Inventing God
Inventing God

Author: Jon Mills

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-22

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1317218442

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In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

Inventing God
Inventing God

Author: Nicholas Mosley

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9781564782915

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"The story ends in September 2001. It is by the capacity to understand the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it seems, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning."--BOOK JACKET.

The Invention of God
The Invention of God

Author: Thomas Römer

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2015-12-14

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0674504976

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Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE. That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah—that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.

Inventing God
Inventing God

Author: Robert Pringle

Publisher: Pudding House Publications

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781589986572

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Inventing God's Law
Inventing God's Law

Author: David P. Wright

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2009-09-03

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 0195304756

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Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.

Inventing the Universe
Inventing the Universe

Author: Alister E McGrath

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Published: 2015-10-08

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1444798472

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We just can't stop talking about the big questions around science and faith. They haven't gone away, as some predicted they might; in fact, we seem to talk about them more than ever. Far from being a spent force, religion continues to grow around the world. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists argue that religion is at war with science - and that we have to choose between them. It's time to consider a different way of looking at these two great cultural forces. What if science and faith might enrich each other? What if they can together give us a deep and satisfying understanding of life? Alister McGrath, one of the world's leading authorities on science and religion, engages with the big questions that Dawkins and others have raised - including origins, the burden of proof, the meaning of life, the existence of God and our place in the universe. Informed by the best and latest scholarship, Inventing the Universe is a groundbreaking new primer for the complex yet fascinating relationship between science and faith.

Inventing God's Law
Inventing God's Law

Author: David P. Wright

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-09-03

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 0199885397

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Most scholars believe that the numerous similarities between the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:19) and Mesopotamian law collections, especially the Laws of Hammurabi, which date to around 1750 BCE, are due to oral tradition that extended from the second to the first millennium. This book offers a fundamentally new understanding of the Covenant Code, arguing that it depends directly and primarily upon the Laws of Hammurabi and that the use of this source text occurred during the Neo-Assyrian period, sometime between 740-640 BCE, when Mesopotamia exerted strong and continuous political and cultural influence over the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and a time when the Laws of Hammurabi were actively copied in Mesopotamia as a literary-canonical text. The study offers significant new evidence demonstrating that a model of literary dependence is the only viable explanation for the work. It further examines the compositional logic used in transforming the source text to produce the Covenant Code, thus providing a commentary to the biblical composition from the new theoretical perspective. This analysis shows that the Covenant Code is primarily a creative academic work rather than a repository of laws practiced by Israelites or Judeans over the course of their history. The Covenant Code, too, is an ideological work, which transformed a paradigmatic and prestigious legal text of Israel's and Judah's imperial overlords into a statement symbolically countering foreign hegemony. The study goes further to study the relationship of the Covenant Code to the narrative of the book of Exodus and explores how this may relate to the development of the Pentateuch as a whole.

Creating God
Creating God

Author: Robin Derricourt

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-05-17

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 1526156180

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What do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread? In this bold new book, award-winning author Robin Derricourt takes us on a journey through the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism and working backwards through Islam, Christianity and Judaism to Zoroastrianism, Creating God opens up the conditions that allowed religious movements to emerge, attract their first followers and grow. Throughout history there have been many prophets: individuals who believed they were in direct contact with the divine, with instructions to spread a religious message. While many disappeared without trace, some gained millions of followers and established a lasting religion. In Creating God, Robin Derricourt has produced a brilliant, panoramic book that offers new insights on the origins of major religions and raises essential questions about why some succeeded where others failed.

And Man Created God
And Man Created God

Author: Robert Banks PhD

Publisher: Lion Books

Published: 2011-04-06

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0745959644

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This book addresses one of the oldest questions posed to religious believers: if God made everything, who made God? Most recently levelled by the New Atheists, the question was asked in ancient Greece and has preoccupied religious believers in the centuries since. Here, renowned scholar Robert Banks explores the history of the objection - from its earliest vocalization in the ancient world to its most famous opponents, Freud, Marx, and others. Ideal for anyone with a general interest in new atheism, for those studying religion, or wanting to sort out what (if any) elements of their idea of God are man-made.

Syntheism - Creating God in the Internet Age
Syntheism - Creating God in the Internet Age

Author: Alexander Bard

Publisher: Stockholm Text

Published: 2014-10-06

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 9175471825

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A book that dares to describe individualism as a religion and paint a reality that is primarily virtual, rather than physical. While the authors don’t mind challenging the reader’s view of the self and the world, their main intention is to induce passive receivers of the future to become more active participants. Engaging observations and perceptive interpretations of contemporary society.