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AN INTERROGATION OF THE "REAL" IN ALL ITS GUISES



Hamm: What's happening?
Clov: Something is taking its course.
Beckett




Saturday, 29 December 2012

Freud on Reason and Religion

"Our God, Logos, will fulfil whichever of these wishes nature outside us allows, but he will do it very gradually, only in the unforseeable future, and for a new generation of men. He promises no compensation for us, who suffer grievously from life. On the way to this distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded, no matter whether the first attempts fail, or whether the first substitutes prove to be untenable. You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable. Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the consolation of religion. No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest."

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