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Freud’s Last Session was released on December 22, 2023, by Sony Pictures Classics. The two-hour film depicts a fictional 1939 debate between an 83-year-old Sigmund Freud and a 40-year-old C. S. Lewis, the Oxford literature “don,” or university teacher, who would go on to write the bestselling children’s book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Sir Anthony Hopkins stars as Freud. Matthew Goode plays Lewis.
Freud’s Last Session is not a bad film, but it’s not a particularly good one, either. And the film doesn’t accurately represent either Freud’s atheism or Lewis’ faith. The film depicts Freud as an intellectual giant who positions science against faith. Lewis, in contrast, is reduced to sputtering in the face of the great man. In real life, as opposed to reel life, Freud’s atheism rested, not on science, but on his own arrogance and ethnocentric bigotry. In this, Freud is a perfect, if anachronistic, exemplar of today’s New Atheists.
Lewis’ Christianity was the product of actual research. Lewis was a serious scholar and it was his scholarship, his knowledge of how the human mind works in an oral society, that contributed to pushing him into belief. A stand-off informed by who Freud really was and the since-discredited, racist pseudo-science he uncritically embraced, and Lewis’ refined scholarship and its impact on his initial atheism, would have made for a better film. More on that, below, after a rundown of the film.
When he was a teenager, C. S. Lewis was “very angry with God for not existing,” and so he became an atheist. In his adulthood, his atheism was intellectually challenged by, inter alia, his friend, the scholar, author, and devout Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien, who also taught at Oxford. Lewis says it was difficult for him to accept Christianity. He became a Christian “kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape … picture me alone in that room … night after night, feeling … the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet … I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps … the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
Director and screenwriter Matthew Brown’s previous film is The Man Who Knew Infinity, a 2015 biopic of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. “My father is a psychiatrist and he lives in Cambridge. I grew up with Freud in the house,” the 53-year-old Brown says. Brown determined to depict a civil debate in an evenhanded film with no one side dominating the other. “I thought it was important as the director with this film, in particular, to not take a side … The question of science versus God is the question of this time … it’s become so polarized … Science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind … I know in this culture, these days, people want it to devolve into take a side and bash the other one’s head in, but that was not the story that we were trying to tell.”
Freud’s Last Session emerges out of a course taught for thirty-five years by Dr. Armand Nicholi, clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In this course, Nicholi compared and contrasted Freud’s and Lewis’ ideas about God. The course inspired his 2002 book, The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. The book, in turn, inspired the 2004 PBS miniseries, The Question of God. These, in turn, inspired prolific American playwright, the 70-year-old Mark St. Germain, to write the 2009 stage play Freud’s Last Session.
Dr. Nicholi, who died in 2017, said, “As a practicing psychiatrist, I came to realize that one’s worldview, or how one answers the basic questions concerning meaning, values, purpose, identity, motivation and destiny, influences not only who we are, but how we live our lives … it was important for students … to have the opportunity to critically assess the arguments for both the worldview that they embrace and some form of the worldview they reject … Freud’s philosophical writings, advocating an atheistic philosophy of life, are more widely read today than his expository or scientific works. His philosophical writings have played a significant role in the secularization of our culture. To this day, Freud is the atheist’s touchstone … Sigmund Freud does not believe that a universal moral law exists.”
Freud’s Last Session has a professional reviewer score of 44% at the aggregate review site, RottenTomatoes. Only 44% of professional reviewers recommend the film. On the other hand, amateur reviewers award Freud’s Last Session a healthy score of 78%.
Freud’s Last Session’s begins as the Nazis invade Poland on September 1, 1939. As Lewis embarks for his meeting with Freud at the latter’s home, he stands at a train station and observes agitated crowds. Children are being evacuated on jam-packed trains out of London, into the safety of the countryside. Barrage balloons hover in the skies overhead. They lend an alien feel to the vista. Throughout the film, every now and then, Freud switches on a radio and one hears historical figures like King George VI and Neville Chamberlain addressing the crisis and announcing that Britain is at war with Germany. Hitler’s deranged screech is also heard in short snippets. In his January 30, 1939 Reichstag speech, Hitler predicts the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
Freud was an atheist but his ancestry was Jewish. He had lived most of his life in Vienna, Austria. In March, 1938, to escape Nazi persecution, he traveled to London. Before his escape, as the film depicts, Freud’s daughter Anna was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo. They eventually released her. The film depicts Freud, as the Gestapo are leading his daughter away, surreptitiously handing Anna a cyanide capsule. In fact, Anna had obtained her own lethal dose of Veronal, a barbiturate, for just such an occasion. Freud, suffering from terminal cancer, would die of a physician’s assisted suicide, using morphine, on September 23, 1939.
It’s a masterstroke: using Hitler’s blitzkrieg and subsequent genocides, and Freud’s terminal illness and suicide, as setting for a debate on the existence of God. The importance of this debate is highlighted by looming suffering, atrocity, the immediate promise of death, the death of children, of soldiers, of civilians, and of one 83-year-old man.
The debate between Freud and Lewis takes place, largely, in one room of Freud’s London house. The couch, the wall behind the couch, and the floor are all covered in blood-red Persian-style textiles. The red motif creates a womb-like atmosphere. Freud’s goal was to return his patients to long-ago trauma. The action occurs during one day. Lewis leaves after nightfall. Throughout the day, Freud sips whiskey and morphine. He is trying to manage the pain of his terminal oral cancer.
Freud’s London house was in fact a replication of his office in Vienna. As the house-turned-museum’s website states, “Freud’s study has been preserved just as it was during his lifetime. It contains Freud’s original psychoanalytic couch, on which his patients were invited to recline and say whatever came to mind. The study also contains his remarkable collection of antiquities. Almost 2,000 items fill cabinets and are arranged on every surface. There are rows of ancient figures on the desk where Freud wrote.” We’ll talk more, below, about those 2,000 statuettes.
Freud’s and Lewis’ conversation has a prickly beginning. Freud castigates Lewis for tardiness. Lewis says trains were overburdened by escaping children. Lewis is self conscious that he caricatured Freud in his 1933 book The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis says that he was just trying to make the point that “There is a God. One doesn’t have to be an imbecile to believe in him.” Freud, again, is prickly. He scoffs that he never read Lewis’ book.
The tone of a prickly Freud and a gentle but insistent Lewis continues. Hopkins depicts Freud as a geezer gnome and terminally ill trickster. He blurts out random challenges to faith, including, inevitably, the problem of evil and suffering. “Our moral certainty is the Beast. We are the Apocalypse,” Freud insists.
