More than a century before Freud, the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that “the primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear.” A century after Freud, the French philosopher René Girard theorized that religion arose among primitive peoples to mitigate violence by focusing that violence upon a ritual sacrifice—a “scapegoat,” as he termed it. More generally, Freud’s assumption that religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind” is merely an echo of his German predecessor Karl Marx, who famously called religion “the
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