Costello got most of it wrong. Western law has no historical connection with the Ten Commandments and not much with Christianity; it is largely a descendant of Roman law. The assertion that the Judeo-Christian tradition has been tolerant would not stand up in Sunday school, though the ambiguating prefix ‘Western’ makes the claim more plausible. But Costello may be right about the revival of religion. At the edges, sects, cults and the occult are doing well. It is reported that Mormonism and Scientology have the highest recruitment rates of any religion. Services in astrology, supernatural therapies and dodgy alternative medicines are in great demand. Buffy the vampire slayer and Sabrina the teenage witch have vanquished science fiction from our screens. Satan appears to be everywhere. There is much talk of Evil, with metaphysical overtones, in high places. The Vatican must have noticed all this because, for the first time in 400 years, it revised its protocols on exorcism and introduced courses on it for priests.

The news also looks good for the mainstream religions. Although surveying religious belief is especially problematic, statistics suggest that traditional faith, even if more equivocal and fragmented than it used to be, still maintains support: in the US, eighty-five per cent of people claim to believe in God; in Nigeria, ninety-eight per cent; in Indonesia, at least ninety per cent; in Ireland, eighty-seven per cent. Taking into account reported revivals of Orthodoxy in Russia and Eastern Europe, religious stirring in nominally atheistic places such as China, religion’s blooming in Africa, and similar developments in the Muslim and Hindu worlds, it does appear that there is still much hankering for religion. People who take their religion seriously have become more clamorous and influential in world affairs than they have been for centuries; this is especially true, of course, in the US, where white Evangelical Christians are having a conspicuous social and political impact. Of course, as ever, the devout still complain about a falling-off from religion – and those who have fallen off, or never got on, still think that there is too much of it.

Many thinkers had believed that the main religions of the West – those situated in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions – had been ringbarked sometime around the Enlightenment and would gradually wither. That hasn’t happened; and for people of a humanist or, at least, anti-religious cast, religion’s persistence is worrying. As regards some fundamentalist religions, or religious extremisms, and some macabre cults, there is general agreement that they are a menace to civil society. But the agreement is usually coupled with the view that they are transient perversions for which the remedy is reassertion of the wholesome traditional mainstream ways. In my opinion, this view is mistaken. The fundamentalisms are branches of a noxious tree. I largely agree with Bertrand Russell, who agreed with Lucretius, that (nearly) all religion is a disease born of fear and a source of untold misery for the human race.

There has been much too little criticism of religion. This is understandable: until the recent past, where the pious have held sway, atheists, heretics and critics were cowed or killed. The persecution extended well into the nineteenth century; Russell was deprived of an academic post by religionists as recently as 1940. But the main reason for the critical sloth in more recent times is that tolerance is a creature of secular humanism, and in its spirit the majority of critics manqué have simply declined to fire. The failure to combat religious belief, the social penetration of religious institutions, and the ever-greening of wishful fantasy in the human breast have ensconced religion in a kind of default position in many cultures, as if it were intellectually respectable, rather than meet for exposure as an enfeeblement of thought.

Russell’s reproaches were similar to those of Nietzsche and Freud, the most penetrating thinkers to turn on religion. All three had the monotheistic traditions mostly in mind (as I shall have here), and between them they charged roughly as follows: religion springs from fear, conceit and cruelty; it is responsible for a terrible record of moral obstruction and slaughter; it is a delusional way of confronting weakness and helplessness; it bends thought to its purposes, undermines reason, inhibits curiosity and imagination, nourishes hubris secretly and forges pernicious group identities; given the opportunity, it persecutes difference and threatens the rule of law. All of this I believe; but it is a weighty indictment, and my attempt here to flesh it out psychologically will necessarily be selective.

I am sure that many good people would not agree with me. Some people are drawn to religion because they believe that it is good, and they may be puzzled or offended by the contention that religion is a creature of darkness. For many, religion provides hope, consolation and inspiration to love and generosity. For some, it may seem the most precious thing of all; the ‘voice of the deepest human experience’, Matthew Arnold said. I do not wish to deny that good can come from religion – as truth can come from error – or that there are good, immensely kind people associated with it. I believe that such people probably would be good, and perhaps even be better, without religion – but that is not a matter I can discuss here.

