Dr Paul Allen

English: Sigmund Freud (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The collapse of the barrier between popular culture and decadence has released a toxic mudslide of vulgarity into the nation’s family rooms—and just about everywhere else. There is almost no remote corner of this culture that is not marked by the toleration of vulgarity, or the outright celebration of depravity. Lee Siegel has seen this reality, and he doesn’t like it. “When did the culture become so coarse?,” he asks, adding: “It’s a question that quickly gets you branded as either an unsophisticated rube or some angry culture warrior.” Siegel wants us all to know that he is neither unsophisticated nor a culture warrior. In his recent feature essay in The Wall Street Journal , “ America the Vulgar,” Siegel recites his cultural bona fides. As he relates, “I miss a time when there were powerful imprecations instead of mere obscenity—or at least when sexual innuendo , because it was innuendo, served as a delicious release of tensi

Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking cigar. Español: Sigmund Freud, fundador del psicoanálisis, fumando. Česky: Zakladatel psychoanalýzy Sigmund Freud kouří doutník. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) But He said to them, “Why are you so fearful ? How is it that you have no faith?” And they feared exceedingly …(Mark 4:40–41a). “I don’t need your religion,” hearers of the Christian message sometimes reply. “That’s just a crutch for those who are too weak to cope with life on their own.” So goes one of the most frequently heard objections to the faith. How should we respond? The roots of this response go back to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Many of the leading thinkers of that period were skeptical as to the existence of God . But as means of travel improved and Westerners began to move about the world, an undeniable truth began to make itself clear—there was religious activity everywhere. Man, it seemed, was incurably religious. This presented a problem for

Image via Wikipedia For a century and a half secular humanist scholars predicted the demise of religion, which Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud dismissed respectively as the opiate of the people, and a mental illness. But the materialistic utopia never materialized. Instead, people have awakened to “spirituality.” Not God but materialistic secular humanism is  dead . One of the Death of God theologians, David Miller (whom we did not read in class) later gave the game away. In his book,  The New Polytheism  (1974) ,  he made the shocking claim that “at the death of God we would see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.”  The Postmodern deconstructionist, Mark Taylor, observed that “the 21st century will be dominated by religion in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago.” A secular literature conference in 2006 boasted the title  God is Undead: Post-Secular Notions in Contemporary Literature and Theory  and included a lecture entitled “Secularism in

Image via Wikipedia The function of the conscience in ethical decision making tends to complicate matters for us.  The commandments of God are eternal, but in order to obey them we must first appropriate them internally.  The “organ” of such internalization has been classically called the conscience. Some describe this nebulous inner voice as the voice of God within.  The conscience is a mysterious part of man’s inner being. Within the conscience, in a secret hidden recess, lies the personality, so hidden that at times it functions without our being immediately aware of it.  When Sigmund Freud brought hypnosis into the place of respectable scientific inquiry, men began to explore the subconscious and examine those intimate caverns of the personality.  Encountering the conscience can be an awesome experience. The uncovering of the inner voice can be, as one psychiatrist notes, like “looking into hell itself.” Yet we tend to think of the conscience as a heavenly thing