Here Freud alludes to the New Testament book of Revelation, also known as Apocalypse. Both terms, the Latin-derived, “Revelation” and the Greek, “Apocalypse,” mean “uncovering.” In popular speech, “Apocalypse” now means the end of the world. In Revelation, the author, John of Patmos, mentions a “Beast” that does terrible harm. In these lines, Freud is insisting that humanity’s “moral certainty” is the real destroyer, not some “Beast” predicted in religious scripture. Like many who take the modern, relativist position that moral certainty is a bad thing, Freud condemns others’ certainty but champions his own certainty. This is the relativist’s dilemma. The script does not allow Lewis the chance to point this out.
“Why believe that Jesus was who he said he was?” Freud asks Lewis. “I had a patient who thought he was Jesus. Why not believe him?” Freud, and the film, never gives Lewis a chance to answer. Hopkins’ Freud celebrates his mini triumphs of catching Lewis in this or that flawed argument.
It’s unfortunate that the film does not allow Lewis to respond to Freud’s question about the identity of Jesus, because there are good answers. See for example, C. S. Lewis’ famous trilemma, quoted here, and the evidence for the historicity of the resurrection, discussed here.
Freud bemoans the death of his daughter Sophie from influenza. He argues that his grief proves that there can be no God. Again, the script mutes Lewis. Lewis was no stranger to grief. His mother died when he was nine. “All settled happiness … disappeared from my life.” His father sent him to boarding school, which he said, was worse than trench warfare. “I never hated anything so much, not even the front line trenches in World War I.” He could make such an extreme comparison because on his nineteenth birthday he was at the Somme Valley, site of one of the deadliest battles in all history. He was wounded; his best friend was killed. The Lewis intimately familiar with human pain, emotional and physical, does not respond to Freud’s mention of Sophie’s death.
Matthew Goode’s depiction of C. S. Lewis was the best feature of the film for me. Goode is a slender and gently handsome forty-five-year-old. In interviews Goode comes across as, simply, adorable. He is open and enthusiastic. He praises Anthony Hopkins, calling him “a walking deity.” He praises Matthew Brown, the director. He is humble about his own contributions. His large and luminous eyes radiate intelligence, curiosity, and openness. If he were a little younger, he could play a British Jesus.
Instead of playing a British Jesus, Goode is playing the next best thing, C. S. Lewis. Goode’s Lewis is never pinned by Hopkins’ Freud, in spite of Freud’s incessant needling. Hopkins has the lion’s share of the dialogue, of the argument, and of the scenery-chewing, but Goode, for this viewer, stole the show. Even when he’s not talking, or arguing, or trying to prove anything or convince anyone of anything, he radiates something that Hopkins’ Freud never manages. Goode’s Lewis is a man who is comfortable in his belief. He listens to Freud’s rantings with bemusement, with intimate understanding – he used to be an atheist himself – and with what looks like it might be pity. He wishes he could rescue Freud from the hell his beliefs have created for himself, but he knows that unless his rescue is invited, any gesture he might make will be rebuffed, mocked, and wasted. And Goode’s Lewis is too astute to waste. He is kind, nevertheless.
The film draws a great deal of attention to Freud’s decaying body. For this viewer, that was a distraction. I came for a brilliant and challenging dialogue, not a reminder of my years as a nurse’s aide. Freud hits the morphine several times. He also gazes repeatedly at his own cyanide capsule. He touches a handkerchief to his pained face. In a hallucination, he sees himself as a little boy who approaches his older self and grabs, hard, at his aching cheeks. Freud refers to his oral prosthesis, which daughter Anna alone is allowed to minister to. Anna is at work, teaching a university course, and Lewis must comfort Freud as the prosthesis is yanked from his mouth, as Freud bleeds profusely. Lewis is tender to Freud in this scene. His tenderness is another manifestation of his faith.
For me, Freud’s Last Session was merely a five out of a possible ten stars. I like looking at well-made images, and this film did not deliver for me. I believe in God but this film made me doubt the existence of cinematographers. Just about every scene, including scenes shot outside in daylight, is dark – and not the dark of, say, a German expressionist film, where darkness is put to good aesthetic use. This was the dull, blurry, sleep-inducing darkness of a room where someone needs to stand up and switch on a decent lamp.
A good two-hander, that is, a film focused on two actors, creates tension and a desire to see what happens next strictly through dialogue. Freud’s Last Session’s choppy script never created that tension. Freud blurts out random arguments against belief in the existence of God, and Lewis gazes in a bemused fashion. There’s no challenging back-and-forth as in a tennis match, no sense of “Wow! How will he respond to that?”
The film, rather than focusing on a thrilling, polished debate, interrupts the conversation and switches to flashbacks, dream sequences, and a subplot concerning Anna Freud. C. S. Lewis enters a forest and sees a distant light and a magical deer. He has a flashback of trench warfare. Freud daydreams of his high life in Vienna. He walks into applause and is awarded the Goethe prize. He hallucinates sitting in a wheelchair, being pushed past a series of erotic statuary. He has a flashback of psychoanalyzing his own daughter Anna, who details for him a sadomasochistic sexual fantasy. Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) is depicted as an unsmiling drudge obsessed with her father’s greatness and her role, essential, she is sure, in protecting and advancing his greatness. Freud bullies, insults, and dominates Anna, and, the film implies, suppresses her career and her lesbian relationship with Dorothy Burlingham (Jodi Balfour).
The scenes with Anna reveal Freud’s historically accurate arrogance, selfishness, misogyny, ambition, and amorality. That’s a good thing, because the movie itself and the publicity for it is worshipful of Freud. The Anna subplot, though, doesn’t go anywhere interesting; in a final scene Anna and her lover Dorothy sit, stiffly, across from Freud and stare at him balefully. This stare-off is no dramatic crescendo. It just looks like an awkward moment on public transportation. It would have been better for this film to dramatize Freud’s darker qualities in his debate with Lewis rather than in an Anna subplot.
The publicity for Freud’s Last Session is idolatrous and elitist. Freud and Lewis are repeatedly referred to as great minds, great intellectuals, the best minds, etc. All this talk of great minds coming down to educate the masses sounds like something out of the past, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. “Hey! I can introduce you to the thoughts of people superior to yourself! That will clear up this God thing for you!”
In place of the hagiography of Freud’s Last Session, let’s get real, and talk a bit about how the real Freud and the real Lewis differ from those presented onscreen. Understanding them both better brings us closer to their arguments about God. Their actual biographies deepen and complicate their respective positions.
Sigmund Freud wanted both fame and power. Like other ambitious people, he cultivated a marketable image. He sold himself, quite explicitly, as a “conquistador” – his word – who defeated the ignorant masses and, like Prometheus, brought cleansing and enlightening fire to benighted lesser mortals. You can hear Sigmund Freud deliver a truncated version of this self-flattering, mythical, hero’s origin story here.
