Religious ideas are teachings and assertions about facts and conditions of external (or internal) reality which tell one something one has not discovered for oneself and which lay claim to one’s belief…

[It is maintained] that religious doctrines are outside the jurisdiction of reason – are above reason. Their truth must be felt inwardly, and they need not be comprehended…

We must ask where the inner force of those doctrines lies and to what it is that they owe their efficacy, independent as it is of recognition by reason…

It will be found out if we turn out attention to the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end-results of thinking: they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. [On Illusions: An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. For instance, a middle-class girl may have the illusion that a prince will come and marry her. That is possible; and a few such cases have occurred. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.] [Religious ideas] are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection – for protection through love – which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place… It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex – conflicts which it has never wholly overcome – are removed from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.

   ^{1O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.   2Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.   3When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;   4What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?   5For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.   6Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:   7All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;   8The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.   9O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!}

The BTK killer in Wichita, Kansas, was apprehended last week, ending the decades long terror of one of the country’s most prolific serial murderers. I remember the attention he was given when we lived in the Southwest, as he had eluded authorities and taunted the city. He was captured in part because his sister living in Michigan gave police DNA samples, and the letters he wrote to TV stations and the Wichita press had been traced to a computer in his church. It seems he was such a constant and reassuring presence in his church that he was enthusiastically elected president of the congregation. The pastor and the congregants are predictably stunned at the revelation of who their friend and neighbor really is, and numbed by the apparent violence and turmoil inside of the man who sat next to them in the church’s pews. The inside of a human being is an unfathomable mystery, and the acts of which we are capable are both terrifying and uplifting.

Our Lenten sermon series has been about thinkers who threaten modern religion, and with this morning’s contribution we turn a corner. To understand our modern religious predicament this sermon may be the most important yet. Our first two thinkers in our series, Thomas Jefferson and Robert Ingersoll, each proffered propositions that undermined classical religion in the West. Jefferson’s declaration of equality having been endowed by “the Creator” came to crush traditional religion’s declaration that believers were favored by God and unbelievers punished. And Ingersoll’s popularizing of previous condemnations of religion’s reliance on fear, terror, and punishment to control the mind and stifle its reason and critical thinking, destroyed the underpinnings of religion in the West sustained for millennia.

With these ideas eroding classical religion’s foundations, Charles Darwin deflated its conception of the natural world and the universe. Classical religion announced the presence of a god whose main activity was the creation of all there is. But, Darwin’s elucidation of evolution accounted better for the changes observed in the natural world and, particularly, the gradual emergence of life from its smallest incarnation through its most complex: human being. Instead of human being having been created by a Father God as a cog in a Divine plan of salvation – through the atoning sacrifice of the Father’s only Son, which made up for humanity’s essential depravity – Darwin’s pronouncement located human origins within the natural cycles of evolving creation. Human being came out of the natural world in which it is found, a natural world that evidences increased mutuality and interconnection over time. Classical Western religion’s view of the universe out there collapsed under the weight of scientific observation of the created world. And today, that collapse will be complete as we consider not the outside world of the universe, but the inside world of the human psyche. I would declare that after Sigmund Freud no one can think about religion in the classical way ever again!

He was called by one of his biographers a “pugnacious atheist.” (Peter Gay) He was born in 1856, died in 1939, studied first law, then medicine and finally landed in the emerging discipline of psychology. He developed psychoanalysis as an approach to understanding human being and considered dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” At first Sigmund Freud thought neurosis in human beings was the result of childhood trauma, but later abandoned that when he recognized what others denied: that even the youngest child has a sexual dimension of self. He then had his key to understanding the depths of human neuroses. There is an anxiety within us whose origin is sexual, in unresolved sexual issues arising in the child regarding the father. It’s the source of deep-seated guilt.

