Mere Christianity

Freud The first subject we covered after our second midterm of the spring semester was Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. He wrote this book in eight chapters and we focused on the first two. In the first chapter, Freud discussed something his friend calls an “oceanic feeling”. He connects this “one with everything” feeling to what an infant experiences at a mother’s breast. When nursing, the child can’t distinguish between itself and the breast. It is happy and satisfied. When the breast is taken away and unpleasure is introduced, that is when the infant is pushed to break itself, or its ego, apart from the rest of the world and create an “outside”. It wants to create a “pure pleasure-ego” with the external world being where

Lewis’ Mere Christianity. The book is mostly a compilation of a set of radio talks Lewis gave on BBC between 1941 and 1944. In the first section of his book, Lewis argues that we all have a moral law governing us, regardless of religion. While moral law doesn’t necessarily lead straight to Christianity, Lewis does reason that a moral law like the one we all follow must require someone or something to give said laws. In the second section of his book, Lewis says that the giver of the moral law has to be outside of the essential nature of the universe which rules out pantheism. He rules out polytheism because the gods all have a higher up god that rules them all. He next rules out dualism because the idea of an absolute good and an absolute evil doesn’t work. “Badness is just spoiled goodness” in the sense that badness had to be given existence, intelligence and will and all three of those things are good. He writes that monotheism is the only religious model that would work with our moral law. Next, Lewis writes about his famous dilemma: either Jesus is lying, crazy, or God. He doesn’t come across as the former two so he must be God entirely, not just a good moral teacher. In the third section of his book, he outlines Christian

The family is a very complex community. The family is analogical. We can say the “family is like this” or that “it’s very similar to that” but the family is different from anything else. The family is a linguistic community. Language is a must in the family. We are all born not with a specific language programmed into us but the capability and capacity to learn (this is on the assumption that the person doesn’t have any mental disabilities). The family is natural and ontological. Everyone has a mother and a father, regardless of whether they are alive, dead, abandoned etc. This is something that no will or choice can change and is a natural limit of our freedom since we cannot choose our parents. This is interesting to think about because it is 100% true. No matter how much we want to change it, our biological parents cannot be