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The Question of God
Both Freud and Lewis wrote prolifically throughout their lives on a wide range of topics, from memoirs and essays to children's stories to grand treatises that explored new psychological frontiers. These 10 readings — five from Freud and five from Lewis — are excerpts from several of their best-known works. The selections lend context for several of the most memorable insights and arguments that each man makes within The Question of God.

Discuss > The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
Discuss > The Life and Work of C.S. Lewis

From the Works of Sigmund Freud
From The Future of an Illusion
(1927) chapter IV
The child's attitude to its father is coloured by a peculiar ambivalence.
From the Works of C.S. Lewis
From Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
(1955) chapter XIV
I gave in, and admitted that God was God ... perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
From the Works of Sigmund Freud
From The Future of an Illusion
(1927) chapter VII and VIII
It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and admit the purely human origins of all the precepts and regulations of civilization.
From the Works of C.S. Lewis
From Mere Christianity
(1952) book 1, chapter 2
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality or Christian morality to Nazi morality.
From the Works of Sigmund Freud
From Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930) chapter II
Sexual love has given us our most intense experience of an overwhelming sensation of pleasure and has thus furnished us with a pattern for our search for happiness.
From the Works of C.S. Lewis
From Mere Christianity
(1952) book 3, chapters 7 & 9
Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive ... And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls of anger.
From the Works of Sigmund Freud
From Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930) chapter VI
The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God. ...
From the Works of C.S. Lewis
From The Four Loves
(1960) chapter VI
Divine gift love in a man enables him to love what is not naturally lovable - lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior, and the sneering.
From the Works of Sigmund Freud
From Moses and Monotheism
(1939) part III, section II, chapter II
I venture to say this: it was one man, the man Moses, who created the Jews.
From the Works of C.S. Lewis
From A Grief Observed
(1961) chapters 1, 2 & 3
Oh, God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell, if it's now doomed to crawl back - to be sucked back - into it?

Copyright © 2004 WGBH Educational Foundation

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