The traditions I’m concerned with are ambitious structures of ideas, and practices and institutions shaped by those ideas. They assemble a variety of superficially unconnected phenomena unified only by the posit of a transcendent, creative, omnipotent, personal and solicitous God. They provide cosmogonies and metaphysical frameworks for understanding humankind’s place and purpose in the cosmos; they provide a transcendent or supernatural foundation for morality and law; they accommodate the powerful dependent and wishful dispositions of humankind, the need for worship, prayer and hope; and they provide a sense of group belonging, self-esteem and security in this life and reassurance about the next.

I referred deliberately to the notion of God as a ‘posit’ to draw attention to the religious conception of a transcendent, personal (person-like) Being. I think that this conception, but not including the detailed theological elaborations of it – the ‘folk-metaphysics’ of religion, one might say – is critical to understanding religion. To be sure, it is a kind of illusion; but I will come to that.

Now, some philosophers and theologians would insist that in dallying with the metaphysics even so far I have already missed the main point about religion. Some distinguish between a God of philosophy and a God of religion, and deny that the metaphysics or theology of the former – in any case, as ‘metaphysics’ is usually understood – is relevant to the God of religion, and therefore of religion, as these are properly understood. There is a variety of related views here. It is said that religion is really about morality, or practical commitment to a way of life, or certain kinds of attitudes to the world. Some thinkers deny that religious language traditionally interpreted as referential – in the sense, for example, in which I refer to my cat Jeoffry – is really so. Thus, Immanuel Kant in his Opus Postumum wrote that ‘God is not a Being outside of me, but merely a thought within me. God is the practical reason giving laws to itself.’ And ‘the proposition “There is a God” means no more than: “There is in human reason, determining itself according to morality, a supreme principle which …”’ The Cambridge philosopher R.B. Braithwaite suggested that religious utterances that appear superficially to be referential are really about commitments to ways of life. The assertion by a Christian of ‘I believe in God’ is really a way of declaring that one intends to follow the agapeistic life exemplified by Jesus Christ. Some followers of Wittgenstein have made similar claims. Some postmodernists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, distinguish between the metaphysical God of the main tradition and an understanding of a ‘divine’ God who is totally ‘Other’, somehow beyond Being. The attempt in each of these approaches is to subvert the traditional conception of a transcendent, personal God and to rescue religion by attaching it to the new, or renewed, non-metaphysical conceptions of the divine.

These attempts, if they are attempts to understand what is essential to the religion that the vast majority of people have professed, are in the wrong ballpark. A philosopher is certainly free to propose a new conception of religion or understanding of God, or to provide a radical reinterpretation of traditional understanding. And there may even be rara aves somewhere whose religious practices conform to such conceptions. But it is quite another thing to advance such proposals as analytical descriptions of the mainstream, traditional conceptions. Consider just one leading objection. An early critic of Kant, H.L. Mansel, pertinently wrote: ‘Throughout every page of Holy Scripture, God reveals Himself not as a Law but as a Person … By what right do we venture to rob the Deity of half his revealed attributes …?’ This certainly seems right. It is the essence of the religious traditions we are considering that their God is a personal, solicitous, omnipotent Being. And it is worth mentioning here that, even in non-theistic religions, as in forms of Buddhism, actual religious worship tends to re-invoke earlier folk deities.

The point is important, and it is revealing to develop it against a historical backdrop. The group of ancient Greek religions flourished until AD 391 when the Christian Emperor Theodosius, forgetful of the spirit of Christian tolerance, proscribed them. Many of the schools of Greek philosophy also had a recognisably religious dimension, but the Christian Emperor Justinian closed them in AD 529. At this time, reason itself became hateful to the Church, and a cloud of doctrinal totalitarianism descended on the Western world, and remained undispersed for a thousand years.

Unlike Yahweh, who seems exclusively preoccupied with the welfare of humankind and whose extramural concerns are undisclosed to us, the Greek gods had private lives and were occupied as much by the affairs of the pantheon as the foibles of mortals. They made neither moral nor civic law. Gods occasionally intervened to enforce morality, but such action was generally in the jurisdiction of the older, chthonian deities. Their solicitude for mortals was not unbounded. Consequently, the Greeks had only an attenuated sense of divine providence. Reciprocally, their sense of the holy was, as Maurice Bowra said, ‘based much less on a feeling of the goodness of the gods than on a devout respect for their incorruptible beauty and unfailing strength’. There was little in these religions that could be called ‘love of god’. The author of the Aristotelian Magna Moralia wrote: ‘It would be eccentric for anyone to claim that he loved Zeus.’

