Peter Kreeft on "Three Questions Everyone Should Ask Themselves"

Three Questions Everyone Should Ask Themselves | Peter Kreeft | The Introduction to Because God Is Real: Sixteen Questions, One Answer

What is this book good for? What is it about?

This book is worthless unless it helps you answer three questions about yourself:

1. Who am I?
2. Where did I come from?
3. Where am I going?

1. All our lives, we keep discovering who we are. None of us comes to the end of that road in this life. None of us completely knows who we are, once we stop fooling ourselves.

You are a one-and-only individual that nobody could ever replace. Nobody who ever lived in the past was exactly like you, and no one who will ever live in the future will be exactly like you. You have a special job to do in this world that no one else can ever do. Each day of your life, you find out a little more about what that job is.

But you also share the same human nature with all other human beings. Your task on earth is to be you, the one and only you; but it is also to be a human being, and that task is the same for all of us. You take different courses in school, but we all take a course called Life. Life's greatest tragedy is to pass all your courses but flunk Life.

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Comments

[James M]

How does the prospect of human cloning affect Q.1 "Who am I?"

Kreeft explains we are made by God to love and serve Him, through a specific and individual purpose.

Now the UK government is trying to pass an Act in Parliament (the HFE Bill) which makes it legal to create animal-human hybrids and to create fatherless children.

I have no doubt that any human with an immortal soul is beloved by God. But I am trying to figure the implications of this HFE Bill: surely it will cause worse than an identity crisis for those created; it will cause a social crisis in the countries which take part; and it will cause international crises if totalitarian regimes take up this embryology technology in a major way.

God help us. Does anyone have answers of where all this might lead? And how, beside prayer, to stop it?

[Mark Brumley]

Does anyone have answers of where all this might lead?

Hell.

[Ed Peters]

Death, than which nothing is more certain.
Judgment, than which nothing is more strict.
Hell, than which nothing is more terrible.
Heaven, than which nothing is more delightful.
----Bl. Pope John XXIII

[Chris Manion]

Charles Rice and his daughter, Dr. Theresa Farnan, have already written a book with the title, 1. Who am I?
2. Where did I come from?
3. Where am I going?

It's excellent (I buy it a dozen at a time) and available from St. Augustine's press. staugustine.net

By the way, Professor Kreeft's books are always original, and quite popular with our protestant friends who are inquiring into philosophy.