ABSTRACT
Freud argued that religious belief is illusion. And he meant this in a precise sense: a belief is an illusion if it is derived from human wishes.18 Illusions are by their very nature misleading. For people
take their beliefs to be responsive to the way things are. So if a belief is held in place by wishes, people are misled about their orientation to the world. Beliefs can be true or false; the same holds for illusions. It is not out of the question for an illusion to be true. The essential problem for an illusion, then, is that we are mistaken about the basis of our commitment to it. We take it to be a belief based on responsiveness to the world; in fact, it is held in place by primordial wishes of which we are unconscious.
