Sigmund Freud’s Contempt for Liberal Theologies

In The Future of an Illusion, after dismissing dogmatic religion as illusion or delusion, Sigmund Freud wrote these words, which sound like a critique of liberal theologies:

“Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense; by calling “God” some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves, they pose as deists, as believers, before the world; they may even pride themselves on having attained a higher and purer idea of God, although their God is nothing but an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrine.”

Freud appears to have regarded liberal theologies as “a kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.”

Freud was not, of course, an advocate for traditional or conservative theological doctrines – he considered them illusions or delusions. It is just that he seems to have expressed greater contempt for liberal theologies and their advocates than he did for the older dogmatic theologies and their true, even if ignorant and deluded, believers. In his estimation, not only are liberal theologies illusions or delusions, they are intellectually insincere illusions – they are fraud.

Ironically, advocates of liberal theologies are more likely to consider Freud an ally than are advocates of traditional theologies.

In Freud’s vision, the least deluded, the most sincere, are the irreligious “who humbly acquiesce in the insignificant part man plays in the universe.”

As translated by Witter Bynner, Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao, “If you never assume importance, you never lose it.”