alter this civilization, or else go so far in their hostility to it that they will have nothing whatever to do either with civilization or with restraining their instincts.
On civilization’s plan to use religion as the silver bullet:
If you must not kill your neighbour, solely because God has forbidden it and will sorely avenge it in this or the other life, and you then discover that there is no God so that one need not fear his punishment, then you will certainly kill without hesitation.
On why they make religion a love story.
The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.
On what’s life about?
So again, only religion is able to answer the question of the purpose of life. One can hardly go wrong in concluding that the idea of a purpose in life stands and falls with the religious system.
End of Freud
Other memorable quotes.
A lie told often enough becomes the truth. Lenin
Religion. A mode of organizing social life around particular symbols, narratives and behaviors. The great courses.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people on how they shall think. ___Arthur Schopenhauer
Religion, a daughter of hope and fear explaining to the ignorance the nature of the unknowable.__ Ambrose Pierce
A lie makes it half way around the world before the truth gets its boots on__Mark Twain
Religion began when a con man met a fool. __ Voltaire
Tell a lie enough times and it becomes the truth. __ Adolf Hitler