There is no absolute difference in nature between gods and men in Greek thought. The gods are immortal, more beautiful and powerful, but they occupy the same space as men and move amongst them. ‘The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as masters and themselves below as servants, as did the Jews,’ Nietzsche observed. Human envy had not yet cast the gods beyond the sphere of the enviable, infinitely and hopelessly beyond the reach and competition of men; nor had it provoked the hatred that engenders idealisation of the deity, and self-abasement.

These strands of Greek religious belief contrast startlingly with the tradition we wish to illuminate. As Iris Murdoch noted: ‘the Greeks were fairly detached about their gods. Jews and Christians (in their different styles) take God as a supreme love object …’ There is reason to think from the Akkadian epics that attitudes toward the Mesopotamian pantheons from which the Jewish gods descended were similar to those of the Greeks. The Mesopotamians had earlier linked morality to the divine, but the idea of a reciprocal bond, a passionate covenant between god and a people, between god and individual, seems to have been a Jewish innovation.

The intensification of the relationship with a god appears to have emerged in Judaic religion during the Babylonian exile in the middle of the sixth century BC. In the preceding century, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, ’El Shaddai, who was perhaps a composite of earlier Mesopotamian or Canaanite mountain deities, was fused with the itinerant god of Moses, Yahweh. The new god became exclusive to the Jews and elevated above all other gods. At some time during or just after the exile, Yahweh becomes unique. Deutero-Isaiah proclaims: ‘There is no God but I.’ The existence of other gods was denied, and all religions but one were declared false and wicked. Religious conversion or intensification of belief often follows calamity, and it is possible that this development was an effect of deracination and the humiliation of exile. It has certainly begotten much calamity.

The emergence of monotheism complicated religious sensibility, but underlying it there seems to be a psychosocial regression. For the first time, a god becomes an object of intense emotional attachment upon which everything depends. This is an extraordinary and crucial development and recalls that other homologous relationship, that between nursing infant and mother.

There is now an impressive body of science concerning the nature of human attachment. It has grown out of psychoanalytic object-relations theory (which focuses on the role of interpersonal relationships in psychological development) and particularly the work of John Bowlby. Bowlby described an innate attachment behavioural system that has the basic aim of maintaining proximity between infant and the parenting figure who provides the infant with a secure base. Attachment to such a figure, and to its various incarnations through the lifespan, is amongst the most fundamental of all human needs. The psychologist Lee A. Kirkpatrick has drawn attention to the ways in which religious belief provides for attachment needs:

To achieve the objective of establishing physical proximity, infants engage in a variety of behaviours such as crying, raising arms (to be picked up) and clinging. With increasing cognitive abilities, older children are often satisfied by visual or verbal contact, or eventually by mere knowledge of an attachment figure’s whereabouts. This latter observation opens the door to the possibility of a non-corporeal attachment figure with which actual physical contact is impossible. Religious beliefs provide a variety of ways of enhancing perceptions about the proximity of God. A crucial tenet of most theistic religions is that God is omnipresent; thus one is always in ‘proximity’ to God. God is frequently described in religious literature as always being by one’s side, holding one’s hand, or watching over one … [V]irtually all religions provide places of worship where one can be closer to God. In addition a diverse array of idols and symbols – ranging from graven images to crosses on necklaces to painting and other art forms – seem designed to continually remind the believer of God’s presence. The most important form of proximity-maintaining attachment behavior directed toward God, however, is prayer …

(Lee A. Kirkpatrick, ‘Attachment and Religion’, in J. Cassidy and P.R. Shaver (eds), Handbook of Attachment (1999))

Kirkpatrick has assembled extensive survey data that supports a link between attachment needs and religious belief. For example, in a US national poll when subjects were asked ‘What comes closest to your own view of faith?’, fifty-one per cent of respondents said ‘a relationship with God’; nineteen per cent said ‘a set of beliefs’; four per cent said ‘membership of a church or synagogue; and twenty per cent said ‘finding meaning in life’. In a US study of clergy, the most common response to the question ‘How does faith help you in daily life?’ was ‘Access to a loving God who is willing to help in everyday life’. In a large newspaper survey, two-thirds of college students responded positively to the question: ‘Do you feel you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and/or God?’ Other studies summarised by Kirkpatrick suggest that personal images of God and other supernatural figures are influenced by the vicissitudes of a person’s attachment history. As one would expect, individuals may turn to God as a substitute attachment figure if parental figures have been inadequate. ‘In a word, God may provide the kind of secure attachment relationship one never had with one’s parents or other primary attachment figures.’ Here we find one, sad explanation for the turning of youth to religion today.

