I read this quote today and wondered what everyone would think of it, whether you would necessarily agree or not and if you do or dont what that means.
"Children in Sunday School learn that honesty and integrity and concern for the soul should be the guiding principles of life, while "life" teaches us that to follow these principles makes us at best unrealistic dreamers." - Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and religion
I find Fromm a strange and intriguing author since I'm pretty sure he was a non-theist, if he wasnt an athiest (and he may very well have been), but he took his own religious tradition, he was a Jew, and others, notably Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism, at face value as important world and individual shaping forces.
Generally when I encounter non-theists or athiests they prove the rule that there are two aspects to denying the existence of God, first that there is no God, second that you hate God, or at least in so far as they will acknowledge nothing good what so ever about theistic traditions or history, its a very polarised tapesty of good and evil with year zero being some time with the aftermath of the enlightenment and emergence of the secular world.
Those points are possibly tangental to the quote and what I want to discuss but its just something which reading Fromm makes me think.
"Children in Sunday School learn that honesty and integrity and concern for the soul should be the guiding principles of life, while "life" teaches us that to follow these principles makes us at best unrealistic dreamers." - Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and religion
I find Fromm a strange and intriguing author since I'm pretty sure he was a non-theist, if he wasnt an athiest (and he may very well have been), but he took his own religious tradition, he was a Jew, and others, notably Christian mysticism and Zen Buddhism, at face value as important world and individual shaping forces.
Generally when I encounter non-theists or athiests they prove the rule that there are two aspects to denying the existence of God, first that there is no God, second that you hate God, or at least in so far as they will acknowledge nothing good what so ever about theistic traditions or history, its a very polarised tapesty of good and evil with year zero being some time with the aftermath of the enlightenment and emergence of the secular world.
Those points are possibly tangental to the quote and what I want to discuss but its just something which reading Fromm makes me think.