Summary Of On The Misery Of The Human Condition

The book Mere Christianity was derived from a series of radio talks by C.S. Lewis during World War two. The book is divided into four other small books each one providing one of the overall tenants of Christianity within its chapters.

The significance of religious leaders during this era is evident by the fact that the writer of this poem places the bishop at the beginning of the table. Due to the fact that the “medieval society was a religious society” and that these religious leaders held a special relationship with God, it is no surprise that these individuals held the second highest social class position in the medieval time period (Feudalism and the Three Orders (Overview) 2).

Towards the end of the Middle Ages and into the duration of the Renaissance, the Medieval Church’s social and political power dwindled. Centuries prior the Catholic Church gained a surplus of control, largely due to the stability it maintained during the chaotic breakdown of the Western Roman Empire . Yet toward the end of the Middle Ages the Church set in motion factors that would ultimately lead to its downfall as the definitive figure of authority. However, despite political and social controversy surrounding the church, the institutions it established cleared a path for a new way of thinking, shaping society in an enduring way.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, there was no main dominating force in Europe to enforce laws and protection for the people. The Middle Ages had begun and without the Romans, life became centered around survival. The destabilization caused rates of illiteracy, disease, and deaths to rise dramatically and to remedy the average peasants worry, the feudalism system flourished and required work in exchange for the safety of manors. Yet while there was not a overlooking empire to look towards for authority, the Catholic Church served its role to bring all classes together (Document 6). The Middle Ages will be ultimately known as an age of faith because of the prevalence of violence, power of religion, and the Catholic Church’s preservation of knowledge.

What is the Human Condition? The Human Condition are characteristics in life in which one will experience at one moment or more in their life. The real question is, however, do you experience the Human Condition even if you’re not conscious of it? In order to be considered “human”, one must experience one of the characteristics of life. Conversely, there is Nihilism. Nihilism is the rejection of all religious and moral principles, believing that life is meaningless. The idea of Nihilism goes against what the Human Condition stands for. Even without being conscious of it, people go through at least one if not all characteristics of the Human Condition.

One of the hardest questions to answer is “Why does God allow people to suffer? Christians believe that even though there is much suffering in the world, there is even more goodness.”. C.S. Lewis once said the “problem of pain,” is atheism’s best argument against Christianity. These findings are so potent that the Bible even states: “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Psalm 14:1). The majority of atheists, excluding any proper evidence, “must resort finally to philosophical objections”.

“ You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left it open to us. He did not intend to.” (Lewis 78.) In Mere Christianity, Lewis talks about the silliness of accepting Jesus as another great moral teacher. According to Lewis, we must all make a choice to call Jesus liar, lunatic, or Lord.

The Catholic Church by the 15th and 16th century was closely aligned with state and was largely corrupt. Many of the Popes, Bishops, and Priests of this time exhibited immoral behavior and their activities in the church opposed scripture. These Catholic priests sold indulgences that represented full or partial remission of sin (Bettenson, 1). Taking into consideration this perceived fraudulence, it was not surprising that a lot of people became disillusioned with the Catholic Church. One of the main characters of this time period who had the courage to go against the Bishop and Catholic Church was Martin Luther, who did not agree with all of the Catholic Church’s doctrine (Unknown, 6). He also did not entirely believe that the bishop and the pope were always authoritative as the church claimed because he believed only the Bible is infallible.

We have now come to the fourth and final book of Mere Christianity. In this book, the author takes us to the place in our Christian growth where we begin to rely more heavily on the power of God and less on ourselves to become the being that God originally intended for us to be — a son of God. He begins with an explanation of the difference between “making” and “begetting”.

In the Middle Ages, questioning authority was unheard of. The commonly professed view was God placed man into certain hierarchical positions, and as such, man had to stay where they were. Man could not question why he was where he was, he could only accept his position in society as reality and move on. Those who questioned the main authority of the Middle Ages, the church, were exiled, forced to partake in lengthy journeys to pray and eventually rejoin the catholic community, or permanently excommunicated. The theocratic nature of this period of time held a tradition of inviting rich and greedy men into the ecclesiastic community. The book ‘A World Lit Only By Fire’ gives a thorough over view of the happenings of medieval times, and shines

During the time of the Middle Ages, the prime unifier of all people in western Europe was the Catholic Church, headed by the pope. Also at that time, the only people who could read and interpret the Bible were the clergy officials, because they were the ones who could read and write Latin. These two things combined gave the Church a significant amount of power over all people. As usual, the power corrupted the Church and they began to take advantage of the unknowing common people. An example of their corruption was the selling of indulgences, or the pardon of all the sins committed by the buyer and his family for a price (“The Spanish Massacre…”).

During the Late Middle Ages, Europe endured several calamities which led to an overwhelming sense of crisis. Three specific types of crises will be discussed in order to better examine our main idea—those being crises in the physical world, society and government, and the Church. In understanding the problems people in the Late Middle Ages faced, we can better understand their downfall and hope to improve upon how we recognize problems in our own society. A clear crisis people in the Late Middle Ages faced happened in the physical world, namely, plague and famine contributed greatly to the general difficulty and decline of civilization.

In “On The Sufferings of the World,” Arthur Schopenhauer has a pessimistic outlook on life. He believes that suffering is a part of life and that without suffering, the world would be an even more miserable place. As many people may assume, life gets better as you grow older. Schopenhauer however disagrees with this statement and claims that life continually deteriorates. Before reading this piece I strongly believed that I was an optimist. I always like to see the bright side of situations but, Schopenhauer really gave me a different outlook on life, a pessimistic view, and I surprisingly agreed with many of his ideas. Although this is true, at the end of the reading, I disagreed with more ideas than not. Therefore, I do not think that Schopenhauer’s account on life is a good proposal to live by because not everyone is continuously miserable in their life and it is perfectly reasonable to have a positive outlook on life.

When it comes to predicting how something will make you feel in the future, you will most likely be wrong. In the book Discovering Pop Culture, edited by Anna Romasino, is the article “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness”. In the article, author Jon Gertner talks about how people think certain things bring them happiness but aren’t as fulfilling as they may think. Gertner gives examples by writing about four men that have been questioning how people predict what will make them happy and how they feel after it happens. Among these men are a psychology professor Daniel Gilbert, psychologist Tim Wilson, economist George Loewenstein, and psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Gertner uses facts from scores of

The concept of suffering plays an important role in Christianity, regarding such matters as moral conduct, spiritual advancement and ultimate destiny. Indeed an emphasis on suffering pervades the Gospel of Mark where, it can be argued, we are shown how to "journey through suffering" (Ditzel 2001) in the image of the "Suffering Son of Man" (Mark 8:32), Jesus Christ. Although theologians have suggested that Mark was written to strengthen the resolve of the early Christian community (Halpern 2002, Mayerfeld 2005), the underlying moral is not lost on a modern reader grappling with multifarious challenges regarding faith in the face of suffering. In his article "A Christian Response to Suffering", William Marravee (1987) describes suffering