Confesiones de San Agustín

jpers36: Plotinus was a major influence on Augustine.

2below: For anyone interested in exploring spiritual autobiographies, C. S. Lewis' is worth checking out. Unlike Augustine, who covers the entire span of his life from birth to his conversion in adulthood, Lewis focuses on his childhood and young adult years and how his experiences during this time shaped the development of his spiritual life as he got older. I found Lewis' book a much quicker read than Augustine's, though both are very good.… (més)

PlaidStallion: Although he was in favor of abstinence, he admitted how difficult it was for him. As for The Blank Slate:


The longest-standing right-wing opposition to the sciences of human nature comes from the religious sectors of the coalition, especially Christian fundamentalism. Anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is certainly not going to believe in the evolution of the mind, and anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is certainly not going to believe that thought and feeling consist of information processing in the tissues of the brain.

The religious opposition to evolution is fueled by several moral fears. Most obviously, the fact of evolution challenges the literal truth of the creation story in the Bible and thus the authority that religion draws from it. As one creationist minister put it, “If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation?”

But the opposition to evolution goes beyond a desire to defend biblical literalism. Modern religious people may not believe in the literal truth of every miracle narrated in the Bible, but they do believe that humans were designed in God’s image and placed on earth for a larger purpose—namely, to live a moral life by following God’s commandments. If humans are accidental products of the mutation and selection of chemical replicators, they worry, morality would have no foundation and we would be left mindlessly obeying biological urges. One creationist, testifying to this danger in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, cited the lyrics of a rock song: “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals / So let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel” After the 1999 lethal rampage by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Colorado, Tom Delay, the Republican Majority Whip in the House of Representatives, said that such violence is inevitable as long as “our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes, evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.… (més)

lisanicholas: Mannin's novel is modeled on the real-life spiritual autobiography of St Augustine of Hippo. Read the original!

satanburger: CONFESSIONS 6.8 (you'll see the similarities)