A man must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings.
illusionsquotes
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.”
Religious doctrines, are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.
Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.
The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness – that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.
Perhaps the hopes I have confessed to are of an illusory nature, too. But I hold fast to one distinction. Apart from the fact that no penalty is imposed for not sharing them, my illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction.
The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.
For those particular illusions there may well have been a past; it is problematic, however, if there is now much of a future.
And, finally, groups have never thirsted after truth. They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real; they are almost as strongly influenced by what is untrue as by what is true. They have an evident tendency not to distinguish between the two.
