Schopenhauer on religion

“According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment. And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance. So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know.

“Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! it would have been so much better not to have made it at all.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860), The Christian System.

 

Psychoanalytic history

“Psychoanalysis is very different [from psychology], and very peculiar. One might even suggest […] that the structure of psychoanalytic history is much more like the history of a religious sect […]. Like a religion, there was a founding father who had a revelation (the existence of the subconscious); he struggled to have the truth of this revelation recognised by a hostile world, and gradually gathered around him a group of followers. […] A canon of set (scared) texts emerged, mostly penned by (or attributed to) the founder and studied continuously down the generations.”

— Stephen Frosh (2012, pp. 16–17), A brief introduction to psychoanalytic theory