The Future of an Illusion

In this section, Freud considers the nature of religious proclamations (what he calls “religious ideas”). Freud sees religion as a set of teachings that lay claim to being “assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself” (25). Religious ideas, collected in religious texts or spread through sermons by priests, make assertions about the nature of the world—how it works or why it exists. However, these statements are not based upon anything observable in the surrounding world and thus rely on one’s “belief” in them to be true.

For Freud, religious teachings starkly differ from the forms of teaching that exist in secular schooling. Schools often teach pupils about facts that they cannot know for themselves, such as the location of a lake in a distant part of the world. However, one could always independently seek out factual proof for these claims, such as traveling to the lake one has learned about in geography class. In contrast, religious teachings demand to be accepted due to the fact that “they were already believed by our primal ancestors” (26). Further, many religions look down upon anyone investigating the truth of religious teachings and often outright prohibit such questioning.