Was Freud a true scientist, and was his atheism founded on firm scientific principles? No, and no. Freud “started out with a theory and then worked backward, seeking out tidbits to reinforce his beliefs … ‘Freud passed himself off as a scientist. He was very sensitive to objections and would simply laugh at an objection and claim the person making it was psychologically ill,'” according to Freud biographer and Berkeley Professor Frederick Crews.
“There is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas,” writes Crews. “From a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead both as a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy … No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory,” writes Berkeley’s Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished psychology Professor John F. Kihlstrom. “One of the main reasons for the decline of psychoanalysis is that the ideas of Freud and his followers have gained little empirical support. Freud’s theoretical model of the mind and of child development has been challenged and refuted by a wide range of evidence … The absence of solid and persuasive evidence for the theory may be the consequence of its self-imposed isolation from the empirical sciences. The philosopher Karl Popper considered psychoanalysis to be a pseudo-science because it has produced so many hypotheses that cannot be refuted empirically,” writes McGill psychiatry Professor Joel Paris.
And there’s more. Freud wasn’t very nice. He and his ideas did real harm to real people. See for example the disastrous impact of Freud’s ideas on Emma Eckstein and Ernst Fleischl von Marxow. And Freud was no lone conquistador. There were others before him and his contemporaries who were working on the same questions and attempting similar solutions. “A huge slice of Freud’s work is simply plagiarism,” as a reviewer of the Crews’ Freud bio puts it.
Yes, Freud remains influential. No, that influence is not an example of applied science. Armand Nicholi was correct when he stated that “To this day, Freud is the atheist’s touchstone … Sigmund Freud does not believe that a universal moral law exists.” Exactly because of Freud’s continued influence, it is important to understand the pseudo-science he cited to support his atheism. To understand that, we must make a short foray into the history of anthropology.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is said, made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist. Darwin, champions of this flawed idea say, eliminated any need for a creator. Freud eliminated any need for Judeo-Christian morality that guided and enhanced lives through moral behavior. The psychoanalyst would replace the priest, the judge, and the healer. That proposed replacement is the key to the 2,000 religious tchotchkes cluttering Freud’s office and, now, museum. In Freud’s Last Session, when Lewis challenges Freud’s ability to differentiate one image of a saint from another, Freud retorts that he is familiar with religious iconography because of his “art appreciation.” The movie seems to be implying that Freud is yearning for something he has rejected, religious faith, including the faith of his beloved Catholic nanny.
No. Those 2,000 Buddhas and Hanumans and pharaohs were not primarily about “art appreciation.” They were trophies, comparable to a hunter’s stuffed tiger or gorilla-hand ashtray. Freud was showing off what he had contempt for, what he killed, what he conquered, and all that he replaced. All the mystical power inherent in that statuary now accrued to him, the new and improved moral arbiter, mythmaker, judge, and healer.
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution influenced nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropologists. Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), the “father of anthropology,” took the idea of evolution and applied it to human beings. In the same way that life moved from, say, fish to reptiles to mammals to humans, human evolution moved from savages to barbarians to civilization. Victorian gentlemen, like Tylor himself, occupied the top of the evolutionary ladder. Material culture, the things people owned and made, helped place humans in a lower or higher evolutionary position.
Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), author of The Golden Bough, also applied an evolutionary model to humans. In Frazer’s paradigm, the lowest level of human evolution was one where humans practiced magic. After that, they evolved into the religious stage. At the pinnacle of human development was science, when humanity finally left religion behind. “Frazer … viewed his anthropological work as exposing the rotten foundations of religion. He came to see a primitive propensity towards human sacrifice as at the wellspring of both Judaism and Christianity. He advanced a theory of humanity progressing through three stages: magic, religion, and science. In this scheme, religion was marked off as an outmoded way of thinking. In his studies of the Old Testament, likewise, Frazer sought to expose the savage beneath the sacred,” writes Timothy Larsen, Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College. Frazer “used ethnographic facts to try and knock the last nail in the coffin of religion in the name of objective science,” writes Robert Ackerman, Frazer’s biographer.
Today we appreciate scholarly pioneers like Tylor and Frazer, but we don’t accept their ideas uncritically, any more than surgeons practice surgery as surgeons did in the nineteenth century. Tylor and Frazer, for example, were armchair scholars. Neither had much interest in actually interacting with the people they diagnosed as lower down on the evolutionary ladder, an evolutionary ladder whose pinnacle they themselves occupied. Frazer gathered much of his material from questionnaires he sent to imperial personnel and missionaries. No doubt his imperial informants had some biases; no doubt their ability to understand the colonized peoples they dominated was limited. Frazer famously claimed, “I have never met a savage in my life.”
In 1914, Bronislaw Malinowski didn’t just meet, but he began to live with the people the Darwin-inspired evolutionists dismissed as “savages.” The so-called “savages” – a word Malinowski uses also – had reasons for doing what they did, reasons that armchair scholars could never begin to guess at. Malinowski was no saint, as his shocking fieldwork diaries reveal, but his focus on living with the people you write about and discovering their reasons for doing what they do changed anthropology forever, and turned people like Burnett and Frazer into historical footnotes rather than living role models.
Unfortunately, the idea of applying Darwinian evolution to human beings did not go away quietly. Applying an evolutionary ladder to humans, making some humans low and others high, inevitably morphed into malignant forms of social Darwinism, typified by the monstrous American author, Madison Grant. Grant’s atheist evolutionary model called for “elimination of the unfit,” that is those lowest down on the evolutionary ladder. Hitler called Grant’s 1916 book Passing of the Great Race, his “Bible.” The defense at the Nuremberg Trials cited Passing in attempts to exculpate Nazis.
Sigmund Freud was influenced by Tylor and Frazer. He takes the outmoded and disreputable concept of a human evolutionary ladder, in which savages are low down, peasants are in the middle, and Victorian gentlemen like Tylor, Frazer, and Freud himself are at the top, as accurate. With this inspiration, Freud went on to pen one of the wackiest and least scientific books ever written. Totem and Taboo articulates Freud’s case for atheism. He cites Frazer dozens of times. He cites Tylor, as well as Darwin, several times. Freud is basing his case for atheism on scholarship considered, today, not only outdated and inaccurate, but inescapably racist.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud argues that our distant ancestors lived in a primal horde. The dominant male had sex with all the females and would not allow other males access. These other males rose up, killed, and ate the father. “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father.” Religion emerged as a system in which those who killed and ate their father entered into “a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect … longing for the father is the root of all religion.”
Humans living since that event, and all of us today, have, through some supernatural process, memories of this event. We may remember this event through a “collective mind,” a “psychical endowment,” or through “psychical continuity.” And that is why we believe in God.
Christ’s “mythical” death on the cross, Freud insists, is just one example of Freud’s theory. Christ – who never existed but was only a myth – died on the cross to redeem mankind from the sin of killing and eating the ancestral patriarch. Christ is no different from Dionysus or any other mythical Pagan deity.
