Abstract
Sigmund Freud in his exegesis on religion (1959/1907, 1961/1927) focused mostly on what he considered to be the illusion responsible for religious belief, especially the belief in a super/supra-natural God. He theorized that belief in God was a first step in a general attempt to manage the unfeeling nature of nature, or as Paul Bloom (2005) puts it, “the terrors of nature.” In a specific way, Freud pointed to man’s fate of ultimate death as a particularly onerous contemplation, and posited that religious faith was conceived by man to approach this harsh truth. In essence he saw it as a compensatory balm for this particular anticipatory (and unfair) existential suffering of human-kind.
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Kellerman, H. (2013). The Personality of a God That Can Be Possibly Known. In: The Discovery of God. SpringerBriefs in Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4364-3_3
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