Parenting & Family Quote by Albert Ellis

Ellis doesn’t just critique religion here; he diagnoses it, with the cool impatience of a clinician who thinks he’s spotted the root of the symptom. “All manner” is doing aggressive work: it sweeps away denominational nuance and cultural variation so he can name one underlying mechanism. “Essentially” signals the posture of rational therapy culture at midcentury: strip the story down to a core belief, expose the hidden need, replace it with something sturdier.

The barb is “childish,” not “childlike.” Childlike can mean wonder; childish means stunted, an adult clinging to the emotional architecture of infancy. Ellis is pushing a specific psychological model: religion as an externalized parent, an authority that offers certainty, rescue, and rules in exchange for submission. “Dependency” lands as both moral and clinical language, a word that turns devotion into a maladaptive attachment pattern. It’s a reframing tactic: if religion is dependency, then faith isn’t a virtue; it’s a coping strategy that blocks growth.

Context matters. Ellis was a founder of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, built on the idea that irrational beliefs fuel misery and that people can be trained into self-acceptance and responsibility. In the postwar, Cold War atmosphere - when anxiety, conformity, and authority were being renegotiated - his line reads like therapy as a secular rival religion, promising liberation through “adult” rationality.

Subtext: he’s also selling a moral ideal. The adult Ellis wants is autonomous, resilient, comfortable with uncertainty, and unwilling to outsource meaning. The quote works because it’s not neutral; it’s a provocation meant to shame dependency and make self-governance feel like psychological maturity.