Attachment in humans, as Freud noticed, is quickly sexualised and attracts the entire assembly of human bondage: erotic love, jealousy, hatred, guilt, and so on. These passions and affections can be transferred from primary attachment figures onto others, including, as seems clear, God and other supernatural persons, such as Jesus or saints. And as with other relationships, much of what transpires in them takes place below the threshold of conscious awareness. Unconsciously, but not thereby invisibly: the manifest and interpreted content of much Christian iconography, many rituals and observances across different traditions, the psychodramas of Pentecostal worship, and so on, are immensely revealing. The sensual character of worship or relationship to the divine is sometimes denied outright, though not ingenuously, I think, by anyone with sensitivity to human dispositions.

It is true, of course, that for many believers religion is little more than a motley of comforting beliefs and reassuring observances that can scarcely be described as passionate. But for many others, a relationship with God (or other supernatural Beings) certainly does seem to acquire an intensely personal, passionate character. These are the devout people I shall have mostly in mind in what follows. Nearly all human activity is, in one way or another, a diffracted striving toward object-relationship, toward emotionally significant personal or quasi-interpersonal relations. It would be astonishing if the religious enterprise was an exception. The remarkable feature of religion precisely is its determined extension of object-relational striving into a supernatural or spiritual dimension. It is remarkable because there is no supernatural dimension and no spiritual objects with which one can have real relationships. (Or, if there are, no one has produced remotely good reasons for thinking so.)

So what is going on? Well, it is not a mystery. One can desire, seek, fear and love things that do not exist, but are believed to exist; and not only then. Abstract, non-existent things such as fictional characters or ideals can be loved. How much more so supernatural figures who are believed to exist! Frequently in such cases, psychological investigation reveals that these objects unconsciously represent loved persons, or parts of them, or aspects of the self. This is not surprising. Humans are social creatures whose thinking and dispositions are shaped by the need for other people and the requirements for relating to them. We never abandon the child’s insistence on personifying the inanimate world, converting dolls into companions and magicking up company. We also turn inwards and make company of our selves.

The psychology of religions is complex but, of course, could not, and should not aspire to, explain all the intricate cultural aspects of religion. However, the object-relational perspective on religion is surely inviting to anyone impressed by the immense human need for other people and the semblances of them; and the idea that the quasi-relationship to God may be in part a variation on a self-relationship seems especially promising if what follows is true.

Around the time that an infant is beginning to walk and talk, she will, in normal circumstances, experience a heightened sense of mastery and an exhilarating love affair with the world. Parents usually are still satisfying the infant’s needs on demand and may therefore be experienced as extensions of her will. The infant is still subject to what Freud called the ‘omnipotence of thought’: when objects are desired, their representations are manufactured in fantasy and are mistaken for the real thing, just as they are later in dreams and fantasy. The conjunction of these circumstances elates the infant and reinforces her (illusory) sense of grandeur and omnipotence. There begins an intricate love affair with the nascent self, as well. This relation to the self is referred to in psychoanalytic thought as ‘narcissism’. Self-esteem is closely bound up with narcissism. Although self-esteem depends greatly on feeling loved by others, it depends also on the reflexive relation to one’s self. Where self-esteem cannot be gained through love, then the machinery of omnipotent thinking may be invoked to compel love, to create an illusion of it, or to build a fortress against its absence.

It is difficult to sustain narcissism. Parents become uncompliant, and the child’s growing understanding soon discloses her real weakness and dependency. Most children then undertake a rescue operation. They reinforce their idealisation of their parents, who are usually already perceived as magnificent creatures, by projecting their own idealised narcissistic self-conceptions into their parents, and then re-identify unconsciously with them. The strategy partly restores their narcissistic self-conception: unconsciously it seems that one is the parent, that one has incorporated, or resides in, them; and this unconscious dispensation undergirds and influences the child’s conscious beliefs and appraisals. If the child is now introduced to ideas about God and other powerful, attractive supernatural figures, the same strategy may be attempted. Elements of the narcissistic self-conception are projected into (her images of) God, an attachment relationship in fantasy is established (much as with a pop star or sporting hero), and the narcissistic state may be restored by varying degrees of identification.

