Freud’s Critique of Religion The Future of an Illusion is Freud’s sustained analysis of religion as psychological phenomenon. The thesis is direct: religious beliefs are illusions, wish fulfillments arising from the most profound human needs and fears. Religion does not describe objective reality but projects human desires and anxieties onto the cosmos. God is the idealized father writ large, heaven is the wish for immortality, divine justice is the projection of the human need for fairness onto an indifferent universe. Religion serves important psychological functions, but it does so through systematic distortion of reality. Freud distinguishes illusion from delusion. A...