Is Freud’s position “science”? Today scholars reject Sir James Frazer’s dying and rising god theory; it’s been debunked by scholarly works like Tryggve Mettinger’s The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East. “Frazer is an embarrassment,” writes Robert Ackerman, Frazer’s biographer. “No one wants him for a professional ancestor.” The historical consensus is that Jesus was a real person, and the Romans crucified him. In other words, both Frazer and Freud were incorrect in their understanding of Jesus as a mythical figure.
It’s not just Freud’s departure from facts that is problematical. Freud’s attitude repels. Freud saw savages, mentally ill people, and children as comparable. The subtitle of Totem and Taboo was On Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Savages – Africans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines – needed to improve and become civilized like Freud. Mentally ill people needed to become healthy. Children needed to mature. All these inferior people, savages, mentally ill people, and children would reach their best state by becoming more like Freud, and by abandoning any belief in God. Belief in God, for Freud, was a badge of savagery, a mental illness, and childish. He, Freud, was the civilized, mentally healthy, adult “cure” for religious faith.
Religion did not offer a rational moral system. Rather, it was an artifact of savagery “It may begin to dawn on us that the taboos of the savage Polynesians are after all not so remote from us … the moral and conventional prohibitions by which we ourselves are governed may have some essential relationship with these primitive taboos.” Custom, morality, and law are comparable to “the obsessional prohibitions of neurotics.” When Christians are Jews avoid a behavior they understand to be immoral, they are merely reacting to their ancestral memory of killing and eating an oppressive ancestral patriarch.
In his atheism, no less than too many New Atheists today, Freud was no representative of science. He was an arrogant bigot who invented his own mythology that relied on supernatural phenomenon: some magical force that causes every human on the planet to retain a memory of the primal horde’s patricidal, cannibal meal. We don’t just remember that cannibal meal, we are controlled by that subconscious memory. We don’t realize this, but Freud does. Freud alone can save us. Freud invented his own myth and ordained himself as its high priest.
Freud was his own messiah, against his own world-destroying enemy. He was a deeply flawed Messiah, as his obsessive hostility to Christianity blinded him to the Beast rising against him. As Nazism rose, Freud insisted, in 1930, that “a nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad.” “In 1937 the French analyst Rene Laforgue traveled to Vienna to urge Freud to leave and was shocked by Freud’s attitude toward the Nazis. ‘He responded almost with contempt,’ Laforgue recalled. ‘The Nazis? I am not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy.’ Astonished, I asked him just what enemy was in question, and I heard him reply: ‘Religion. the Roman Catholic Church,'” reports Todd Dufresne, in The Late Sigmund Freud.
- S. Lewis is a direct contrast to Freud, in both the scholarly support for his conversion to Christianity, and the personality of the man. In Freud’s Last Session, a flustered Lewis sputters to Freud that he believes the Gospels are true because no myth would be written so badly. Freud is able to dismiss this argument, “You are convinced of Christ’s existence because of bad storytelling.” That exchange is intellectually lame.
Let me walk you through what Lewis should have been allowed to say in Freud’s Last Session. We are a literate society. We run on printed words. We are not a premodern, traditional, oral society and we don’t understand how oral societies worked. Spoken words are taken very seriously in premodern, traditional, oral societies. This is true the world over. As Malinowski described, the Trobriand Islanders of the South Pacific had the same genres of narrative that we have. They differentiated between myths, legends, and fairy tales. For such people, the difference between each genre is almost a matter of law. To present a myth as a fairy tale would be like breaking the law. Such a confusion of genres would violate the cultural scaffolding, the skeleton of the tribe. There were times and places where one could tell one genre, and where one absolutely could not. There were even personages who could tell one genre, and personages who could not. Did such societies rigorously differentiate between the narrative conventions of one genre and another? Absolutely they did.
To say that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not myths, but, rather, are reportage, that is a non-fiction account of true events, is to state a fact supported by scholarship in study of narrative. This was scholarship that Lewis, as a teacher and eventually a professor at world-class universities, knew perfectly well. Not only did Lewis know the conventions of various narrative genres; Lewis was multilingual and he knew these traditional narratives in their original tongues, including ancient Greek.
As Lewis said, “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage … or else, some unknown writer … without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic realistic narrative.”
Scholarship on narrative is a lot less sexy than sons rising up and killing and eating their father and then having sex with the women of the tribe. But for those intellectually curious persons interested in how narrative scholarship can be applied to the Gospels, two excellent resources are The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition and Lord or Legend?: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, both by Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy.
When it comes to reliable scholarship as applied to the Gospels, Lewis was the representative of science, and Freud was the representative of one atheist’s arrogant, self-serving myth. How do the two men compare in terms of personality?
Freud was his mother’s pet. Freud’s sister Anna, like many other middle class girls, was taking piano lessons. “Though Sigmund’s room was not near the piano, the sound disturbed him. He appealed to my mother to remove the piano if she did not wish him to leave the house altogether.” Anna was forced to give up the piano. This stance reportedly continued throughout Freud’s life. “There was never a piano in the Berggasse and not one of his children learnt to play an instrument. This was unusual in Vienna then, and would probably be thought unusual today: because to be able to play the piano is considered to be an essential part of middle-class education.”
In contrast, according to reports by people who knew him well, C. S. Lewis was patient when his writing was interrupted. Douglas Gresham is Lewis’ stepson. As a child, Lewis took the nickname “Jack,” from his pet dog who had been killed by a car. Like most people, Gresham called Lewis “Jack.”
Gresham reports that “Jack was someone who would accept interruption every ten minutes if necessary while he was working very hard on a book without the slightest degree of irritation. He was able to behave as if he believed – which he did – that our own personal work is nowhere near as important as the interruptions to it. The interruptions are the real substance of God’s job for us.”
In several different interviews, Gresham tells and retells his account of meeting C. S. Lewis. It’s an important anecdote that reveals a great deal about Lewis’ character. Gresham’s mother, Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer who traveled to England and met with Lewis, had told her son that he was about to meet the author of the Narnia books.
In one telling of this meeting, Gresham reports, “I was a little American boy who had never seen anyone who was dressed as shabbily as Jack was dressed that day. His baggy gray trousers were scattered with cigarette ash; his shoes (though one could hardly have called them that) were slide-on slippers, the heels of which were crushed; and his jacket was in total shambles, torn holes in the elbows and other tears here and there. His shirt, though, was clean, and the collar of it spread out over the lapels of the jacket.
