The Psychology of Religion

In terms of the psychology of religion, many thinkers have commented about the origins of religious belief. Some of these support these religious beliefs, some don’t. However it is first appropriate to establish whether or not they are actually making a valid comment on the subject of religion or not.

Georg Hegel (1770–1831) was the initial scholar to step foot into this field. He redefined God by creating a character he often named ‘Spirit’. He attempted to make "God" sound theistic by giving God a mind. In some passages, this mind was made to resemble the transcendent mind of Christianity's theistic God, although some interpreters recognised that ‘Spirit's’ mind was actually nothing but the collective psyche of man. For this reason, and also because God had a physical aspect of which man was a part (We are made “in the image of God”), God/Spirit was essentially humanity. Inwood modifies theism to pantheism: Hegel was "a metaphysician" who "saw the world as a whole on the model of a mind."

The second scholar to attempt to engage in the psychology of religion was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). He was an atheist who picked up from Hegel’s ideas, and thus was committed to a materialist ‘Hegelian’ account of religion. Hence from is perspective, religion has evolved and ‘branched out’. In The Essence of Christianity, The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout man in all forms. God, "is the principle of man's salvation, of man's good dispositions and actions, consequently man's own good principle and nature". It appeals to man to give qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as God wou...

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... Jung on Religion, the primal horde theory is at the very least, shaky. Totemism turns out not to be quite. The primitive form of religion that Freud’s account requires it to be, and the suggested place of ritual cannibalism is also counter to contemporary understanding of early human groupings. Interestingly, Westphal presents giving up a degree of personal happiness for the greater societal good as a utilitarian action, nonetheless Freud demands that we all sacrifice religion (if it is false) and this becomes more and more the any challenging. McGrath makes a sharp point a by the time Freud had finished, however, psychoanalysis was no longer primarily a form of therapy, designed to liberate people from the hidden tyranny of repressed traumas. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, it had virtually become a global hypothesis, capable of explaining just about anything.