However, the conscious sense of one’s great goodness, importance and power is not easily surrendered. If it is forcefully extinguished with threats or punishment, or if the parents are remote, the projected image of the self may be angry and punitive, and the corresponding image of God may be wrathful and vengeful. Children raised in a cold or crushing atmosphere, or where identification with parents is for some other reason deterred, are more likely to depend on supernatural or other substitute – often imaginary – figures to contain their narcissism. Their self-esteem may be precarious and sustainable only through unremitting efforts – prayer, sacrifice, self-abasement – to stay in emotional proximity to a cruelly silent God.

Two final, rebarbative items on this excursion into psychodynamics. The projected self-conception has become idealised, in part, by the dissociation from it of the bad conception the child has of herself. This leaves the counterpart all-bad self-conception unmoderated. If, as is often the case, there is a dominant identification with this bad self-image and the attachment to, and identification with, God fails or is patchy, then the expense of maintaining an image of an all-good, almighty God is to see oneself as sinful, weak, dependent and suppliant. Worse: underlying this bad self-image is an image of the bad parents with which it has become more or less fused; the child feels bad because she feels that she is, or is engulfed by, these bad parents. At bottom, confronting this feature of their inner lives may be the most difficult ordeal for people caught up in these psycho-religious constellations. The image of parents who were experienced in childhood as depriving, hateful or terrifying may seem in the child’s and the adult’s unconscious mind – like the infusorian under the microscope – a hideous monster, a Satan. One common way of coping with this painful psychic situation is to project this satanic image onto suitable objects in the external world and reinforce the identification with God. That manoeuvre, it seems likely, underlies the perceptions of George W. Bush and others like him. I have hinted at baleful consequences but have done little so far to support even one of the charges levelled by Russell, Freud or Nietzsche. Yet now, I think, we have some of the psychological understanding to do so. The sense of importance and power, and self-esteem garnered by identification, first with idealised parents, then images of God (and other supernatural figures), then through religious group membership, is rarely very stable. It is threatened by challenges to faith, by the debility of a dissociated self and, in the end, by reality. Religious people who can make sensible decisions about life insurance suspect, privately, that religion, or much of it, is a house of cards. Faith, as Mark Twain’s schoolboy said, is believing what you know ain’t so. The salient episodes in the social history of religion comprise more or less violent attempts by the faithful to shore up their faith. Those who do not share the faith must be segregated, converted, exiled or eliminated. Even small differences become major threats to those who require the world to narcissistically mirror them. Christians, as Russell frequently observed, have been far more persecuted by other sects of Christians than by pagans. It is just 200 hundred years in a Christian dispensation of 2000 years that atheism, heresy, blasphemy, homosexuality, witchery and other bugbears of religion have not been cruelly punished. There are still places under religious influence where these transgressions are punished; and no doubt there are many religious folk elsewhere who believe that they should be. It is true that the worst has occurred in the past; but there are now emerging reasons to fear that the worst may return with a vengeance.

Religious identity easily becomes an instrument of narcissistic assertion and aggression. Compelling others to think and act as you do not only confirms your faith and eliminates challenges to it, but also nourishes grandiose self-conceptions by testifying to your power. It affirms the special relationship, and partial identification with, God. This underlying arrogance and self-importance is partly why there is so much talk in religion about humility, of a kind which often strikes people as hypocrisy. It rarely is suppressed successfully. Bullying is an inseparable feature of monotheism. Examples today are everywhere: from the crazy idea of a purified caliphate, to the invocation of divine mandates over land, to the hopes of American evangelicals to stamp their self-image on the world. The combination of devout faith and astounding arrogance, exemplified most starkly by contemporary Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists – but not by them alone – cannot be satisfied in the undisturbed practice of religion. Their conceit requires that they co-opt Caesar; arguably the American branch has.

It is perhaps not coincidental that the leaders responsible for the heinous invasion of Iraq are religious folk – or say they are. When deity is apprehended as wrathful and punitive, then, as we have seen, character may be shaped by the apprehension. When morality is largely built on fear, of other people or a deity, then it becomes vulnerable to all the stratagems used to evade, fool, corrupt and seduce others. Deceit and self-deception become its elements. Some days before the invasion of Iraq, John Howard attended a Church service for the ‘pre-deployed’ troops. He read from Proverbs. The text warned against ‘men of perverted speech, who forsake the paths of uprightness to walk in the ways of darkness, who rejoice in doing evil and delight in the perverseness of evil; men whose paths are crooked, and who are devious in their ways’. Sometimes political leaders have uncanny, but misattributive, insight. Of course, it will be said that some irreligious leaders have been more murderous and mendacious. That’s true, but it shows only that there are other paths to iniquity.

