Quotes from Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

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.

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.

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.

Recent research by neuroscientists adds a twist here. Evidence exists that the human brain is "hardwired" (genetically programmed) for belief. Whether, if true, this wiring reflects an Intelligence beyond the universe depends on one's worldview. As Lewis states, what we learn from evidence "depends on the kind of philosophy we bring" to the evidence.

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.

Why did Freud write a book about which he had such doubts? We can only conjecture. Peter Gay wrote that "it is highly plausible that some of the impulses guiding Freud's arguments in Totem and Taboo emerged from his hidden life; in some respects the book represents a round in his never finished wrestling bout with Jacob Freud." Gay also mentions that Freud realized he was "publishing scientific fantasies.

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.

Freud asserts that "when a man has once brought himself to accept uncritically all the absurdities that religious doctrines put before him and, even so, overlook the contradictions before them, we need not be greatly surprised at the weakness of his intellect.

We conduct our lives according to our sense of right and wrong. We somehow possess an awareness of what we "ought" to do. When we fail to do what we "ought," a part of our mind we call "conscience" evokes an unpleasant feeling we call "guilt." Is that feeling—present in almost all individuals—an indication of a God-given moral law? Or does it simply reflect what we have been taught by our parents?

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

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.

Man is never happy, but spends his whole life striving after something he thinks will make him so

We have shown that the substance and object of religion is altogether human; we have shown that divine wisdom is human wisdom; that the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind.

had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution

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 . .

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.

In the wider world, we keep hectically busy and fill every free moment of our day with some form of diversion—work, computers, television, movies, radio, magazines, newspapers, sports, alcohol, drugs, parties. Perhaps we distract ourselves because looking at our lives confronts us with our lack of meaning, our unhappiness, and our loneliness—and with the difficulty, the fragility, and the unbelievable brevity 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.

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.

When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father." Thus, God is often depicted as someone to be feared as well as loved.

we possess intense, deep-seated wishes that form the basis for our concept of and belief in God. God does not create us in His image; we create God in our parents' image—or, more accurately, into the childhood image of our father. God exists only in our minds.