You Shall Be As Gods

Is the concept of God dead? Or is the experience to which the concept points, and the supreme value which it expresses, dead? In other words, shouldn't the question for today's world be, "Is Man Dead?" rather than "Is God Dead?" In this major book from the author of "The Sane Society" and "Man for Himself," we explore the evolution in the Old Testament of the basic concepts of God, Man, History, Sin, and Repentance. Erich Fromm shows how the concept of God evolved from that of a "jealous" God to that of a "constitutional monarch" and finally to that of the nameless God bound by the same principles that govern man. Conversely, he shows how Man, once the obedient servant of God, became free to the point of making his own history. While his vast knowledge and wide-ranging insights cover a broad area, Erich Fromm's greatest appeal to today's readers will be in his urgent cry for a rebirth of humanism-and in his implicit answer to the question, "Is religious experience necessarily connected with a belief in God?"