Truth and reason have been problems for religion because they are so contrary to it. Historically, the institutional strategy of religion for dealing with this inconvenience has been to arrogate to itself special rights over the former while undermining the latter. From its earliest confrontations with rational philosophy and science, the monotheist religions sought to restrict reason, cultivate faith, and flirt with the occult and other expressions of the non-rational. St Paul and his Jewish contemporary, Josephus, regarded philosophy with contempt, and their attitudes set the tone. Luther thought reason a whore. Reason was accused of pride and of overstepping its limits. When science began to erode dogma, Christianity persecuted it. Faith in divine revelation, deliverance of prayer, the wisdom of the heart, and mystical experience were invoked (at different times, by different sects) as alternative, or even superior, sources of epistemic authority. But these things are not supplementary to reason; they are assaults on it. Ironically, they maim the only thing that could conceivably justify them.

Reason and insight (truth about the self) present a serious dilemma for the religious individual. The religious have a desperate need to know: about such matters as their place in creation, about an afterlife, whether they are watched over and loved by the creator. I suppose that most people are curious about these and kindred things, but the curiosity of the religious is more desperate because it is animated both by the necessity of maintaining passionate contact with an attachment figure and by the unconscious need to secure the illusion of omniscience. The only real means of acquiring knowledge, however, are the slow accumulations of the sciences and humanities, and these obstinately refuse to endorse what the religious wish most to know. Not knowing is intolerable; it is like being abandoned. So reason and insight become inimical to the religious, partly because they refuse to support, and indeed challenge, belief, but also because, at the deepest level, they threaten to subvert the cherished relationship to God and the (illusional) omnipotence of the self. In the grip of offended narcissism, in precarious identification with God, the eye is plucked out and many religious selectively abandon reason and insight. Thought, unguided by reason or self-understanding, captive to infantile needs for attachment and omnipotence, becomes more or less fantastic and delusional.

A passage from An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Religion (2003), by the theist philosopher John Haldane, tells that in paradise the blessed will gaze upon the divine nature and see:

the perfection of every positive quality … [and find] what they have always craved – absolute, unconditional, and everlasting love – their minds are themselves made more loving, but now without prospect of relapse, for the wound from which their darkness and disturbance issued as a consequence of wilful disobedience has now been healed …

This is fantasy, and the argument of this essay would suggest that the passage be read as a depiction, with little allegorical disguise, of the ideal state of the infant reconciled with its mother. It may be objected that this interpretation is reductive in that it seems to reduce a complex cultural product, the crystallisation of thought, revelation and spiritual longing, to an infantile fantasy, the child’s solution to the problem of eternal separation. But the objection is mistaken. The logic of the interpretation is deflationary, not reductive: it notes certain claims (about paradise), considers that the claims are empty (there is no paradise) and then tries to account for the claims (how can people believe such things?). Passing over the detail, we can say that it accounts for the latter claim by appeal to the fact that the mind is a creature of desire that uses wishful fantasy and wish-fulfilling delusion to occlude unpleasant faces of life, or to patch over torn or shattered ones. Since there are insuperable philosophical difficulties with the conception of an afterlife as described by Haldane, it seems reasonable to conclude either that Haldane reasons very badly or that he is not reasoning at all: his reason has been recruited into the service of fantasy. I suspect the second conclusion is true. The kind of religious picture described by Haldane is not refuted by psychology; but it fades in the light of psychological understanding.

Freud argued that religious ideas are wishful delusions that satisfy the infantile longing for protection and love by a powerful figure – a Father in Heaven. He said that religions are mass-delusions and compared them to the hallucinatory confusions of amentia. Freud did not believe that he could prove this contention, but he thought it a ‘very striking fact’ that the religious picture of the world was ‘exactly as we are bound to wish it to be’. I have been arguing along somewhat different lines, developing some themes that Freud neglected, but my destination has been much the same as his: we need to consider seriously the possibility that for many people their religion supervenes on something akin to mental illness or infantilism. Shortly before his death Anton Chekov wrote to Diaghilev: ‘I can only regard with bewilderment an educated man who is also religious.’ I share that bewilderment and the psychological explorations here are partly attempts to dispel it. Of course, good can flow even from illness, but far more often it is a source of fear and misery.