Abstract
Religion is a dream, a fantasy-picture which expresses man’s situation and at the same time provides a fantasy-gratification of man’s wish to overcome that situation. … In religion man recognizes his helplessness, his dependence, and he seeks to overcome it by calling in the aid of the imagination. Sacrifice and prayer thus stand at the very centre of religion and reveal to us its essential character and aim … ‘the prayer pregnant with sorrow, the prayer of disconsolate love, the prayer which expresses the power of the heart that crushes man to the ground, the prayer which begins in despair and ends in rapture’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Eugene Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 39f. The concluding quotation is from Feuerbach.
Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957), p. 16.
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 220.
H.H. Price, ‘Some Considerations about Belief’, in A. Phillips Griffiths, ed., Knowledge and Belief (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 43. For a more recent case in point, consider the following definition by Dan Sperber: ‘a subject’s factual beliefs are all the independently stored representations that the subject is capable of retrieving from his encyclopaedic memory and all the representations that, by means of his inferential device, he is capable of deriving from his stored factual beliefs’ (‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’, in M. Hollis and S. Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982], p. 172.)
Williazn Preston Jr, ‘On Omaha Beach’, New York Review of Books, 14 July 1994.
On this, cf. e.g., Karl-Otto Apel, ‘Universal Principles and Particular Decisions and Forms of Life’, in R. Gaita, ed., Value and Understanding (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 83ff.
D.Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 101ff. The quotation is from p. 102.
Gareth Moore, Believing in God: A Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), pp. 131f.
This point is forcefully made by O.K. Bouwsma in ‘Miss Anscombe on Faith’, in the collection of his essays, Without Proof or Evidence, ed. J.L. Craft and Ronald E. Hustwit (Lincoln, Neb. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
This type of attitude seems to lie at the basis of the religious reductionism attributed by D.Z. Phillips to Ingmar Bergman. See his essay, ‘Ingmar Bergman’s Reductionism: “A Modern Cosmology of the Spirit”’, in Through a Darkening Glass (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1996 The Claremont Graduate School
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hertzberg, L. (1996). Is Religion a Product of Wishful Thinking?. In: Phillips, D.Z. (eds) Can Religion be Explained Away?. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24858-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24858-2_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-24860-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-24858-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)