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Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness QUOTES

Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness QUOTES

1 " Our own death is indeed unimaginable, and whenever we make the attempt to imagine it, we can perceive that we really survive as spectators. Hence, the psychoanalytic school could venture on the assertion that at the bottom no one believes in his own death, or to put the same thing in another way, in the unconscious, everyone is convinced of his own immortality” (Freud 1958, 222-23). "

― Raymond M. Smullyan , Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness

2 " I believe that Goethe somewhere said that the reason for his believing in an afterlife was that he simply could not conceive of himself as not existing, and he could hardly believe something that he could not even imagine! And so Goethe on a conscious level reacted exactly as Freud says that all of us react on an unconscious level. I have known others who have reacted similarly on a purely conscious level—I am one such person. I believe that my inability to conceive of myself as nonexisting is a far more potent factor in my belief in an afterlife than my desiring to have one! "

― Raymond M. Smullyan , Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness

3 " Freud’s belief that we all unconsciously believe in an afterlife reminds me of Calvin’s belief that we all, deep down, believe in God—only Calvin goes further and claims that deep down we all know that there is a God. I tend to believe that Calvin is right in that we all unconsciously believe in a God, only I do not share Calvin’s belief that this constitutes evidence that there is a God. I also believe (as does Carl Jung) that our unconscious belief in a God, coupled with our conscious rejection of the idea, is responsible for an enormous number of our neurotic disorders. "

― Raymond M. Smullyan , Who Knows?: A Study of Religious Consciousness