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Freud's Critique of Religion and the Viability of Faith

The subject of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents is, of course, the tension between civilization's demands and human happiness. It claims that the price for advances in civilization is "a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt."¹ For Freud, happiness "comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up." Lesser forms pale beside the "feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego" that convulses one's "physical being." Here the sexual is obvious. Indeed, Freud claims that "the purpose of life is simply the programme...