Religion as Lie: Gervais (4)

The supposition at the heart of Ricky Gervais' (2009) The Invention of Lying is that religion is so closely linked to story-telling and historical embellishment that it is understood as lying.

Here, the distinctions made by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche in their critiques of religion (see here, here and here for "Atheism for Lent" Course material) between appearance and reality, or manifest and latent meanings, becomes that between lies and the truth. But in the world within The Invention of Lying there are no such terms; there are simply “things that are” (the truth) and “things that aren’t” (lies), just “the way things are” and Mark’s new-found ability to say “something that wasn’t.” This language of being or existence denotes Gervais’ scepticism: ‘God doesn’t exist… Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true' (Gervais, "Why I'm an Atheist"). 

But Gervais’ suspicion is also apparent in the ways that Mark’s theological inventions function as psychological wish-fulfilments (Freud's critique of religion), oppressive ideologies (Marx's critique of religion), and vengeful morality (Nietzsche's critique of religion).

Framed in the sceptical language of falsehood and lies, is it possible to more clearly see the functions that critics suspect religion plays?

If religion existed in a world where we (like Mark) knew it to be deceitful, which of our religious beliefs and practices could we more readily identify as harmful?

In other words, if religion is a lie...

...what happens to my faith?

Atheism for Lent: Freud

Just got back from first session of "Atheism for Lent" in which we looked at Freud's critique of religion. I was bold over by the attendance (Journey's pastor, Chris, found it somewhat telling that there were 9 that morning for the morning worship service at church and 18 in the evening for atheism!)

I started off by asking (prompted by Chris!) why each person was interested in the course, which evoked some really good responses to do with neo-atheism, doubt, disbelief, defensiveness, openness, and self-examination. Whilst Journey is very broadly a liberal and leftist congregation (it's an eco-congregation that is part of the pro-LGBT MCC association of churches), there remained some diversity within the group theologically, with many really embracing the challenge to challenge themselves and each other.

Our discussion of Freud began by remarking how "miserable" he appears, a symptom (!) of his emphasis on external (self/nature/culture) and internal (self/id/super-ego) conflict and essentialisation of "common unhappiness." Merold Westphal's distinction between suspicion and scepticism (see this post here) was really helpful in moving everyone from discussing Freud's atheism and the critiques of his theory of the psyche, of dreams and of religion towards reflecting upon what his critique might mean for the different (broadly Christian but also interested in Buddhism, paganism and humanism) faith of the people in the room.

One really great comment was that, in congregations like Journey, it can be easy to read critiques and just completely agree (as a badge of being liberal) without really challenging ourselves... to identify fundamentalism, for example, as the Christianity that Freud is critiquing and thereby to miss the opportunity to use Freud to purge our own faith of its more instrumental (see this post) aspects. We can say, "oh, our God is better than the God of the Christianity Freud is exposing, because we sometimes refer to God as a Goddess or as a tree or rock or river."

So it was great to see the group trying to relate Freud's critique of religion to their own faith, and not just to the easier target of "other people's faiths."

To read the material I prepared (using Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith: Religious Uses of Modern Atheism) see the following posts:

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (1)

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (2)

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (3)

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (4)

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (5)

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (6)

And then join us tomorrow for the start of Religion as Ideology: Marx!

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (6)

Freud writes that, ‘filial rebelliousness also emerges, in the later products of religion, often in the strangest of disguises and transformations’ (Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.13, p.145).



Do we, in our own contemporary contexts, as well as in these tribal societies, attempt to “bargain” with a god we have created in our own image, “purchasing” ‘the right to guilt-free rebellion’ (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.114)?



Are our religious beliefs and practices re-enactments of our hostility towards and our desire to control or cheat God?



Does belief in Christ’s atonement for our sins reveal a wish to displace blame and disown responsibility? Does this belief allow us to “buy” our continued revolt?



Does the practice of Eucharist both renounce and re-enact the torture and execution of the father? Does this ceremonial allow us to symbolically renounce our guilt, yet symbolically re-enact our triumph, over breaching the prohibition “thou shalt not kill”?



Do we insolently refuse to ethically renounce “some freedom” by substituting for this the ritual renunciation of “some thing”? Does our participation in religious beliefs and practices function as a bribe for rebellion?



To the extent that it does function in this way, perhaps our religious beliefs and practices are indeed formed from our needs, wishes and wants. From our fears and anxieties. Our ambitions, aspirations or pride. Our anger or envy. Our cynicism or mistrust. Our resentment, bitterness or spite.



But if religious beliefs are wish-fulfilments and religious practices are strategies to manage guilt and mutiny...



...what happens to my faith?

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (5)

Freud further highlights the connection between neurotic ceremonials and religious practices in his study of the totemic cultures of tribal societies, Totem and Taboo.

He suggests that cultural taboos against touching or harming the totem (the tribe’s sacred animal) are so strong since they correspond to a repressed desire to do precisely what is prohibited.

This ambiguity results because, for Freud, the totem represents the father:

On the one hand, the totemic taboos against killing the totem and having sexual relations with women of the same totem (tribe) are designed to defend against the Oedipal guilt of wanting to kill the father and sleep with the mother.