“Initially I was taken aback and beginning to worry about what our Mommy had gotten us into. And then Jack started to talk. His whole face became a smile and he said ‘Hello, hello, hello! Welcome, welcome!’ His speech, and his eyes glowing with joy, suddenly changed him from a shabby scarecrow into a vibrant and friendly man glowing with wisdom and happiness … I very soon learned to like Jack and later on to love him dearly. Now I miss him all the time. Jack was a pure man, a kind, gentle, and loving man, and all of those qualities were increasingly evident as I grew to know him better.”
In another telling of the same event, Gresham says, “I was convinced that” the author of the Narnia books “would be in silver armor and wearing a crown and be about eight feet tall … Instead of my dream, he was a stooped, balding, professorial looking gentleman with nicotine stains on teeth and fingers. He was a complete disappointment. Within about half a minute, his enormous personality, his warmth, his welcome, and the fact that there was more in this man than you could ever see from outside of him struck me as being something important and I suddenly lost an illusion and gained a very, very good friend and later a wonderful step-father … he was exceptionally wise, enormously charitable, and he had the most amazing sense of humor I’ve ever met … When I talk about this man, most people find it very hard to believe that he was real. He gave away two thirds of his earnings … From Jack I learned the great value to be found in helping others, that helping other people not only rewards those being helped but even more, helps the person doing the helping.” And, “I wasn’t aware that my mother married one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Jack didn’t come across that way at all. He didn’t ever appear to be a great man. He was just Jack.”
“He didn’t ever appear to be a great man.” That’s one thing no one will ever say about Freud.
I’d like to see a movie that dramatizes a fictional meeting between the real Freud and the real Lewis. One, an atheist who creates a myth that elevates himself. The other, a former atheist nudged to faith via, inter alia, narrative scholarship that identifies the Gospels as reportage.
Postscript: I, too, was inspired by Armand Nicholi to make my own humble contribution to the dialogue. After watching PBS’ The Question of God, I shot off a snarky email to one of the panelists, atheist Michael Shermer. To my surprise, he wrote back, and very graciously. We corresponded for a year. My fictionalized memoir, Save Send Delete, was inspired by our exchange.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Good job knocking Freud, though there is more to be said along those lines.
We are not allowed to reveal the inconsistencies and moral failures of progressive heroes. Only heroes of the conservative right shall be perfect — or risk total humiliation and censure.
True that.. And some of us have the bruises to prove it. I really want someone to tear the mask off of John Dewey. His treatment of Anzia Yezierska, a vulnerable immigrant woman, does not look like the behavior of a liberal hero who cares about the common people.
Oh please write a column on John Dewey.
Yes, please do!
His cover up of the sexual abuse of his female patients and the invention of the absurd Seduction Theory is Freud’s greatest offence. He was terrified of poverty and social exclusion. He desperately needed to be recognised and accepted by his peers, the patriarchs in Vienna, and so he lied to them, knowing that they represented the male world that was sexually abusing children.
I trained as a psychiatric nurse in the mid eighties. On my first ward, there was a patient who frequently talked about having been sexually abused. Her father was a professional man, and her account was attributed to Freudian wish-fulfilment fantasy. In the 90’s, when sexual abuse victims started to be given the credence that they deserved, I remembered that woman – and wondered if she had at last had a fair hearing.
The first step towards believing in God, is to accept that we are not He. Freud seems not to have navigated this initial stage.
I think you are right. This is perhaps the most difficult step, springing from the first lie in the Garden.
One of the greatest Freud quotes I have ever read comes from a recently-published and highly iconoclastic collection of his letters. He writes to a friend, declining an invitation to visit him at his summer house, something to the effect that he cannot leave Vienna at that point. He has a patient who was approaching a crisis, and without him she might get better. The gently cynical humor of that comment tells me exactly who Freud was, and that he himself knew it and was unashamed to share it with a friend.
I don’t see that there can be a scientific basis for atheism, because of the creation. We see it, we live in it, we are part of it, we see glimpses of its immensity, and, thanks to science, we see more and more of its astonishing detail.
Creation requires a Creator. As Hebrew 3:4 says: “Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.”
And thanks for the review Dr.,G, though I won’t be watching the movie
The existence of an Almighty Creator is not a scientific question but a philosophical question.
My personal belief is if God does exist then he must be beyond science, beyond proof, he must be taken on faith. He must be ineffable and beyond matter and energy, And he must be a form of energy or consciousness thoroughly different from anything we know of as consciousness.
It is important to differentiate between basic atheism and militant atheism. Basic atheism does not deny the existence of God, it does not concern itself with disproving God, anymore than it concerns itself with disproving angels. Basic atheism is not militant atheism. Militant atheism denies the existence of God. Simple, basic, atheism simply says there is no evidence or proof of God, anymore than there is evidence or proof of angels or ghosts, therefore I will simply live my life according to the evidence, if you on the other hand wish to believe in God that’s up to you, it’s your right and your choice.
“The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments that have ever been offered on this subject.
Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God is not only an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man’s worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason, but of faith.” – Leonard Peikoff
Scientific law and miracles are not mutually exclusive – a miracle is God operating by laws that He has not made accessible to our investigation. A while back, I was thinking about a miracle that seemed, on the face of it, to be in direct conflict with science – the account of the blind man. In John 9:1-6, we read of a man born blind, who was healed when Jesus put mud on his eyes and sent him to wash it off in the pool of Siloam. It is easy to take the details of Biblical accounts for granted, because we’ve heard them so often, but this time, it hit me: Who in their right mind would put mud in someone’s eyes? It could contain bacteria, or parasite, or little bits of grit – under normal circumstances you would have to be completely stupid to do something like that. So what was Jesus doing? My tentative conclusion, since we are told in Genesis 3:19 that we were made from dust, is that the man had no eyeballs, only closed sockets, and that Jesus was not merely healing his eyes, but actually making what was missing from the mud.
What a self indulgent load of B.S. And she still won’t date you.
Hello THX – and welcome back! My problems and questions were more simple I think. I knew there had to be a Creator, as nothing comes from nothing. Even empty space is something – and what we are seeing is so far beyond that. My problem was this. If there is a Creator, does he care about us – can he be good – as the world is so full of injustice and cruelty, and nature is “red in tooth and claw with ravine”? Why would a Creator who cares make it that way?
It was the beauty – specifically the tender beauty of an Autumn sky that told me, as clearly as if it had spoken that it was created by Someone who cares. And I began to look for him, to thank him.
In searching for him, I found the answers to my questions – all there in the first chapters of Genesis. No wonder “the world” is determined that we should see it as a “creation myth”, so we miss not only what it explains, but also the hope it holds out.
For example, please please read the last verses of Genesis chapter 1. What do they tell us about how the world was created? Was nature created “red in tooth and claw”?
THX: “My personal belief is if God does exist then he must be beyond science, beyond proof, he must be taken on faith. He must be ineffable and beyond matter and energy, And he must be a form of energy or consciousness thoroughly different from anything we know of as consciousness.”
