"We all grow up in a land of giants when we are very small... within us, surely, is some part of our childhood that hasn't disappeared and hasn't grown up. ...In your formative years, you learn from direct experience, absolutely incontrovertible, that there are much larger, much wiser, and much more powerful creatures in the universe than you. And your strongest emotional bonds are to them. ...and you must propitiate them. ...Isn't it... likely that there remains a part of us that is still in the practice of this...? Could that have something to do with prayer specifically and with religious beliefs in general? Well, this is in fact the scandalous view of Sigmund Freud in Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion and other famous books of the first few decades of the twentieth century."
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Academics from AustriaPsychiatrists from AustriaPhysicians from AustriaPsychoanalystsNon-fiction authors from Austria
Original Language: English
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Sources
Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud
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