Author Topic: Human Life is Fragile but EVERY Life is Valuable (Read 15781 times)

AGelbert · « **Reply #30 on:** August 27, 2014, 08:33:28 pm »

Quote from: agelbert on August 27, 2014, 02:58:20 pm

Ashvin, I suggest you dwell on the subject of guilt. The responses (or lack of them) are quite revealing of the willingness of the debater to be objective about the human condition and the disposition (or lack of it) of the debater to seek the Truth.

Ashvin said, "Very good suggestion! Here is a great paper about that. The following are two snippets, the rest can be found at the link."

http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAF006.pdf

CIVILIZATION AND ITS “MALCONTENT”:
SIGMUND FREUD AND THE PROBLEM OF GUILT
The Second in an Occasional Series on the West’s
Most Influential Thinkers
by C. Wayne Mayhall

SYNOPSIS

Sigmund Freud despised religion, theism, and the Bible, and, although his goal was to eradicate the problem of guilt, he is ultimately responsible for confusing it. His primary motivation for psychoanalysis was to transform guilt into neurosis and sin into sickness. Freud believed that guilt must be eliminated through self-analysis and that our struggle to transcend the stifling codes of culture is inescapable unless we are willing to break out of our moral prison. Freud viewed himself as a destroyer of conventions whose purpose was to dissociate guilt from sin, making it a problem for science rather than faith.

A careful study of Freudian thought reminds us that as long as people continue to believe in a view that relegates the problem of guilt to biological determinism and ignores individual responsibility, Freud is with us. Secular thinkers, for better or worse, consider him an architect of the modern mind, whereas Christian critics name him an unholy builder of said modern mind, in the line of Marx and Darwin.

...

GUILT AS MAN’S BASIC PROBLEM

In the summer of 1997, exactly one-hundred years beyond Freud’s first intense interaction with religious phenomena and the beginning of his own self-analysis in 1897, after two weeks visiting Nazi Labor and death camps in Germany and Poland, I came by Eurail to the foot of the Heumoz mountains in the Swiss Alps. There I boarded an incline for a ride up into the heart of Christian apologist Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship11 for a time of intense study and the opportunity, I hoped, to get my mind off the absurdity of Hitler’s “final solution.”

I arrived at the cozy retreat to discover it was between student summer sessions and virtually
abandoned. Alone in the Fellowship library, surrounded by hundreds of volumes of the thoughts of great thinkers, I came across a seventy-six-page book humbly titled Freud, 12 written by theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony.13 For the next few days, beginning very early in the morning and lasting long into the night, I explored his thesis that the central problem Freud confronted was the nature and character of guilt and the development of a method for its eradication.

As I write this article, a decade after that experience, I realize why I was so consumed by Rushdoony’s perspective. Five years prior to that trip to L’Abri, in 1992, I was an upstart professional freelance writer plying my trade for national magazines when I was commissioned by Harper’s magazine to do research on white supremacist groups in America. As I combed through stacks of their propaganda riddled with the rhetoric of hate and destruction, I was shocked when I came across a pamphlet blatantly denying that mass extermination of Jewish people had even occurred. I pledged right there and then to visit the sites of concentration camps myself one day, so that I could see it for myself.

At L’Abri, after fulfilling my pledge to wade through historical remnants of Nazi sewers of depravity, alone in that quiet place, my thoughts and experiences coalesced. I realized clearly the guilt of the white racist and the German fascist were cut from the same cloth, one denying the other fabricating a death machine responsible for the slaughter of millions of innocent men, women, boys, and girls. I saw in Rushdoony’s reasoning, how Freud’s desire to eradicate religion under the banner of illusion and eliminate guilt through the language of biological determinism let them both off the hook, with neither God to judge nor conscience to condemn them.

http://www.equip.org/PDF/JAF006.pdf

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Author Topic: Human Life is Fragile but EVERY Life is Valuable (Read 15781 times)

AGelbert

CIVILIZATION AND ITS “MALCONTENT”: THE PROBLEM OF GUILT

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