Hobart Mowrer Quote

Atheistic psychologist Hobart Mowrer, who taught at both Harvard and Yale, and was a one-time president of the American Psychological Association, perceptively said:

“For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be free in this sense, that is, to have the excuse of being sick rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also becoming lost… In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity, and with neurotics, themselves, we find ourselves asking: Who am I, what is my deepest destiny, what does living mean?”  (“Sin, the Lesser of Two Evils,” American Psychologist, 15 (1960): 301-304).

“In becoming amoral, ethically neutral and free, we have cut the very roots of our being, lost our deepest sense of selfhood and identity.”