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You Shall Be As Gods, by Erich Fromm
- Abstract
In this book, Erich Fromm seeks to support his particular Weltanschauung—that of atheistic (or nontheistic) mystical humanism—by articulating its roots in the Hebrew Bible and the subsequent Jewish tradition. He attempts to show how the concept of God evolved from that of a clannish authoritarian deity (the God of Eden), to a progressively limited constitutional monarch (the covenant-making God), to the nameless God who reveals himself to Moses (“I am Who I am”), to the God of Maimonides (without attributes of essence). At this point, Fromm believes, the stage is set for “atheism,” for the next step would be to eliminate the concept “God” altogether, except perhaps as a “poetical symbol of x.” That x is a projection of the primary and mystical ego-transcending experience of man in which he sees himself as an “open system” rather than a fixed entity.
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