You are correct.
But you have a definition for “faith” that is not a biblical understanding of the word. Your definition is “belief WITHOUT evidence.” The biblical definition is closer to “trust.” You and I give TRUST to that which we believe to be true – just as we trust a chair to hold our weight before we sit down.
The first example of the biblical meaning “faith” is Abraham. Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness (Gen. 15:6) That faith was preceded by experiences that persuaded Abraham that he could TRUST God to do and be what He had promised. Abrahams’s faith was based upon evidence and experience.
“It is important to differentiate between basic atheism and militant atheism. Basic atheism does not deny the existence of God, it does not concern itself with disproving God, anymore than it concerns itself with disproving angels. Basic atheism is not militant atheism. Militant atheism denies the existence of God.”
Kent is right. Your definition of “basic atheism” is contradictory. “Atheism” means “no god” or “without god.” Your definition is closer to agnosticism. Agnosticism can be searching or indifferent. The searcher wants to know, but honestly admits he does not. The indifferent does not concern himself with the issue at all.
Militant atheism is a firm FAITH there is no god. It is grounded in a confident assertion that reality excludes the possibility of God and finds no merit in arguments otherwise. The reason militant atheists are so emotional about the issue is because they WISH God did not exist because they hate him. I think this position accurately reflects your stance, unless, of course, I misunderstand you.
I am not a militant atheist, where have I shown emotional hatred towards Christians or Jews?
Criticizing Christianity, criticizing religion, is not hatred. Pointing out horrible and horrendous acts done by Christians in the name of what they believed to be Christian is not hatred.
There have been Christians who have interpreted Holy Scripture as condoning slavery, misogyny, Apartheid, persecution and massacres of infidels and heretics. These are historical facts. Why is it that when Islam is criticized it’s considered legitimate but when Christianity is criticized it’s called hatred by you and other Christians?
You show no emotional hated towards Christians, but you slander and mock their beliefs.
Criticizing Christianity is not hatred – agreed. It is also valid.
Pointing out horrendous acts done by Christians is valid – agreed; but you profess to know their inner motives and attribute their religion as the motivation of their actions, even when often these horrendous acts are done in contravention to the tenets of Christianity. That is not valid.
Islam is a horrendous religion. Its followers commit horrendous acts as worship in accordance with their scriptures. The same cannot be said of Christians.
THX: “I am not a militant atheist, where have I shown emotional hatred towards Christians or Jews?”
Militant atheism is a firm FAITH there is no god. It is grounded in a confident assertion that reality excludes the possibility of God and finds no merit in arguments otherwise.
Do you not hold this faith? I think you do.
Personally and in all honesty, when I’m feeling confident and efficacious I don’t pray or ask for the help of God or a beings in a higher realm. But when I’m feeling really bad about life I do wish and even pray for a higher power.
Like I’ve written here before I have had three very powerful, uncanny, mystical experiences. And I’m not going to deny those experiences. They were wonderful, ecstatic, exhilarating, even scary, but scary in an AWE-INSPIRING way.
I have never found any rational, scientific, secular, explanation for them and I doubt I ever will or can. These experiences were beyond science, beyond matter and energy as we know them, these experiences were ineffable. I will also say that these experiences were beyond formal and doctrinal religion. Most people who have been declared clinically dead and then brought back to life and reported an out of body Near Death Experience never go back to formal and doctrinal religion, it becomes stifling and suffocating to them. They report that the Being of Light they encountered is vastly different from anything formal and doctrinal religion speaks of.
They report that the after-life is ineffable and words do not exist here in this dimension to describe it.
THX:
Your definition of Basic Atheism is so close to the definition of agnosticism, why not just agree you are skeptical and therefore an agnostic ?
As for no proof of God, while it. Is true that science cannot definitively prove He exists, we can employ logic and infer God’s existence from the following: 1. the indirect physical evidence (design & fine tuning) and, 2. the argument that everything that begins to exist has a cause (our universe) and therefore the ultimate cause of everything must be eternal, uncreated, intelligent and also transcend space, time & matter.
I would therefore argue we have, at the very least, a preponderance of evidence which points to the existence of God.
How might the modern atheist refute this ?
Dear Kent, the argument from design has been refuted many times. Wha the argument from design basically claims is that the precise orderliness of the universe requires a designer but this is a non-sequitur. It does not follow that because matter and energy follow their nature with precision that that precision is willed by a God.
A is A, matter and energy are what they are by their nature, by the nature of their existence, existence is identity, to exist is to be something specific with a precise , specific nature and identity, and whatever something is it cannot escape or violate its natural identity. Matter and energy are eternal, they eternally combine and recombine into different entities but they have no beginning and no end.
“Causality, in the Objectivist viewpoint, is a fact independent of consciousness, whether God’s or man’s. Order, lawfulness, regularity do not derive from a cosmic consciousness (as is claimed by the religious “argument from design”). Nor is causality merely a subjective form of thought that happens to govern the human mind (as in the Kantian approach). On the contrary, causality—for Objectivism as for Aristotelianjsm is a law inherent in being qua being. To be is to be something—and to be something is to act accordingly.
Natural law is not a feature superimposed by some agency on an otherwise ‘‘chaotic” world; there is no possibility of such chaos. Nor is there any possibility of a “chance” event, if “chance” means an exception to causality. Cause and effect is not a metaphysical afterthought. It is not a fact that is theoretically dispensable. It is part of the fabric of reality as such.
One may no more ask: who is responsible for natural law (which amounts to asking: who caused causality?) than one may ask: who created the universe? The answer to both questions is the same: existence exists…. CONTINUED
Actually, the arguments from design have never adequately been refuted. They have been mocked and slandered – but never refuted. You mischaracterize Intelligent Design theory in your 2nd sentence. It is about a lot more than “Oooooh! So complicated!
Would it not be reasonable to study the scientific evidence for God from physicists, philosophers and accomplished members of the hard sciences rather than objectivists? Why not, THX?
Stephen C. Meyer has a broad internet presence as does John Lennox. Both are easy to find with an internet search.
Doing that would show you are not a “militant atheist” but an honest skeptic.
“Dominating philosophy from Plato to Hume was the supernaturalistic version. In this view, existence is a product of a cosmic consciousness, God. This idea is implicit in Plato’s theory of Forms and became explicit with the Christian development from Plato. According to Christianity (and Judaism), God is an infinite consciousness who created existence, sustains it, makes it lawful, then periodically subjects it to decrees that flout the regular order, thereby producing “miracles.” Epistemologically, this variant leads to mysticism: knowledge is said to rest on communications from the Supreme Mind to the human, whether in the form of revelations sent to select individuals or of ideas implanted, innately or otherwise, throughout the species.
