The Question of God Quotes

“Freud eventually developed his theory of transference, one that would play a key role in his method of treating emotional disorders and that still today gives us some insight into how we choose both our friends and the person we marry. Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood—particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past. An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us—strong attraction or strong aversion—totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer. We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person—the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh, or some other feature—recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure. *”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing machine”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Does the spiritual worldview hinder functioning or enhance it? Does it provide resources that make our few days on this planet more meaningful? Freud argues that because it is not true, it can’t work. Basing one’s life on an illusion, on a false premise, will make living more difficult. Only the truth can help us confront the harsh realities of life. Lewis, however, argues that the most important reality concerns our relationship with the Person who made us. Until that relationship is established, no accomplishment, no fame or fortune will ever satisfy us. Who is right?”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“He calls religious faith “an attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality . . . and no one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.” Nevertheless, Freud acknowledges that one’s worldview can not only lessen unhappiness, but can also influence the degree of happiness one experiences. He expresses envy that his worldview offers little in this regard.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“The writings of Freud and Lewis help us understand one difficulty we often have in seeing the signposts—namely, our tendency to distort our image of God. One of Freud’s theories that has proved helpful clinically relates to the unconscious process of transference, the tendency to displace feelings from authority figures in our childhood onto those in the present, thus distorting and causing conflict with the present authority. If we possess a strong tendency to displace or transfer feelings from parental authority, especially the father, onto present-day authority figures, how much more might we distort our concept of an Ultimate Authority whom we cannot experience with our senses? If this holds true, we must be careful that our concept of God—whether the God we reject as unbelievers or that we worship as believers—is firmly based on the Creator revealed in history and not on our neurotic distortion of Him.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“What accounts for the profound impact the writings of C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud continue to have on our culture a half century after their deaths? One reason for their impact may be that, whether we realize it or not, we all embrace some form of either the materialist worldview advocated by Freud or the spiritual worldview advocated by Lewis. But there may be more subtle reasons. Perhaps Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves. One part raises its voice in defiance of authority, and says with Freud, “I will not surrender”; another part, like Lewis, recognizes within ourselves a deep-seated yearning for a relationship with the Creator.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“He concludes that one can do only three things about death: “To desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls ‘healthy,’ is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud reminds them that children do not conceptualize or fear death as do adults. He then lists what he thinks adults fear about death: “the horrors of corruption . . . freezing in the ice-cold grave . . . the terrors of eternal nothingness.” He then adds that adults cannot tolerate these fears, “as is proved by all the myths of a future life.” Freud believed that people accepted the religious worldview because of their fear of death and their wish for permanence.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“. I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by the conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering (which a prolonged life would mean) and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Wars demonstrate that our basic impulses have changed little from those of our primitive ancestors, that underneath our civility we are just as uncivilized and savage as ever. Wars show that “our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided (that is, ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primeval man.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Soon after we arrive on this earth, we become aware of the most fundamental fact of our existence—that we won’t be here very long. An average lifespan lasts less than 30,000 days. We sleep a third of that time, so the days we experience number less than 20,000. We may try, but we can’t ever completely deny our mortality. Reminders keep cropping up: classmates fail to return after a summer break; we drive to work on a beautiful spring day, and a line of cars with lights on and a hearse in front suddenly appears; each day’s paper carries numerous obituaries. Though the Psalmist tells us there is wisdom in numbering our days and realizing this world is not our home, the process of becoming aware is extraordinarily painful. The unbelievable brevity of our lives conflicts with our deep-seated yearning for permanence and with our lifelong fear of being separated from those we love—a fear that haunts us from infancy to old age. How do we resolve and come to terms with what Freud called “the painful riddle of death”? Socrates said, “The true philosopher is always pursuing death and dying.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“In his Future of an Illusion, Freud described what life would be like when people rejected the spiritual worldview, perhaps describing what he himself experienced. “They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness . . . they can no longer be the centre of the creation, no longer the object of the tender care on the part of the beneficent Providence . . . And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.” The positive feelings reemerge as one’s concept of God; and the negative feelings as one’s concept of the devil. *”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“people can’t reconcile their suffering with their concept of a loving God, so they conjure up a devil to take the blame. But even the concept of a devil doesn’t let God off the hook. Freud asks, after all, didn’t God create the devil? In Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, “The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God . . . But even so, one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Look around, Freud says, the good as well as the evil suffer. In “The Question of a Weltanschauung, ” Freud writes: “. . . the pronouncements of religion promising men protection and happiness if they would only fulfill certain ethical requirements [have] . . . shown themselves unworthy of belief. It seems not to be the case that there is a Power in the universe which watches over the well-being of individuals with parental care and brings all their affairs to a happy ending . . . Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no distinction between the virtuous and pious and the scoundrel or unbeliever.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Where is God?” He noted that “when you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.” But when Lewis needed Him most, God appeared to be absent. “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become . . . What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“The suggestion is that psycho-analysis, and in particular its assertion that the neuroses are traceable to disturbances in sexual life, could only have originated in a town like Vienna—in an atmosphere of sensuality and immorality foreign to other cities—and that it is simply a reflection, a projection into theory, as it were, of these peculiar Viennese conditions.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“awareness of our mortality causes pain because our most deep-seated need is for permanence and our most pervasive fear is separation from those we love. The Psalmist tells us that there is wisdom in the awareness that our days are numbered (Psalm 90:12). But in that awareness lies pain as well.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud says this commandment, along with “love your enemies,” absolutely bewilders him. He simply cannot understand it. He asks: “Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection . . . If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way . . . He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him . . . But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“There are no ordinary people,” Lewis reminded his audience in an address given at Oxford. He encouraged them “to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.” No one ever talks to “a mere mortal . . . it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors . . . your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“if anyone asked me ‘why do you not believe in God?’ my reply would run something like this . . .” First, the starkness of the universe: “the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold . . . all the forms of life live only by preying upon one another . . . The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain and in pain they mostly die.” Next, in the “most complex creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.” This human history is “a record of crime, war, disease, and terror with just sufficient happiness interposed to give . . . an agonized apprehension of losing it.” In short, “If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Indeed the best thing about happiness itself,” Lewis writes, “is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money . .”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“people tend to seek their happiness primarily in love relationships. But Freud warns that when someone succeeds in finding his main source of happiness in a love relationship, he has “made himself dependent in a most dangerous way on a portion of the external world, namely, his chosen love-object, and exposed himself to extreme suffering if he should be rejected by that object or should lose it through unfaithfulness or death.” As any poet would agree, “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Whereas happiness appears to be very difficult to attain in this life, “unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.” Freud explains: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.” Freud dismisses out of hand the large number of people who find that spiritual resources help free them from this “unrest,” “unhappiness,” and “anxiety.” He calls religious faith “an attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality . . . and no one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Whereas happiness appears to be very difficult to attain in this life, “unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.” Freud explains: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Man is never happy, but spends his whole life striving after something he thinks will make him so,”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right . . . Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Lewis points out that although the moral law does not change over time or from culture to culture, the sensitivity to the law, and how a culture or an individual expresses the law, may vary. For example, the German nation under the Nazi regime obviously ignored the law and practiced a morality the rest of the world considered abominable. Lewis claims that when we assert that the moral ideas of one culture are better than those of another, we are using the moral law to make that judgment. “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another,” Lewis writes “you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other . . . the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are in fact comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.” Lewis concludes that “if your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be true about.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud, however, asserts that ethics and morals come from human need and experience. The idea of a universal moral law as proposed by philosophers is “in conflict with reason.” He writes that “ethics are not based on a moral world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human cohabitation.” In other words, our moral code comes from what humans find to be useful and expedient.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life