Although he had many devotees, he broke with one of his most famous, Carl Jung, when Freud disagreed with Jung over culture and society, which Freud thought were rooted in sexual prohibitions. Freud developed a concept of the mind whereby it possessed a tri-part structure: the Id, where were harbored the deepest and most ancient and dark urges and desires and conflicts and forces of human nature; the Superego, which housed the conscience, those internalized rules that kept the Id at bay and the individual as a non-destructive part of a group and society; and the Ego, the waking consciousness of an individual, which evidences both desires of the Id which bubble up into thoughts and acts as if coming from nowhere, like slips of the tongue or obsessive behavior; and elements of the Superego, which the Ego projects up onto the world outside and then responds as if those elements have an existence independent of the self who projects them.

To classical Western religion there is something wrong with human being as it has been created. Human being was created with a free will that can be exercised as the BTK killer did, to terrorize creation. This free will can even be exercised for what seems a good that over the long haul proves to be disastrous, as the first atomic scientists realized when they found out their discoveries of the properties of the atom would lead to massive human destruction. In classical Western religion this “something wrong” is called sin, and its internal yield is guilt. It is part of God’s plan of salvation. That the whole visible universe – as so beautifully described by the Psalmist – was created and human being arose, in order that all of creation and the universe would be redeemed according to a plan. God fulfilled this plan by countering man’s sinful nature with the saving event of sacrificing His Son, which atoned for that sin. To classical Western religion the BTK killer need confess his sin, receive the forgiveness of God the Father, and live inside this divine plan of salvation. The problem, of course, is that he has done that already, is inside the church, and is even its president and chief exemplar!

Maybe there is something wrong with how we have conceived of a divine plan, because it really hasn’t accounted for inner human turmoil from the inside.

But the work of Sigmund Freud, which upset the apple cart of classical Western religion, had to do with the origin of these beliefs about how the outside universe is constructed and ordered, and how doctrines of the Church, which it maintained were true, composed themselves into a metaphysical order, earthly and divine. Freud considered all of this a projection that helped the individual deal with an internal, psychological ambivalence first stirred by the child’s helplessness. A child fears the power of parents yet trusts them for protection. The helplessness of a child in terms of its narrow world does not abate in the adult whose helplessness is in relation to larger, ultimate things. The internal turmoil of this ambivalence seeks an outlet. “Men invent gods,” wrote Peter Gay describing Freud’s work, “or passively accept the gods their culture imposes on them, precisely because they have grown up with such a god in their house.” (p531)

Freud studied neurotic obsession and behavior, and discovered a curious analogy in religious belief and practice. Both neuroses and religion, outward manifestations both, are found to be projections of unresolved internal anxiety and guilt. The self possesses unresolved ambivalence suppressed over time as the yield of a child trusting and fearing the father. The ensuing suppressed anxiety and guilt manifest outwardly in neurotic obsessions or, when projected upon the cosmos, in religious ritual.

We have a family friend who is obsessive-compulsive. At times it manifests itself so strongly that when driving to the store he can repeat portions of the drive over and over again until he is eased into completing the journey. It can express itself in wildly impulsive acts, like the time he hiked the desert of Death Valley California with little preparation or provisions, and eventually had to be rescued. To Freud his neurotic behavior is the outward expression of an internal, unresolved condition, an anxiety and guilt born of the ambivalence between child and father. Our friend projects this unresolved condition outward and it becomes the ritual repetition when he drives and the impulsive wish fulfillment of hiking in the desert with little prospect of success.