The religious view of the world, though it has been abandoned by most philosophers, is still entrenched in the public mind. Witness the popular question “Who created the universe?”—which presupposes that the universe is not eternal, but has a source beyond itself, in some cosmic personality or will. It is useless to object that this question involves an infinite regress, even though it does (if a creator is required to explain existence, then a second creator is required to explain the first, and so on). Typically, the believer will reply: “One can’t ask for an explanation of God. He is an inherently necessary being. After all, one must start somewhere.” Such a person does not contest the need of an irreducible starting point, as long as it is a form of consciousness; what he finds unsatisfactory is the idea of existence as the starting point. Driven by the primacy of consciousness, a person of this mentality refuses to begin with the world, which we know to exist; he insists on jumping beyond the world to the unknowable, even though such a procedure explains nothing. The root of this mentality is not rational argument, but the influence of Christianity. In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.” – Leonard Peikoff
I may be wrong, but I will venture to say that when we struggle and have strong passions about our sufferings, we sometimes choose words that describe the experience in terms that better describe our feelings rather than what our rational minds would choose when relieved of the suffering.
And suffering is a better teacher than comfort.
“And suffering is a better teacher than comfort.”
This is a statement that I often think about. Pain and suffering will not teach the stupid blockhead anything unless the stupid blockhead sits down and makes an effort to learn from his pain and suffering. Unless the blockhead asks the right questions and arrives at the right answers, and changes his behavior for the better, but isn’t that called reasoning and rationality?
How about happiness and pleasure? Surely they can be powerful teachers too but only if the individual thinks properly, reasons properly, about how they achieved their happiness and pleasure.
Unfortunately, many if not most people, rarely change their character defects even after their character defects cause them much pain and suffering. Deeply ingrained character virtues and character flaws are very difficult to get rid of, it’s who we are at the most fundamental level. It is possible but it requires a monumental, constant, awareness, discipline, and dedication, sometimes for decades to get rid of a deeply entrenched character flaw.
There’s a wonderful book called “The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change” by Bernie Zilbergeld that delves into the difficulties of psychological change. I highly recommend it.
“It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same.” – Isadora Duncan
THX, I agree with you that we are all born who we are, and that “change” is simply that which brings out of us what is already there but latent.
Perhaps it would be better to say that suffering is more likely to bring out the best in us.
“But when I’m feeling really bad about life I do wish and even pray for a higher power”.
I think I’m calling B.S. here. Unless you have had some sort of inexplicable encounter I can only say these are your death bed confessions and you are trying to get in good with the big guy.
And she still won’t date you.
I’m curious about why you believe the reports of those claiming to have experienced a Being of Light in NDEs, but you discount the reports of those claiming to have experienced direct GOD encounters in daily life.
BTW it’s true that people going through NDE “never go back to formal and doctrinal religion”. But that doesn’t mean what you think.
Once we understand that scientism wears the garb of science while being a faith-based religion, then all makes sense.
Brilliantly written, one should always appreciate those who argue their case with such passion and literary brilliance as dr Goska.
Quote – allegedly Freud – “‘The Nazis? I am not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy.’ Astonished, I asked him just what enemy was in question, and I heard him reply: ‘Religion. the Roman Catholic Church,’”
Wow … just wow.
Kind of sums up the Left’s whole problem in one sentence …
God has given man free will. For that to be a real gift, God Himself has to stand aside, providing just enough clues to His existence to encourage those who want Him to pursue getting to know Him, whilst others can build a life which completely excludes Him. The Bible invites us to test God’s reality empirically, to act as if the hypothesis of God were true in order to find out whether it is. “Taste and see that the Lord is good”, Ps.34:8
Goska wrote a wonderful review … and saved us from wasting our time on the propaganda …
… anyone who has read CS Lewis’ corpus of published work …
Knows the man was a genius on another level.
… And he was ‘good’ … which does not mean he was not dangerous (those who know – know what I mean by that)
As for Freud … I’ve read a few short clips. Sorry. Could not care less.
… If you want to read an ‘atheist’ try Marvin Harris the anthropologist or any science fiction writer – Arthur Clarke or Isaac Asimov … skip the professional ideologues like Dawkins.
… at least you’ll learn something about anthropology or science – if not philosophy of law.
But no Atheist can explain how anything works. Nor can they explain why ‘Atheism’ – like Communism, Socialism, and every other godless ism … fails so predictably and spectacularly … at least from the viewpoint of normal people.
Atheism boils down to “I love my sin and I won’t give it up” and “I hate ‘god’ because he won’t give me a lottery ticket.” It’s shallow, selfish, self-centered, and simplistic.
… It’s also anti-science.
Their only argument is … G-d does not perform tricks on demand …
… while they cannot explain their own existence.
G-d save us from the selfish …
Thomas Edison’s SELFISH love of science, technology, and invention gave mankind the phonograph, motion picture, automatic telegraph, and many other revolutionary inventions that made the world a better place and permanently raised the standard of living for all mankind.
Edison pursued science, technology, and invention not out of a sense of self-sacrifice for mankind, not out of a sense of duty to God or duty to be his brother’s keeper, but out of his SELFISH joy in discovery and invention.
The same SELFISH motivation has been at the heart of all the scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and businessmen who have raised the standard of living for all mankind.
What did Mother Teresa do to permanently raise the standard of living for all mankind?
She lived a life a self=denial, because she “selfishly” believed that doing so would get her something better.
And, believe it or not, some people get a charge out of helping others. That is normal, THX.
I never said helping DESERVING others is not a virtue. I never said helping deserving people is not thrilling and wonderful and a cause of profound happiness.
Helping someone who has fallen get back on their feet is a wonderful experience.
But helping deserving others, when you can, and to the extent that you can, is by its very nature a SECONDARY virtue, wholly dependent on the PRIMARY virtue of PRODUCTION.
You cannot help a starving person by giving him food to eat unless you first have produced enough food to feed yourself and then produced extra food to give to the hungry person that is unable to produce his own food.
Charity is completely dependent on surplus production.
Mother Teresa could not have practiced her self-denial charity without the producers donating their surplus wealth to her first. Those producers were not practicing self-denial but seeking self-interested profit, gain, and pursuing their personal happiness.
What would Heaven be like? A place where every man can be productive and independent of others. With a healthy and earned pride in able to provide for himself and achieve his personal happiness.
What would Hell be like? To have to be a complete invalid and be completely dependent on others for your survival. To be a chronic charity case is humiliating and depressing to any self-respecting person.
People do not need to be encouraged to be selfish, or, more properly, to love themselves. God calls us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves – so self-love is a natural assumption.
But I think your definition of “selfishness” is a specialized term for the objectivist religion.
