Religion and Reason

Extract

The persistence of the religious spirit under the most varied cultural circumstances suggests the superficiality, though not necessarily the irrelevance, of those explanatory theories that view religion as the symptom of some profound, but theoretically superable, social or personal disorder. Certainly the most influential of these, the Marxist and the Freudian, cannot be dismissed as mere errors; they have too clearly perceived certain regular abuses of religious sensitivity, and they have stated these in such a bold and open way that it seems unlikely that anyone could resist their simple truth: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people …’ [Marx]; ‘religion [is]… the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’ [Freud].