religion
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Can psychology enlighten religious behaviors?
William James and Sigmund Freud both agreed that religion plays an important role in human society, but they were also fundamentally different in the way they viewed religious experiences. James, the great psychologist and philosopher, was a pantheist, which meant that humans were an integral part of God. While Freud, the famed psychiatrist and father of psychoanalysis, was a rationalist, rejecting the passion, fear and mysticism that James valued in religious experiences. Instead of humans existing as an essential part of God, Freud believed that the weakness of human character created God out of a desire for comfort and protection. The contrast between James and Freud appears when they discuss whether religion benefits humanity. James sees the virtues of religion, where as Freud sees its dangers.
In his study of religious experiences, James discovered people who display a "healthy-mindedness" or the ability to see the world around them as essentially good. This state of "high religious excitement" prevents such people from experiencing evil (17). This quality was evident in many of the artists, scientists and philosophers who made the greatest contributions to humanity, including the fathers of American Romanticism, such as the philosopher Ralph Emerson and the poet Walt Whitman (17)...