The Future Of An Illusion

I find another advantage of religious doctrine in one of its peculiarities, to which you seem to take particular exception. It admits of an ideatiorial refinement and sublimation, by which it can be divested of most of those traces of a primitive and infantile way of thinking which it bears. What is then left is a body of ideas which science no longer contradicts and which it cannot disprove. These modifications of religious doctrine, which you have condemned as half-measures and compromises, make it possible to bridge the gap between the uneducated masses and the philosophical thinker, and to preserve that common bond between them which is so important for the protection of culture.—Sigmund Freud