Freud, remaining loyal to his realist beliefs, views religion as one of the major wish-fulfillments inside the Western Cultural Tradition.
Religion allows humans to tolerate their repressed and instinctually repressed life within society.
Within society, a person seems to conform and appears to forfeit their personal goals. However, this is quite the contrary to the reality of an individual s psychological and emotional state within society. The instincts which a person cannot express, are repressed but not forgotten. Indeed, these hidden feelings or instincts are the source of neurotic suffering and asocial acts which themselves threaten the very framework of western civilization. Religion reconciles the everyday sacrifice of one s individual freedom and constant constraint upon acting on natural or instinctual desires, by the promise of a better life to come and the religious sanctions or taboos which declare the social and moral order to be God-ordained.