extremely deficient. Indeed, if Freud had the possibility of evaluating his propositions today, he would himself be surprised by the logical deficiency of his claims and he would be the first to criticize such senseless presuppositions.
After Freud, psychology developed on an atheist foundation. Not only Freud, but the founders of other schools of psychology in the 20th century were passionate atheists. Two of these were B.F. Skinner, the founder of the behaviorist school and Albert Ellis, founder of rational emotive therapy. The world of psychology ended up by becoming the forum for atheism. A 1972 poll among the members of the American Psychology Association revealed that only 1.1 percent of psychologists in the country had any religious beliefs.24
But most psychologists who fell into this great deception were undone by their own psychological investigations. It became known that the basic suppositions of Freudianism had almost no scientific support and, moreover, that religion was not a mental illness as Freud and some other psychological theorists declared, but a basic element of mental health. Patrick Glynn summarizes these important developments:
Yet the last quarter of the twentieth century has not been kind to the psychoanalytic vision. Most significant has been the exposure of Freud’s views of religion as entirely fallacious. Ironically enough, scientific research in psychology over the past twenty-five years has demonstrated that, far from being a neurosis or source of neuroses as Freud and his disciples claimed, religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious
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