« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 »
May 17, 2007
the problem of pleasure...
an excerpt from "Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church" by Philip Yancey...
"In addition to the problem of pain, G.K. Chesterton seemed equally fascinated by its opposite, the problem of pleasure. He found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts as sex, childbirth, play, and artistic creation.
Why is sex fun? Reproduction surely does not require pleasure: some animals simply split in half to reproduce, and even humasn use methods of artificial insemination that involve no pleasure. Why is eating enjoyable? Plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds. Why are there colors? Some people get along fine without the ability to detect color. Why complicate vision for the rest of us?
It struck me, after reading my umpteenth book on the problem of pain, that I have never even seen a book on "the problem of pleasure." Nor have I met a philosopher who goes around shaking his or her head in perplexity over the question of why we experience pleasure. Yet it looms as a huge question: the philosophical equivalent, for atheists, to the problem of pain for Christians. On the issue of pleasure, Christians can breathe easier. A good and loving God would naturally want his creatures to experience delight, joy, and personal fulfillment.
Christians start from that assumption and then look for ways to explain the origin of suffering. But should not atheists have an equal obligation to explain the origin of pleasure in a world of randomness and meaningless?"
Posted by Autumn at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2007
i like this quote...
so, i'm a book fiend and with grad school finishing up, i've been devouring 2-3 books (200-500+ pages) a week. yes, this is a part of my ideal existence...
i finished up the time traveler's wife yesterday. good for fiction (i don't usually read a lot of fiction). sad. would make a good movie (you heard it here first, haha).
anyway, i picked up further along the road less traveled again today. m. scott peck, m.d. wrote this book as well as, you guessed it, the road less traveled. these books combine psychology, psychiatry, and religion. dr. peck isn't a christian, but a lot of his ideas fit well into a christian worldview. so, i read his work with caution and pick out what really speaks to me and convicts me (which is a surprising amount). he writes with a very conversational style and isn't afraid to say, look, you're experiencing pain because you're immature and you need to deal with that.
so, there's this quote from the first chapter ("consciousness and the problem of pain") that i love and wanted to share.
"One of the things that never cease to amaze me is how relatively few people understand what courage is. Most people think that courage is the absence of fear. The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage.
Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of the fear, or in spite of the pain. When you do that, you will find that overcoming that fear will not only make you stronger but will be a big step forward towards maturity."
anyway, i thought it was great.
back to reading...
Posted by Autumn at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)