"Religion is an illusion...

"We say to ourselves: it would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent ruler, if there were a moral world order and a future life, but at the same time it is very that odd that all this is just as we would wish it ourselves. And it would be still odder if our poor, ignorant, ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.

"If, on the one hand, religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, on the other hand it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.

"The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such...

"And it tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

"The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.

"The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.