Religion today is a topic of many controversial arguments. It being one of the main basis of our development as a civilization, it is hard for it to still keep its place in a world as developed as ours, as the advanced and modern ideas of today start to contradict with the ideas of religion. Religion seems to have lost the impact and importance in people's lives in today's world where science is the direction where people look for answers to their questions. This is where a lot of skeptics try to discredit religion as something false and made up since there is no proof to back its teachings up, and in a civilization where proof is the only way people will start to believe. But this scepticims is not something new, it has been around for a long time, and it has been discussed by many psychologists, and philosophers, one of whom is Sigmund Freud. .
In "Future of an Illusion," Sigmund Freud takes on religion and presents it as an illusion, and as a human obsessional neurosis. Freud, an aggressive atheist, argues that religion is an idea that we humans have developed as a way of dealing with the powers of nature that can harm us greatly. Religion in his mind also is nothing more than our way of dealing with the feelings of helplessness, which carry on from childhood into adulthood. He finds the human race looking up to God as a fatherly figure whom we are terrified off, and whom we look up for protection at the same time. .
Freud's book starts out with some background of human civilization. He focuses his introduction with the characteristics of a human civilization, or the way culture and civilization influences our life and our views of what is important in life. He explains our focus on gaining the knowledge and capacity in order to control the forces of nature and take from it the wealth to satisfy their needs. On the other hand, he also mentions our focus of adjusting relations of men to one another, and especially the distribution of the available health.