To Freud our obsessive-compulsive friend’s behaviors and their origins are analogous to another friend of ours who is highly religious, as classical religion would boast. Both men “exhibit pangs of self-reproach whose severity is appeased” (Lecture by Stacia Brown, Original Patricide, Original Violation: Revisiting Freud's theory of religion as an obsessional neurosis) by repeated ceremony and ritual. One goes to church for worship as many as four or five times a week to appease his sense of his own sin, while the other repeatedly engages in a car driving ritual until he arrives at his destination. One does these repeated rituals in a church contained in isolation from the rest of his life, while the other does it in a car, contained in isolation from the rest of his life. If one declared that God called him to abandon his family here to go to Central America as a missionary, it would surprise me no more or less than the other hiking the desert in Death Valley on an impulse. To Freud these two friends of ours exhibit analogous behavior because the origin of these behaviors is the same: There is deep within human being, inside of the Id but something that cannot be contained there, an anxiety, a guilt, unresolved because its origin is in the earliest portion of an individual’s life and the oldest chapters of human evolution. But it involves the basic condition of man: helplessness and fear, and the experience of the father’s ambivalent power. Yet notice that driving a loop repeatedly before completing an errand is termed abnormal behavior to be rid of. While going to church numerous times during the week earns reward. Freud would not be fooled.

Classical Western religion has drawn the landscape of the earth and the heavens, the outline of God’s grandest design with man placed upon that landscape to make his way toward an afterlife reward. Freud drew a map of our interior landscape, saw unresolved turmoil on the plains where the Id, Ego, and Superego roam, and pronounced religion as an outward projection of this inner turmoil designed to resolve it but actually furthering a suppression in obsessional acts society rewards! You can see why religion cannot be the same after Freud, that it must turn a corner. Considering human being from the inside, any and every belief, ritual, or doctrine asserted by religion could be nothing more than an internal projection. Religious practices do not resolve any internal guilt or the destructive urges of the Id, but further suppresses them. Rites and rituals designed to shape one towards the goodness of God imposes the illusion of a future resolution of an internal unresolvable! After Freud religion cannot ever be understood the same!

An individual eats a communion wafer and one wonders what internal turmoil leads to celebrating the destruction of the father by digesting the son! Moses descends from Mt. Sinai with the Ten Commandments and one wonders whether the author of the story, and those that celebrate it, aren’t really replaying an old internal tape of being taken to the woodshed and returning having learned one’s lesson! An individual goes to church three times on Sunday, does no work on the Sabbath, declares it God’s rules, and one wonders what internal turmoil leads to this obsessive behavior the church indulges and rewards! After Freud religion cannot ever be the same!

After Freud there is no way religious to distinguish between what is out there and exists, and what is inside, projected out, and then declared to exist. After Freud religion cannot begin with declarations of that map the universe. They could simply be projections insisted upon as really the way the universe is ordered. Psalm 8 cannot be read the same, and neither can any other parts of any Scripture. The world out there is real. It exists. But religious interpretations by anyone – Pope, preacher, or President - made about the meaning and purpose and ultimate dimensions of existence, human nature, and the human condition, include to a greater or lesser extent projections of inner and unresolved turmoil. It can’t be otherwise. Those who neglect this can easily mistake their neurotic obsessions for God’s will and plan!

With Freud classical Western religion is dead. But the religious impulse within human nature is not. Human beings will read existence religiously, whether partly or completely projection. And the world outside the self is real. So in understanding what pronouncements we human beings make, must always be taken with the prospect of our projecting the inner upon the outer.

So, there is no way around it. Religion now cannot be about answers God provides human beings, to be accepted and enacted and rewarded. Religion cannot ever again be about answers at all, because we know now any answer tells us as much about the inner turmoil of the declarer as anything else. “Answers” may tell us nothing about the ultimate order “out there.” So, the religious impulse is human, and its products are human and subject to critique, testing, and change. Reason must now be part of the religious task. Investigations into Nature must be the path to understanding the world we find ourselves in. The equality of human being must now supplant religious proclamations that certain individuals’ pronouncements are naturally due more credence than others. And religion itself must be now about a journey of uncertain duration, length, and destination. It can no longer be about certainty.

Religion now must be about the matrix of meaning individuals and communities create and pronounce and live inside of and through. This matrix, declares our faith tradition as Unitarian Universalists, can be summed up this way. It is a part projection and part revelation, not a supernatural one, but the revealing borne through the ages by various individuals confronting various issues in their internal and external lives: There abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed through a love for all souls.

AMEN.