When you try to shoehorn Thomas Edison’s motivation (mind reading again) into selfishness, you reveal your philosophy is skewed. You are full of sound and fury about reason and evidence, but you signify a cult religion by doing this.
“It’s easy to promote something in theory. But to walk the talk, you must be prepared for everyone to live up to that theory in practice. And if you’re not, then either you are a hypocrite, or your moral theory is flawed, in the first place.
If everyone were Mother Teresa, we’d all inhabit a material and spiritual wasteland far worse than anything she faced while walking the streets of Calcutta all those years. And while she may have alleviated the suffering of a few, for a time, remember that she did nothing to lift that civilization out of poverty in any permanent, meaningful way. Only self-interested, profit-seeking, materialistic economic progress – the capitalism Pope Francis hates so much – can ever do that.
Mother Teresa didn’t produce much of anything. She just allows some of us to feel better about ourselves for applauding her. If we’re honest about it, her works spread guilt, not inspiration. Life is about more than the reduction of suffering and pain. It’s about growth, achievement and soaring to ever-new heights. That’s not Mother Teresa’s world. Yet it’s the world she and others like her count on to do what they do.
My idea of a saint? Someone who produces. Producers don’t do what they do for our sake; they do it for themselves, for their own profit, and out of their own desire to be productive. And that’s just fine with me.
The world desperately needs more producers. Charity is perfectly fine. But don’t kid yourself that charity lifts millions out of poverty and disease. Only economic progress does that. And progress arises not from a Mother Teresa-like compulsion to sacrifice. It arises from the best within us: Our desire to live for our own sakes, most of all.” – Michael J. Hurd
THX: Thanks for your earlier reply.
A couple of things:
The Theist’s argument from “design” is about the biological complexity of life.
Fine tuning speaks to our orderly cosmos.
As for the universe, or matter & energy, being eternal – with all do respect, science thoroughly debunked that notion many years ago.. It is settled science that the universe is finite.
Because the universe had a beginning, logic holds that there is a reality beyond it and said reality cannot be constrained by, or subject to, the laws of physics – and that includes time, space and matter.
Finally, the idea that there can be an infinite regression as an explanation for existence is not logical. Logic dictates a First Mover that is eternal and thus uncreated.
Why do you argue against everyone being Mother Teresa? Neither I nor anyone else is advancing that idea. Why create a straw man for yourself, THX?
You say Mother Teresa produced nothing? Full stop, THX. I agree she left no tangible property and produced no widgets, but to dismiss her life’s work as producing nothing?
People like Mother Teresa are desperately needed and worthy of our help and support. She was not a parasite.
THX: “The world desperately needs more producers. Charity is perfectly fine. But don’t kid yourself that charity lifts millions out of poverty and disease.”
Another straw man: Assuming the purpose of charity is to “lift millions out of poverty and disease.”
“Atheism boils down to “I love my sin and I won’t give it up” and “I hate ‘god’ because he won’t give me a lottery ticket.” It’s shallow, selfish, self-centered, and simplistic.”
That about says it all. Atheism and now the new paganism allow people to enjoy and even justify their sins. And a childish, shallow view of G0d is that he is some sort of magical present-dispensing machine Who will grant a person his fondest wishes. Both are absurd, but try to convince some “true believers” of that!
I saw the movie trailer, and thought that could be an interesting story, of course Hollywood fixed that.
Danushka Goshka’s rant against Freud only addressed one aspect of his writings, and should not be mistaken as an informed commentary on his contribution to psychology.
Danushka recognizes how surgical techniques have drastically improved since Victorian times, but does not acknowledge that psychotherapeutic techniques have also drastically improved. Psychoanalytic theory/therapy as put forth by Freud led the way to neo-Freudian theories of the psyche, child development, psychotherapies, and even psychoanalytic neuroscience. For example, one of the new areas in neuroscience is the study of the Default Mode Network active in daydreaming (mind wandering) – that interacts with logical/analytical thinking (Freud’s primary and secondary process thought).
Worth taking a look at these articles:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128164006000109
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15294145.2023.2284697
“The film depicts Freud as an intellectual giant who positions science against faith. Lewis, in contrast, is reduced to sputtering in the face of the great man.”
Of course it does. Science can explain everything, right? Wrong. As a technician and later an engineer I have been working alongside scientists for most of my career, some 37 years out of 43. For the most part, I know none that think science can explain everything. I do know some who think it will eventually explain everything, and some who think that there is no difference between a rock and a human. The Holy Triple-Alpha Process, think Join Mitchell:
-We are stardust
-Billion year old carbon
-We are golden
-Caught in the devil’s bargain
-And we’ve got to get ourselves
-back to the garden
“Freud “started out with a theory and then worked backward, seeking out tidbits to reinforce his beliefs … ‘Freud passed himself off as a scientist. He was very sensitive to objections and would simply laugh at an objection and claim the person making it was psychologically ill,'””
I have worked with many people like this. Science does not shield one from one’s own ego, it makes it worse, because they may hide behind the fig leaf of being an expert. I think it’s a constant battle in research to check and recheck ones priors and biases. Unfortunately, the ego and pressures to publish undermine the process. No one cares about reproducing something old. It’s a pity, because I read a lot of literature on various detector technologies, and when you look at the similar performance graphs and compare them, it looks like scattershot. Reproduction might be the next research gold to mine.
I never knew they were called ‘two handers.’ I love two handers, if done right. Sleuth with Michael Caine and Lawrence Olivier, My Dinner with Andre with Wallace Shaun and Ander Gregory, and perhaps the one that most closely resembles your description of this movie, The Sunset Limited with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. I have not yet seen Freud’s Last Session, so I am going on your description. Thank you for sharing this, and when I get the opportunity I will see the movie myself.
Joni Mitchell reference is wonderful. Her music and poetry was under appreciated even when she was at her most popular. Her best work was greatly helped by Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny.
I loved this review. I had general knowledge of Freud but the biographical details from Dr. Goska were helpful for a fuller historical portrait. Her suggestions for a more accurate historical portrait strike me as sound — I really prefer accurate history to dramatic license about actual people. Since this encounter is fantasy anyway, though, I believe this review taught me far more than the movie could hav.e.
And now, a personal message.I read Save Send Delete years ago, and was quite moved by it. That’s when I started reading your columns in Front Page Mag. When God through Binoculars was published, I suggested it for our Catholic Women’s Book Club and it was a hit! To know after all these years that Michael Shermer was the inspiration for Save Send Delete is so interesting to me because I know of his work through my study of intelligent design and Stephen Meyer’s work, especially Return of the God Hypothesis. Should you ever become interested in that topic, I’d love to talk with you and send you some books! If not, I understand. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not at all scientifically inclined but the authors I’ve read have fascinated me from a history of ideas perspective.
Thank you for your luminous trenchant thoughts and writing and your defense of our faith!