Psychological and
sociological challenges
to religious belief
Instructions
Use this PowerPoint presentation as you would any other; press F5 on your keyboard to start
presenting and use the arrow keys to go backwards or forwards.
License
Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 UK: England & Wales
This means you‟re free to i) Copy, distribute & perform the work and Version
ii) Make derivative works, as long as you i) Attribute the work (and any
derivate works) to Pisp.co.uk, ii) Do not use it for commercial gain and 2
iii) License any derivative works under an identical license. More...
2007-09-28

This PowerPoint presentation is based on an article on the
Pisp.co.uk website.
For more information, on this subject or many others, visit
Pisp.co.uk and click Learn. You‟ll also find links to
download this show in PowerPoint format.
LEARN MORE ONLINE...

All the stuff created by the Pisp.co.uk team is licensed
under Creative Commons where possible.
We encourage you to print or pass this resource on to
others who might find it useful! If you edit, you agree to
license your edited version under the same license and
not to use it for commercial gain.
SHARE THIS...

Fast facts
• The psychological and sociological
challenges are a posteriori arguments
challenging religious belief
• Argues from psychology (relating to
human psyche) and sociology (relating to
society)
• Critics include most religious people
• Advocates include Sigmund Freud, Jean
Charcot and Carl Jung

Welcome
• Psychological and
sociological challenges
to religious belief are
different than other
theories.
• Attempt to discover what
makes humans religious Most societies have, or had, a
– not necessarily to religious element to them.
From top-to-bottom, left-to-right:
prove or disprove G/d. Christian, Jewish, Hindu,
Muslim, Buddhist, Shintoist,
Sikh, Baha'i, Jain.

The advent of psychological studies created new
possibilities for the understanding of religion. It also
created new possibilities for its explanation. In the
hands of Sigmund Freud, religion becomes reduced
to a psychic mechanism by which the individual falls
victim to illusory hopes and dreams that have no
foundation in reality. Religion can therefore be
dismissed as an infantile obsessional neurosis arising
from childhood experiences. These experiences
centre on neurotic fears connected with the father
figure, who looms large in the life of the developing
child. The result is preoccupation with an idealised
cosmic father figure, who will guarantee protection
from the fears and anxieties of an otherwise
meaningless life. This is the essence of religion – an
understandable, but ultimately illusionary, world of
make-believe. (P. J. Clarke)

What the Freud?!
• Born 1856, died aged 83 in
1939 of cancer of the jaw.
• Graduate of the University
of Vienna.
• Surprisingly, he managed
to take his attention away
from his mother for long
enough to marry and have
What a looker! Ladies and
six children! Gentlemen, this is
Sigmund Freud!

Freud‟s findings
Freud argues that religion is an illusion, or
psychic mechanism, created by humans...
1. Religion is an aid to overcome inner
psychological conflict
2. Religion helps us to overcome the conflict
between our desires and society
3. Religion is an illusion to overcome our
fear of nature

Before we delve any further, we‟ll need to understand Freud‟s work
relating to the human mind, or psyche.
MIND MAP

The Id
• Seat of the unconscious
mind, controlling our basic
biological impulses.
• Breathing and hunger.
• Potentially socially
unacceptable things like the
desire for sex.
The Ego The Super-Ego
• Stuck in the middle. • Conflicts with the Id as it
• Filters the impulses from the „wants‟ the complete opposite.
Id and the Super-Ego. • Develops from birth
• Ensure personal safety and • Internalisation of society and
social acceptance are the socially accepted norms.
maintained. • Criticises and makes us feel
guilty.

In practise
This example nicely shows the relationship
between the three parts of the mind...

Ego self-defence
• Ego also filters our own thoughts.
• Employs several „defence mechanisms‟ to
protect us from ourselves, including...
 Fantasy
 Projection
 Repression
 Sublimation, amongst others
• We‟re only looking at repression and
sublimation...

Repress yourself
All things lost lie under closing water
in that lake with the poor man’s daughter (G. Clarke)
• The poet, Gillian Clarke, struggles to
remember an incident at „Cold Knap Lake‟
where her mother saved a drowning girl.
• Remembers it for the most part, but
wonders whether it really happened as
she remembers
 What other people have told her.
 Ego altering memories to suit her.

Bad memories are pushed
under...
Bad memories are pushed under the
surface of the lake, the lake being our
unconscious.

The first memory is sexual
• For Freud, body‟s most basic drive is sex,
or libido.
 Babies: Libido centred around mouth and
desire to suckle mother‟s breasts.
 Child, adolescent, adult: Libido centres on
reproductive organs and desire to reproduce.
• Our first memory is our conception and
being breastfed, but this is repressed.
• Leads to hostile feelings towards same-
sex parent.

Summary of Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Oedipus learns he may be adopted so
sees an oracle for advice
• Murders his biological father, without
knowing he‟s his biological father
• Wins the hand of the queen, who is his
biological mother but he is unaware of this
• Realises the queen is his mother and that
he murdered his father.
• Stabs himself in the eyes. The end.

Oedipus complex
• From that, Freud developed his ideas of
the Oedipus Complex...
• Here‟s a summary diagram:
Mother Farther
Son

Oedipus complex explained...
• The father has sex with his wife to
conceive the son.
• Son is born, father not getting any sexual
attention as mother is breastfeeding son.
• Baby develops into a child, no longer
needs her breasts so father gets attention.
• Child grows to adolescence, shifting the
libido to the sexual organ.