On the other hand, however,

[t]otemic religion not only comprised expressions of remorse and attempts at atonement [in the form of ethical obedience], it also served as a remembrance of the triumph over the father. Satisfaction over that triumph led to the institution of the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held. Thus it became a duty to repeat the crime of parricide again and again in the sacrifice of the totem animal (Freud, The Complete
Psychological Works, vol.13, p.145).

Together, these religious ceremonials (the taboo against killing the totem and the festival at which the totem is killed and eaten) form the symbolic renunciation and symbolic re-enactment of aggression, hostility and rebellion directed towards powerful figures, such as parents – and ‘at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father’ (vol.13, pp.147-148).

Thus, for Freud, all religious ceremonials share with neurotic ceremonials this defensive character, since a symbolic re-enactment of wish-fulfilment (eating the totem) replaces such an action in reality, and therefore allows us to "cancel out" our guilt. The purpose of participating in religious rites is to circumvent the punishment that would be meted out were the taboo(s) in question to actually be breached. The renunciation involved – of various kinds, depending on the ritual; for example, sacrifice of some possession, or atonement through abstention from certain activities and behaviours for a period of time – replaces the renunciation that would be involved in the punishment for any violation of the prohibition.

But whilst renunciation ostensibly expresses remorse, it actually repeats the offence, since through the self-imposed substitution of one renunciation (of “some thing” in ritual sacrifice) for another (of “some freedom” in ethical abstention) it is possible to both “cancel” our guilt and renew the rebellion by offering sacrifices as a bribe in exchange for continued disobedience and defiant freedom.

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (4)

For Freud, religious practices are akin to neurotic symptoms. He writes,

I am certainly not the first person to have been struck by the resemblance between what are called obsessive actions in suffers from nervous affections and the observances by means of which believers give expression to their piety. The term “ceremonial,” which has been applied to some of these obsessive actions, is evidence of this. The resemblance, however, seems to me to be more than a superficial one, so that an insight into the origin of neurotic ceremonial may embolden us to draw inferences by analogy about the psychological processes of religious life (Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.9, p.117).

While neurotic ceremonials are private and individual in nature and sexual in origin, and religious ceremonials are public and communal and related to pride, they share an ‘underlying renunciation of the activation of instincts that are constitutionally present’ (vol.9, pp.126-127).

They share the dual function, therefore, of symbolic re-enactment and symbolic repudiation of forbidden desires (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.98). The intolerable wish seeking fulfilment is displaced, replaced by more bearable notions and the resulting symptoms of obsessive symbolic actions. Think, for example, of Lady Macbeth, whose concerns about moral purity (wish-fulfilment) become displaced by the idea of physical cleanliness (displaced wish-fulfilment) and who consequently experiences an abnormal compulsion to wash her hands (symptom).

Neurotic and religious ceremonials are richly meaningful, but those who perform such an action do so ‘without understanding its meaning – or at any rate its chief meaning’ (vol.9, p.22). This means that the conscious reasons we give for what we do are rationalisations of what we are doing, but not the real meanings of our actions.

According to Freud, ceremonials are ‘penitential measures,’ expressing repentance on the one hand and self-imposed punishment on the other. Self-reproach is therefore key to ceremonials of both kinds, since they function as a defence not only against our guilt in relation to the original desire or act, but also against the anxiety associated with our on-going temptation to fulfil the desire or to repeat the act.

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (3)

As wish-fulfilments, religious beliefs are ‘illusions,’ a technical term which has a specific meaning for Freud: ‘we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality’ (Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.21, p.31). Therefore, the ‘psychological nature’ of religious beliefs as illusory (vol.21, p.33) does not involve ‘the truth of the foundation of religious ideas but their function in balancing the renunciations and satisfactions through which man tries to make his life tolerable’ (Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp.234-235).

Religious beliefs function as illusions when

[w]e represent God to ourselves, not in accordance with the evidence available to us but in accordance with our wishes; in other words, we create God in our image, or at least in the image of our desires. Now we have three things to be ashamed of: (1) the desires that govern this operation, (2) our willingness to subordinate truth to happiness, and (3) our [hubris] in making ourselves the creator and God the creature. If we are not utterly shameless, we will do our best to distract attention, especially our own, from what is going on (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.62).

For example, when God is ‘only seemingly stern,’ or when we are God’s ‘only beloved child, his Chosen People’ (vol.21, pp.19-20), ‘I need fear no punishment and can count on rewards, both quite independently of what I deserve’ – and quite independently of the biblical evidence which suggests that the chosen people have a special responsibility rather than enjoying a special exemption (Suspicion and Faith, p.63-64).

Further, as David Hume notes of these ‘comfortable views’ of God, ‘[w]hat so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?’ (The Natural History of Religion, p.76). A religion whose God is constructed in believers’ own image serves to legitimate “our” way of structuring the social world and ‘buttress’ the persecution of anything “other,” by authorising ‘the social status quo’ or by its simple compatibility with it (Suspicion and Faith, p.131).

