The Relationship Between Feeling Forgiven by God and Self-Forgiveness for an Interpersonal Offense Exploring Forgiveness.

Two THE RETREAT FROM COPERNICUS: A MODERN LOSS OF NERVE All of us grow up with the sense that there is some personal relationship between us, ourselves, and the universe. And there is a natural tendency to project our own knowledge, especially self-knowledge, our own feelings, on others. This is a commonplace in psychology and psychiatry. And so it is with our view of the natural world. Anthropologists and historians of religion sometimes call this animism and attribute it to so-called primitive tribes-that is, ones who have not constructed instruments of mass destruction. This is the idea that every tree and brook has a kind of actuating spirit-that, as Thales, the first scientist, said in one of the few surviving fragments of his work, "There are gods in everything." It's a natural idea. But it's not restricted to animists, of whom there are many millions on the planet today. Physicists, for example, do it all the time, except where nature does not oblige. It is the commonest thing in the world in, say, the kinetic theory of gases, to imagine each of these little molecules of air that are busily colliding in front of us as, maybe, billiard balls ...»