When one has lived for quite a long time in a particular civilization and has often tried to discover what it origins were and along what path is has developed, one sometimes feels tempted to take a glance in the other direction to ask what further fate lies before it and what transformations it is destined to undergo.
The opening line of the book establishes the stimulation for writing it. The book is not just a psychoanalytic explanation for how religion and religious beliefs arose as a universal constant across global civilization, but also a predictive analysis of how civilization might change if the neurosis known as religion were properly treated as such.
Man’s self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer.
Freud’s contention is that the creation of religion is in large part driven by a desire for protection. It is a psychological wish-fulfillment for an entity capable of providing protection against the dangers of life that stimulate anxiety while also creating an acceptable answer to the mysteries of death which can never be answered otherwise.
Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.
This quite essentially outlines in efficient fashion the answer to a central question concerning not so much why religion arose, but how it managed to maintain its dominance over civilization even through the continual accumulation of knowledge which challenges many of its doctrines and tenets.
You have to defend the religious illusion with all your might. If it becomes discredited — and indeed the threat to it is great enough — then your world collapses. There is nothing left for you but to despair of everything, of civilization and the future of mankind. From that bondage I am, we are, free. Since we are prepared to renounce a good part of our infantile wishes, we can bear it if a few of our expectations turn out to be illusions.
Freud here addresses one of the central arguments of his critics. Even if religion is merely illusion—a wish-fulfillment for various desires to be met—it is preferable to the alternative. To believe and be wrong offers no downside, according to this perspective. Freud counters it by pointing out that belief is constantly challenged and unless a true believer can address those challenge intellectually, their very faith is subject to catastrophe. Since faith is the driving mechanism behind any illusion that is believe, what is left when faith is gone. By contrast, not believing and being wrong may not turn out to be as bad as expected.