Oedipus complex explained... (2)
• The father uses his sexual organ with the
mother, so there is already a rival in the
form of the father.
This shift creates a tension
between the father and the son.
A hula father and son!

The Ego, Id and Superego
• The Id has feelings of jealousy and
hatred, and ultimately wants the father
dead.
• The Super-Ego is concerned about
respect for the father.
• The Ego‟s defence mode kicks in,
pushing the conflict into our
unconscious mind (repression).

Neurotic behaviour
• However, repression isn‟t enough.
• The mind struggles to keep these feelings
in the unconscious and, as a result, ends
up channelling out these feelings as
neurotic behaviour.
• For Freud, religion is the ‘universal
obsessional neurosis of mankind’, thus
religion is simply a response to the Ego‟s
struggle with repressed memories.

Pour femme...
• Girls don‟t suffer the Oedipus complex
since their sex organs are the same as
their mothers.
• Instead, they suffer the Electra complex –
they believe that they‟ve been castrated.
• They get jealous of the father and fearful
of the mother.
• It‟s almost like a case of “well, if I can‟t
have it neither can you”.

Charles Darwin
• As you can imagine, Freud‟s theory wasn‟t
popular so he sought to back it up using
Charles Darwin‟s Origin of the Species.
 Speculated that in early
societies each group, or primal
horde, would hold one male as
the leader.
 He got all the babes, which
made all of the other males
jealous so they‟d bump him off.

And from that...
• With the leader dead, the whole
structure of society would be
disrupted.
• No centre of society, as there
was before, so totems or idols
were created to take his place.
• Sacrifices and offerings could be
made to the totem to starve off
feelings of guilt and jealousy.
• Totems are phallic symbols, too.

Religion today
• Eventually, this evolved into
religion as we have today.
 The totem took on a divine role,
becoming „G/d the father‟ and the
gods of religion.
 Even today, Catholics still make a His Holiness
Benedict XVI
sacrifice in the Eucharist which celebrating the
they believe to be the actual body sacrament of the
Eucharist.
and blood (in substance, not
appearance) of Christ through the
process of transubstantiation .

We don‟t get our own way, ergo religion
• The second reason
for our supposed
creation of religion is
to help us get over
the fact that we can‟t
do everything we‟d
like to do because of
the laws of our land.

The problem
• By living in society we give up a few of our
rights in order to receive protection and
other benefits.
• The Oedipus complex is the desire to the
kill the father, but we know that our society
punishes murder. We give up our right to
murder our father (and anyone else) in
order to receive protection from murder by
the local law authorities. Well, that‟s the
idea anyway.

Religion helps us
• Religion doubles up as another of the
Ego‟s self-defence mechanisms,
sublimation.
• The libido‟s focus is channelled into other
activities, like distraction
• Religion gives us a reason to submit to
society, it give us the promise of a better
life after as a reward for our good
behaviour in this society.

Religion to help with nature
• We may have
domesticated cats and
dogs, but we can‟t tame
nature... we can‟t control
the weather and we can‟t
completely prevent death.
• Ultimately, we are
helpless in the hands of
Mother Earth and her
cruel ways.

Acts of G/d!
• An “act of G/d” is a legal term for events
outside of human control.
• Examples include sudden floods or other
natural disasters.
• No one can be held responsible since
they‟re not man-made.

Religion helps
• Religion personifies nature by making
G/d the force that controls nature. By
offering sacrifices and praying to G/d, we
are able to gain some control over the
elements.
• Religion and G/d become a father figure
by providing us protection from nature in
the same way a father would protect his
children.

“Oi, Freud... Ya mom!”
CRITICISMS

“Ya mom dot com”
• Did you know that Freud even tried to take
humour away from us? Apparently humour
is another of the Ego‟s defence
mechanisms!
• So, we can‟t even make fun of Freud for
some of his bizarre ideas because that‟s
just further evidence of our love for our
mother and hatred of our father!
• Here are a few other criticisms to
consider...

Inner psychological conflict
• What about „test-tube babies‟?
Their conception was in a lab and so their
earliest memory wouldn‟t be conception.
• What about single parent families?
There are a lot of cases where a mother is
raising a son without a father figure, yet
very few cases of sons doing things they
shouldn‟t be with their mums.
• What about gay children?
Are they after their mum, too?

Authority in society
• Not all early religions had totems.
In fact, Darwin merely speculated about
the existence of the primal horde and
there is no concrete evidence. It‟s actually
now been discredited by modern science.
• The theory of evolution.
At some point we were animals. There is
no evidence in the animal kingdom of a
father figure that is both respected and
hated. Funny how Freud overlooked that.

Fear of nature
• Freud tested on a small number of
people.
The bigger the test size, the more
accurate the results. Since Freud tested
on a relatively small number of people, his
findings might not be totally trustworthy.

Final thoughts
• Aristotle once said that “it is the mark of an
educated mind to be able to entertain a
thought without accepting it” and that‟s
definitely true for anyone studying Freud.
• While he may be the father of
psychoanalysis, there are very few people
who would actually accept his theories for
obvious reasons.

Final thoughts continued...
• The criticisms do quash
much of what he
theorises and, ultimately,
there are very few of us
that actually want to
accept that we love our
mums in the way Freud
suggests!
Say goodbye to Freud!