It was Freud’s stated conviction that the force behind the creation of all religious systems was the need present in human beings to bank the fires of anxiety born in what he called “the shock of existence.” By this he meant the moment that self-conscious awareness appeared in the evolutionary process. Freud believed that religion was simply the human projection into the sky of a protective parental figure of our own creation. This deity used supernatural power to deal with all the anxieties of self-consciousness, such as meaninglessness and the certainty of our mortality.
