ABSTRACT
The cult of the measurable fact, entirely appropriate to physical science and its material applications became a tyranny that mocked the value-creating feelings and intuitions out of which religion springs. Psychoanalysis too can tell a story of "advance" of this kind. It has shifted from being a drive theory, in which human motivation is above all powered by the need to discharge certain physiological tensions, towards being an object-relations theory in which we seek particular persons with whom to enact certain sorts of relationship. One of God's functions is to provide an appointment that does not disappoint, a love, generosity, and bestowal of significance so great that beside it all our other disappointments seem minor and bearable. The Roman Catholic Church, with its disastrous imposition of celibacy on its secular clergy, has obsessed itself with sex and authority in a way that can only be called pathological.
