Freud came to his conclusions about religion through his study of his patients and applied psychoanalysis to the issue as a means of divining the cause. His starting point was one of atheistic belief and as such he attempted to understand what he considered to be an illusory world. He opined that religion was not created on the basis of verifiable truth and as such had not been treated with the rational thinking applied to the mundane aspects of our existence. Freud equated religious belief and behavior to the behavior of his neurotic patients, claiming that both shared similarities in their treatment of reality. He stated that just as religious people held seemingly empty and pointless ritual in high regard so too did the neurotics he treated for mental disorders. Freud treated religion as a mental disorder or a ` universal obsession neurosis' and...