ABSTRACT

Freud maintained that religion was based on a lie of salvation. In The Future of an Illusion, he recounts how he used to tell fairy tales to his children and how his son would come up to him afterward asking if the story were true. When told it wasn’t, “he would turn away with a look of disdain.” Freud observes drily that “[w]e may expect that people will soon behave in the same way toward the fairy tales of religion.”1 He had hopes that the maxim ascribed to Tertullian, Credo quia absurdum, which is taken to mean religious doctrines supersede and are exempt from reason, would someday soon be debunked and human beings would realize they create their own gods.