Our Freud-marinated culture
Of all the prominent atheist writers, I’ve always believed Sigmund Freud to be one of the worst when it comes to arguing against God’s existence. His reasonings, to me, are like a BB bouncing off a tank.
In his work, The Future of an Illusion, Freud did his best to attack the claims of the Christian faith calling the Bible, “writings which themselves bear every mark of untrustworthiness. They are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications.”
Please. Even high school students who have had just one short class in Christian apologetics know better.
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Freud’s main thesis was that religious belief was illusory in nature. He wrote, “What is characteristic of illusions is they are derived from human wishes” and went on to say that religious doctrines, “are all illusions and insusceptible of proof” and that religious people are, “guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.”
Freud felt that the hopes offered by religion were, “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind" and said, “we disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.” He ultimately saw religious belief as a coping mechanism that assisted people in dealing with the harsh realities of life.
The funny thing is, that Freud never realized his wish-fulfillment sword was dual-edged. In other words, couldn’t it be true that an atheist like Freud has wishes and desires of his own? Maybe a wish that a deity such as the God of the Bible does not exist — one who will call him to account on a future day of judgment, which is a very harsh reality in the afterlife for some? Could he, himself, be “insusceptible of proof”?
As an example, Charles Darwin, one of Freud’s partners in crime, demonstrated just this when he wrote: “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother, and almost all my best friend, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”
All that said, while Freud may not have done any discernible damage to the idea of God’s existence via his atheist arguments, he has managed to undercut Christian morality and wreak havoc on our civilization through his sexualized psychological teachings.
Especially when it comes to kids.
Freud’s key to everything
If you’ve ever wondered who laid the foundation for some of the things we see in our culture today like drag queens reading stories to kindergarteners, the leftist push in education to teach sexually explicit material at the elementary school level, and Disney doing its best to sexually groom young children via its entertainment outreach, look at least partially to Freud. I doubt many on the left know it, but Freud owns their thinking on sex.
Let me push pause quickly here to say that when I refer to the “left” I do not mean those affiliated with the dwindling side of the democratic party who are still committed to America’s first principles. I’m referring to the left that was forged out of the godless French Revolution’s teachings, whose end goal was seeing, “the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
For them, Freud fits right in with their agenda. And that plan where sex and kids are concerned involves the introduction of one thing along with the simultaneous removal of something else.
In his Future of an Illusion, Freud asks in a grumbling fashion, “Is it not true that the two main points in the program for the education of children today are retardation of sexual development and premature religious influence?”
Read his question again and then meditate on what’s happened in our culture and educational systems over the past 50 or so years. Knowledge of God at an early age (heck, today, at any age)? Out. Explicit teachings on, and encouragement of, sexual practices of all kind? In.
In an insidious twist, Freud takes Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it,” and substitutes godless instruction for godly. His hopes are to have the young so hooked on the empty promises of sex outside of God’s limits that, as they grow older, they’ll naturally reject Christianity due to its moral demands.
This falls perfectly in line with what Aldous Huxley said long ago, “We objected to the [Christian] morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”
And where sexual freedom is the goal, you can bet that any public religious thought freedom that opposes it will take a bullet.
As do his supporters today, Freud hated the fact that children were being taught the truths of Christianity at a young age. Although he endorsed sexually charged instruction early on, when it came to religious teaching, he argued kids weren’t mentally or emotionally ready for that saying: “We do not wait for such a development; we introduce him to the doctrines of religion at an age when he is neither interested in them nor capable of grasping their import … Thus by the time the child's intellect awakens, the doctrines of religion have already become unassailable.”
And that, of course, just won’t do for what Freud wants to accomplish given his belief of how intertwined sex is with our “self.” So, Freud’s disciples today do everything in their power to block the young from God while introducing them to as much sexualized teaching as they possibly can.
The progression from Freud’s original teachings to the point where we’ve come today is summed up perfectly by Carl Trueman in his book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, when he says: “The self must be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized.”[1]
Sound familiar?
[1] Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020), pg. 221.
Robin Schumacher is an accomplished software executive and Christian apologist who has written many articles, authored and contributed to several Christian books, appeared on nationally syndicated radio programs, and presented at apologetic events. He holds a BS in Business, Master's in Christian apologetics and a Ph.D. in New Testament. His latest book is, A Confident Faith: Winning people to Christ with the apologetics of the Apostle Paul.
