2 Excellent Books!

I've been reading two excellent books lately:

The Question of God--C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Armand M. Nicholi (There's also an interesting PBS video documentary that goes along with the book)

And

Simply Christian by N.T. Wright

Not having read much about Freud, I began the Freud/Lewis book expecting some challenging arguments against theism from Freud, given his status as one of the world's most famous atheists. However, I've found he has little to offer in defense of atheism or in much of anything else. This point is made all the more poignant because of the author's (a Harvard Psychiatry professor) approach of objective analysis of each side without imposing his own view. The sheer objective observations of the life and thought of Freud and Lewis show that Lewis was centered in reality and Freud was not. If anyone else reads this, I'd be really eager to hear what you think.

I'm a little over half way on each of them, but thought I'd share some great quotes:

From The Question of God:

As a skilled clinician, Freud would have observed that the transition Lewis experienced matured him emotionally and did not impair, but enhanced, his functioning. Perhaps he might have concluded, as the noted psychoanalyst Erik Erikson did, that the person who, like Lewis, experiences a spiritual transition 'is always older, or in early years suddenly becomes older, than...his parents and teachers, and focuses in a precocious way on what it takes others a lifetime to gain a mere inkling of: the question of how to escape corruption in living and how in death to give meaning to life.' (pg. 94)

How did C.S. Lewis, a gifted, highly intelligent, critical, militant atheist, and a respected faculty member in perhaps the most prestigious university in the world, come to embrace a worldview so in conflict with his atheism? (pg. 81)

If one begins with Freud's assumption that God does not exist, then the experience of Paul can only be explained as an expression of pathhology, a case of visual and auditory hallucinations. (pg. 79)

In a letter to Dr. Putnam, Freud wrote: 'When I ask myself why I have always behaved honorably, ready to spare others and to be kind whenever possible, and why I did not give up doing so when I observed that in that way one harms oneself and becomes an anvil because other people are brutal and untrustworthy, then, it is true, I have no answer. Sensible it certainly was not.' (pg.75)

From Simply Christian:

What we mean by 'know' is likewise in need of further investigation. To 'know' the deeper kinds of truth we have been hinting at is much more like 'knowing' a person--something which takes a long time, a lot of trust, and a good deal of trial and error--and less like 'knowing' about the right bus to take into town. It's a kind of knowing in which the subject and the object are intertwined, so that you could never say that it was either purely subjective or purely objective.
One good word for this deeper and richer kind of knowing, the kind that goes with the deeper and richer kind of truth, is 'love.' (pg. 51)


[The desire for love, justice, beauty and a spiritual reality] are things which might well function, across all types of human society, as signposts to something which matters a great deal but which we can't grasp in the way we grasp the distance from London to New York, or the right way to cook carrots. And it seems to me that all of them point to the possibility that this something, which matters so much, is a deeper and different sort of 'truth' than those more mundane matters. What's more, if it's a different sort of truth, we might expect that to grasp it we might need a different sort of knowing. (pg. 48)

[Jesus] would be the place where God's future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence. (pg. 110)

Nor was it the case, as some writers are fond of saying, that the idea of 'resurrection' was found in religions all over the ancient Near East. Dying and rising 'gods,' yes--corn kings, fertility deities, and the like. But--even supposing Jesus' very Jewish followers knew any traditions like those pagan ones--nobody in those religions ever supposed it actually happened to individual humans. (pg. 113)