magic, science and religion for freud, the child's "terrifying impression of...

Magic, Science and Religion

For Freud, the child's "terrifying impression of helplessness" gave rise to the desire for an all-powerful, protective, and just father. Freud thought religious ideas are built out of this desire and were fundamentally disconnected from reality. …They are illusions, like delusions, and are derived from deeply-felt, unconscious urges.

[Religious ideas] are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in strength of those wishes.

The Future of an Illusion Sigmund Freud, 1927

For Freud, religion was a primitive attempt to deal with the frightening realities of the world and the impossibility of satisfying our fundamental desires. Religion, in his view, was a response to that fear and longing. Love for and fear of the father found symbolic expression, he thought, in the major religious traditions.


We are social animals who must relate to others, and we are spiritual animals who must infuse our lives with meaning in order to function.….To give meaning to our lives, we must acquire a sense of identity and rootedness. Religions both sacred and secular (including tribalism and nationalism), with objects of devotion, guiding myths and rituals, serve this function.

--- Psychoanalysis and Religion (1951) by Erik Fromm


“Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new FACTS as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have, over and above the altered expression, a natural constitution different at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must be required.”

William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902


“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.”

“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

-- Albert Einstein

Magic, Science and Religion“Marx’s famous saying that ‘religion is the

opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say, at any rate in that place, that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said that it is something the people create for themselves to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’ What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly.”

--George Orwell


E.B. Tyloranimism

R.R. Marrettanimatismmana

James G. Frazer The Golden Bough

Magic and science are similar…the practitioner is the active agent…. In religion, the practitioner is a supplicant.

Contagious; sympathetic (imitative)

“…organized belief in the supernatural.”--Haviland 2003:656


Magic and Science - agent is activeRainmaker (by N. Richard Nash, starring Kathyrn Hepburn and Burt

Lancaster…remade as 110 in the Shade with Woodie Harrelson)

Weather forecasters, Caddos, West Texas cloud seeding


Polytheism, Atheism, Monotheism

Pantheon (all gods….Jupiter, Mars, Venus, etc.)

Shaman, Priests

Curandero, el susto

Navaho singers


Revitalization Movements (Nativistic movements)

Five Stages:

Resolution

Revitalization efforts

Cultural Distortion

Stress Buildup

Normal


Rites of Passage Arnold van Gennep

Three Stages:

Separation

Transition

Incorporation


Revitalization Movements (Nativistic movements)

Examples:

Ghost Dance

Cargo Cults

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