The Idea of Monotheism

The Idea of Monotheism PDF Author: Jack Shechter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780761870432
Category : God (Judaism).
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Jack Shechter explores the idea of monotheism as it has evolved over the centuries: the belief in the existence of the One God who fashioned the world and remains involved in it and with humanity and its values.

Moses and Monotheism

Moses and Monotheism PDF Author: Sigmund Freud
Publisher: Leonardo Paolo Lovari
ISBN: 8898301790
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
The book consists of three essays and is an extension of Freud’s work on psychoanalytic theory as a means of generating hypotheses about historical events. Freud hypothesizes that Moses was not Hebrew, but actually born into Ancient Egyptian nobility and was probably a follower of Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian monotheist. Freud contradicts the biblical story of Moses with his own retelling of events, claiming that Moses only led his close followers into freedom during an unstable period in Egyptian history after Akhenaten (ca. 1350 BCE) and that they subsequently killed Moses in rebellion and later combined with another monotheistic tribe in Midian based on a volcanic God, Jahweh. Freud explains that years after the murder of Moses, the rebels regretted their action, thus forming the concept of the Messiah as a hope for the return of Moses as the Saviour of the Israelites. Freud said that the guilt from the murder of Moses is inherited through the generations; this guilt then drives the Jews to religion to make them feel better.

Of God and Gods

Of God and Gods PDF Author: Jan Assmann
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299225534
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Book Description
For thousands of years, our world has been shaped by biblical monotheism. But its hallmark—a distinction between one true God and many false gods—was once a new and radical idea. Of God and Gods explores the revolutionary newness of biblical theology against a background of the polytheism that was once so commonplace. Jan Assmann, one of the most distinguished scholars of ancient Egypt working today, traces the concept of a true religion back to its earliest beginnings in Egypt and describes how this new idea took shape in the context of the older polytheistic world that it rejected. He offers readers a deepened understanding of Egyptian polytheism and elaborates on his concept of the “Mosaic distinction,” which conceives an exclusive and emphatic Truth that sets religion apart from beliefs shunned as superstition, paganism, or heresy. Without a theory of polytheism, Assmann contends, any adequate understanding of monotheism is impossible. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

Monotheism and Tolerance

Monotheism and Tolerance PDF Author: Robert Erlewine
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253221560
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable problem of religiously motivated and justified violence.

The Idea of Monotheism

The Idea of Monotheism PDF Author: Jack Shechter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 076187044X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
Jack Shechter offers a detailed clarification of the ideational development within each of the tenets that flow from the Oneness of God that is the core of the monotheistic idea as it has evolved over the centuries. The Idea of Monotheism historically traces the concept of God as it emerged in the ongoing life of the people in specific time periods; it reflects the newly perceived perspectives about the deity due to changing times, locales, and climates of opinion. However, so profoundly One is God in Judaism, these transformations had not effect whatever on this eternally uniform substance. Thus, what man did over time was to uncover God's true nature; he unraveled that which was always there—the nonexistence of other gods and His universality.

The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

The Idea of Semitic Monotheism PDF Author: Guy G. Stroumsa
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019289868X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The Idea of Semitic Monotheism examines some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century--from the Enlightenment to the First World War. It aims to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. Guy G. Stroumsa focuses on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century on the basis of the postulated and highly problematic contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted from its traditional status as the locus of the Biblical revelations. This innovative work studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century, up to the present day.

From Akhenaten to Moses

From Akhenaten to Moses PDF Author: Jan Assmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9774166310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
The shift from polytheism to monotheism changed the world radically. Akhenaten and Moses-a figure of history and a figure of tradition-symbolize this shift in its incipient, revolutionary stages and represent two civilizations that were brought into the closest connection as early as the Book of Exodus, where Egypt stands for the old world to be rejected and abandoned in order to enter the new one. The seven chapters of this seminal study shed light on the great transformation from different angles. Between Egypt in the first chapter and monotheism in the last, five chapters deal in various ways with the transition from one to the other, analyzing the Exodus myth, understanding the shift in terms of evolution and revolution, confronting Akhenaten and Moses in a new way, discussing Karl Jaspers' theory of the Axial Age, and dealing with the eighteenth-century view of the Egyptian mysteries as a cultural model.

The Concept of Monotheism in Islam and Christianity

The Concept of Monotheism in Islam and Christianity PDF Author: Hans Köchler
Publisher: International Progress Organization
ISBN: 9783700303398
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Concept of Momotheism in Islam & Christianity

The Price of Monotheism

The Price of Monotheism PDF Author: Jan Assmann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080477286X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
Nothing has so radically transformed the world as the distinction between true and false religion. In this nuanced consideration of his own controversial Moses the Egyptian, renowned Egyptologist Jan Assmann answers his critics, extending and building upon ideas from his previous book. Maintaining that it was indeed the Moses of the Hebrew Bible who introduced the true-false distinction in a permanent and revolutionary form, Assmann reiterates that the price of this monotheistic revolution has been the exclusion, as paganism and heresy, of everything deemed incompatible with the truth it proclaims. This exclusion has exploded time and again into violence and persecution, with no end in sight. Here, for the first time, Assmann traces the repeated attempts that have been made to do away with this distinction since the early modern period. He explores at length the notions of primary versus secondary religions, of "counter-religions," and of book religions versus cultic religions. He also deals with the entry of ethics into religion's very core. Informed by the debate his own work has generated, he presents a compelling lesson in the fluidity of cultural identity and beliefs.

Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism

Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism PDF Author: Beate Pongratz-Leisten
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781575061993
Category : RELIGION
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
Proceedings of a conference held in Feb. 2007 at Princeton University.