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (2)

Part of Freud’s hostility towards religion stems from its tendency to impose ‘on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering’ (Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.21, p.84), but his critique of religion consists of both scepticism and suspicion. As ‘foreign to reality,’ religion is an error, whilst as ‘so patently infantile,’ religion is an illusion (Freud, vol.21, p.74).

Merold Westphal’s distinction between scepticism and suspicion makes the difference between these two critiques clearer. While scepticism is a function of an ‘evidential atheism’ – an atheism which requires of theism evidential proof of its claims – suspicion is a “hermeneutic,” a method or principle of interpretation.

Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, who have been called the “masters of suspicion,” practice a hermeneutic of suspicion, which, according to Westphal, is a way of interpreting beliefs and practices in an attempt to ‘expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motives from ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not to notice how and how much our behaviour and our beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown’ (Suspicion and Faith, p.13).

Suspicion is cast not upon the “truth” of religious beliefs themselves, but upon the believers’ motives and the function(s) of their beliefs. ‘Skepticism is directed towards the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is directed towards the evasiveness of consciousness. Skepticism seeks to overcome the opacity of facts, while suspicion seeks to uncover the duplicity of persons’ (Suspicion and Faith, p.13).

Freud’s suspicion links religion to his theory of dreams. It is easy to see that daydreams, as ‘scenes and events in which the subject’s egoistic needs of ambition and power or his erotic wishes find satisfaction,’ are direct fulfilments of wishes, desires and needs (Freud, vol.15, p.98). Freud argues that dreams in our sleeping state also function in this way, but often only indirectly, since the wishes, desires and needs they fulfil are shameful to our waking consciousness and consequently repressed. The ensuing censorship and distortion of these desires mean that, in analysis, it is necessary to distinguish between dreams’ manifest and latent content(s). Dreams are, therefore, the disguised fulfilment of a suppressed wish.

Freud writes that,

there are some dreams which are undisguised fulfilments of wishes. But in cases where the wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defense against the wish; and owing to this defense the wish was unable to express itself except in distorted shape (Freud, vol.4, pp.141-142).

From this, Freud generalises from dreams to all thoughts of the human mind, including religious thoughts.

…religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilisation: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this a second motive was added – the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt… We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact [noteworthy, rather than surprising] that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be (Freud, vol.21, pp.21 and 33).

Because, as Francis Bacon notes, ‘what a man had rather were true he more readily believes’ and ‘whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion’ (Novum Organum, XLIX, LVIII), psycho-analysis is therefore ‘justly suspicious’ of religious belief (Freud, vol.5, p.517).

For Freud, then, religious beliefs are also the disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes, ‘fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind’ (Freud, vol.21, p.30).

Religion as Wish-Fulfilment: Freud (1)

Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, p.292:

The permanence of conflict is Freud’s leading theme, and part of his hostility to religion stems from an awareness that religion somewhere assumes a fixed point… at which conflict is resolved. In contrast, Freud maintains an intractable dualism; self and world remain antagonists, and every form of reconciliation must fail.

Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.21, p.74:

[Religion is a] system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to [“the common man”] the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.

For Freud, the human predicament is bleak. The world that is antagonistic to the self is both natural and cultural. Against the disasters, decay and death in the natural world, human culture is a consoling force, since ‘[e]very human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death’ (Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy, p.52). But this comfort is also a burden to the self, as culture demands the renunciation of sexual desires and aggressive instincts. This means that ‘[c]ivilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security’ (Freud, vol.21, p.115). Freud’s worldview is therefore tragic, despairing of the self’s happiness in the face of the dual external threats of nature and culture, which mirror the dual internal threats of the id and the superego, respectively.

For Freud, the self (the ego, the “I” that we think of as our selves, as “me”) serves ‘three tyrannical masters…: the external world, the super-ego and the id.’ The ego is

driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, [and] repulsed by [external] reality… If the ego is obliged to admit its weakness, it breaks out in anxiety – realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id (Freud, vol.22, pp.77-78)

The id (nature as desires, instincts, drives, or passions) and the ego are ‘like a weak rider on powerful horse’ (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.36). Whilst the rider (the ego) guides the power of the horse (the id), most of the time ‘a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id’s will into action as if it were his own’ (Freud, vol.19, p.25).

The super-ego (culture as conscience, social constraints) also asserts power over the ego, confining it not with the voice of reason or of God, but with the voice of culture, which places the restrictions and requirements of social norms on the ego with such cruel violence – Freud refers to the super-ego as merciless and sadistic – that the ego experiences intense guilt and shame.

Amidst these pressures of nature, culture, id and super-ego, it is little wonder, then, that Freud writes that ‘[o]ne feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be “happy” is not included in the plan of “Creation”’ (Freud, vol.21, p.76). Despite the impossibility of ever fulfilling what Freud calls the “pleasure principle,” there is a ‘reduced sense’ in which happiness is possible and it is the task of the ego to attempt to acquire it (Freud, vol.21, p.83). But this happiness is the ability to be nothing more than ‘better armed’ against the general human predicament of ‘common unhappiness’ (Freud, vol.2, p.351).