Is God A Crutch?

Freud once said:

“Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires”

It's a projection of our psychological ideals or ways we invented to soothe our phobias. And isn't it true that people do derive comfort, peace and assurance from religions... even false ones?!

Even the Bible warned us against false prophets to teach things that will 'tickle the ear' of the status quo. So Freud's analysis is a secular critique of idolatry, the sin of making gods in the image of man.

But as a critique of the Christian faith, C. S. Lewis pointed out the genetic fallacy inherent in it: (Find out MORE)

"Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is 'wishful thinking.' You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition.

Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself....If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at arithmetic...but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely mathematical grounds....In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong."

Just because you figure out I may have a psychological motive to rob a bank doesn't mean that I, in fact, had robbed one!

Perhaps, we are all moral 'invalids' who need a crutch. The question then should be, "Could the crutch you rely on HOLD you?"

Bertrand Russell wrote, “The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain - a curious wild pain - a searching for something beyond what the world contains."

Why such painful longing for something or Someone beyond this world if it is impossible to be fulfilled in another world?

Perhaps as Augustine saw it much earlier, “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”