I will spare you reading Freud’s actual article since it is about 50ish pages (and who wants to read 50 pages of Freud), so here is a link to a good summary of his articles. 

 http://www.supersummary.com/moses-and-monotheism/summary/

Here is an unrelated meme I have been laughing at all week:

When looking back at previous readings I noticed that this trend was also described in the Hick’s reading. Hicks argued that Postmodernism changed the reading of literature from and academic perspective. “The task of the literary critic, accordingly, is to deconstruct the text to reveal the author’s race, sex, or class interests,” (Hicks 16). Schools and textbooks now focus on the motivations of the author rather that the experience of reading a literary work. “Nathianal Hawthrone, for example, in The Scarlet Letter seems at least ambivalent about Hester Prynne’s moral status--and this ambivalence reveals that he is sold out to an authoritarian, conformist, and masculine religious establishment,” (Hicks 16). To me this perspective of literature in schools is somewhat disturbing. What is your opinion on the consequences of accepting a postmodern perspective in literature and schooling? Do our words only mean anything with reference to our perspective or is it possible to speak objectively about an object's beauty? When we think about values do come from within us or are they discovered from an external source?

Another theme in my padlet post that I noticed was the postmodernist attempt to discredit ideas based off of their origin. While I did not talk about the application of postmodernism in education directly, reflecting on my posts it is easy to see the connection. I wrote one of my padlet posts on how I was shocked to find out that Freud did not believe that Moses was Jewish. Freud seemed to think that since religion was a necessity for civilization, it is only a result of society's psychoses. The idea of debunking religion based on society's need for it is seen in Freud's The Future of an Illusion, Darwin's work, and Nietzsche's Parable of the Madman. In each of these works, the author claims that religion exists because of society's need for it and that it has no claim to objective truth. However, does religion's scientific origin debunk religious claims? Both the modernist and postmodernist seem to think that recognizing how religion benefited society automatically debunks the claims that religion makes; however, the idea aligns fairly well with the Christian perspective that the world is broken and the Church serves the only hope of order. Freud claims that religion was an illusion that man created to survive but how does religion aiding man's survival prove biblical objective truth to be a fabrication? Another one of my padlet posts reflected on C. S. Lewis’s arguments against subjectivity. The Green Book example from The Abolition of Man shows how the postmodernist believes that an individual's description of something reflects nothing but an individual's emotions towards that object. For example, the contemptible action of abusing a child is only contemptible because of the observer's feeling of “contempt”. Under a postmodern subjectivist perspective, value is only given extrinsically by the individual and no emotion, value, virtue, or truth has intrinsic value. Throughout the course, I was wondering how modernist and postmodernist could argue against Christianity by saying that it was once necessary but now is redundant. However, I now understand that it is because they believe that Christianity's only worth comes from the value extrinsically placed on it by society. Intrinsic value does not exist from the postmodern perspective and with that truth cannot exist. 

Of my padlet posts only three reflected obvious biases, one source was a political cartoon poking fun at postmodernism, another was a meme criticizing Nietzsche's attacks on Christianity, and another was a summary of a section from C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. The summary of The Abolition of Man was written by theater scholar Dr. Cole Matson. His commentary was written from a Christian perspective that reflected upon the work of C. S. Lewis in a positive light. The meme and the political cartoon do reflect the biases of the creators but I think in the context of my postings they are a better representation of my personal biases. In high school, my interactions with postmodern thought were frequent in my conversations with my peers. Since I was already exposed to the current application of postmodernism, I already had a negative perception of it when entering the class. Similar to the meme's mocking of Neiszche’s criticisms of Christianity, I had a similar perspective of my peers' opinions on religion. Oftentimes, my peers equated Christianity with racism, homophobia, and other Ad Hominem attacks. The political cartoon also reflects my biases because it portrays philosophy as being in a standstill. Overall, this course helped me to understand how the early embodiments of modernity and postmodernity were hopeful but the application of the philosophy leaves society to struggle to find what it should place value on extrinsically.