Unit Three Groundless Beliefs

Period 3-4: Background information

1. Catholic Belief

v  To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world. Man must know, love and serve God in a supernatural manner in order to gain happiness of heaven. Man is raised to the supernatural order only by grace, afree gift of God.

v  We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.

v  “In order to be saved, all persons who have attained the use of reason must believe explicitly that God exists and that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked; in practice they must also believe in the mysteries of the Blessed Trinity and the Incarnation.

v  By the Blessed Trinity we mean one and the same God in three divine persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

v  By the Incarnation is meant that the Son of God, retaining His divine nature, took to Himself a human nature, that is, a body and soul like ours.

v  The Church is the congregation of all baptized persons united in the same true faith, the same sacrifice, and the same sacraments, under the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops in communion with him.

v  We find the chief truths taught by Jesus Christ through the Catholic Church in the Apostles' Creed.

2. Presbyterian Belief

v  We believe the Bible is the written word of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and without error in the original manuscripts. The Bible is the revelation of God’s truth and is infallible and authoritative in all matters of faith and practice.

v  We believe in the Holy Trinity. There is one God, who exists eternally in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

v  We believe that all are sinners and totally unable to save themselves from God’s displeasure, except by His mercy.

v  We believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, who through His perfect life and sacrificial death atoned for the sins of all who will trust in Him, alone, for salvation.

v  We believe that the Holy Spirit in dwells God’s people and gives them the strength and wisdom to trust Christ and follow Him.

v  We believe that Jesus will return, bodily and visibly, to judge all mankind and to receive His people to Himself.

3. Aristotle VS. Galileo

1) Aristotle(384 B.C.—322 B.C.):

    Let me introducemyself, I am Aristotle.

I lived from 384—322 B.C.,

I was a pupil of Plato, another Greek philosopher.

Most do not realize that I was a tutor of Alexander the Great.

My authorship includes works on ethics, logic, metaphysics, natural sciences, politics, and poetry.

Some say I had a profound influence on current Western thought.

My philosophical system theory follows empirical observation and logic

—the essential method of rational inquiry.

Galileo(1564—1642)

v  Galileo was an astronomer and mathematician, born in Pisa, Italy.

v  He entered Pisa University as a medical student in 1581, and became professor of mathematics at Padua (1592—1610), where he improved the refracting telescope(1610), and was the first to use it for astronomy.

v  Among his other discoveries were the law of uniformly accelerated motion towards the Earth, the parabolic path of projectiles, and the law that all bodies have weight.

4. WilliamJames (1842—1910)

      1842—Born in New York City, January 11.

      1861—Enters Lawrence Scientific School, HarvardUniversity.

      1864—Enters Harvard Medical School.

      1890—Publication of The Principles of Psychology.

      1910—Died in Chocorua, August 26, at the age of 68.

5. The Principles of Psychology

vJames’s Analysis of the Stream of Thought

James’s analysis of the stream of thought consisted of a number of components.

The first of these components was an attack on the idea that sensations constituted the fundamental elements of consciousness.Sensation, James argued, was an abstraction from not a fact of experience.

The two remaining components emphasized change and continuity in thought. For James, thought contained no constant elements of any kind, be they sensations or ideas. Every perception was relative and  contextualized, every thought occurred in a mind modified by every previous thought. States of mind were never repeated.

vJames’s Characterization of the Self

James’s chapter on the self introduced numerous self-related concepts and distinctions into psychology. The phenomenal self (the experienced self, the‘me’self, the self as known) was distinguished from the self thought (the I-self, the self as knower).

In discussing the me-self, James wrote of three different but interrelated aspects of self: the material self (all those aspects of material existence in which we feel a strong sense of ownership, our bodies, our families, our possessions), the social self (our felt social relations), and the spiritual self (our feelings of our own subjectivity).

In addressing the I-self, James turned first to the feeling of self identity, the experience that’ I am the same self that I was yesterday.’

vJames’s Theory of Emotion

Finally, James’s chapter on the emotions presented his famous theory of emotion.

The chapter began with a clear recognition of the close relationship between action and the expressive and physiological concomitants of emotion. ‘Objects of rage, love, fear, etc.,’he wrote, ‘not only prompt a man to outward deeds, but provoke characteristic alterations in his attitude and visage, and affect his breathing, circulation, and other organic functions in specific ways.’

Here James also made it clear that emotion could be as easily triggered by memory or imagination as by direct perception of an emotion-producing event. As he phrased it, ‘One may get angrier in thinking over one's insult than at the moment of receiving it.’

6. prohibition: 

The period (1920—1933) during which the 18th Amendment forbidding the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was in force in the United States.禁酒时期，美国第十八条修正案禁止生产和销售烈性酒实施的时期（1920—1933年）