In the tradition of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Russell et al. Cohen provides a penetrating examination of "history's most successful psychological manipulation" found in biblically based Christianity. Comprehensive, readable, recommended.
Choice
An authoritative study of the psychological effects of conservative fundamentalism on a believer. Dr. Cohen's book deserves a wide reading among Americans.
W.Stanley Rycroft
The ChurchmanThis book is fantastic! Messianic! Incredible!
The Journal of Psychology and Christianity
Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer is one of those seminal works that can be profitably read again and again. The thesis is compelling, the insights frequent and deep-running. It is the kind of book that tempts scholars to raid it for its wealth.
Joseph E. Barnhart
author of Jim and Tammy and The Southern Baptist Holy WarAn absolute must for the library of anyone wishing to know what makes the born-again Christian tick. This work will also help the Christian to understand himself. Dr. Cohen displays an unexpected tongue-in-cheek sense of humor to the delight of those of us who have been there. I can identify completely with what he is saying.
Austin Miles
author of Don't Call Me Brother, former Assemblies of God minister and frequent PTL guestEdmund Cohen was the first to my knowledge, to sort out the hints of ominous intentions in Pat Robinson's antics on the "700 Club". Cohen marshalled his videotape evidence and made his tough conclusions stick. I expect Cohen to be the first to detect it, when the next of those cockroach-messiahs is hatched and descends from the baseboards.
Frank Zappa
Could it be that a subconscious impression of the torments of Hell awaiting the unchosen - in the Calvinist sense of election - led the Germans to build the concentration camps? Were they unknowlingly imitating the destruction of the Jewish firstborn early in the time of Jesus, even as Herod had been imitating God's last plague on Egypt? Does the imago of a wrathful and avenging God in the Bible furnish the model for man's inhumanity to man, far outweighing the injunction to "love one another"? Does the present resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, with its radical-right political cutting edge, prefigure a dark age of prejudice and persecution - like the thousand-year dark age brought on Greco-Roman cvilisation by the original rise of New Testament religion?
When Edmund D. Cohen sensed the psychologically powerful effects of the New Testament among the new, conservative Evangelicals, he became engrossed in their experience. Reworking and expanding on familiar ideas of Jung, Freud, Feuerbach and others, Dr. Cohen found he could uncover the disguised psychological ploys around which the New Testament is built and analyse them.
The unsurpassed psychological acumen of the New Testament authors is explained here for modern readers. It will unstelle both liberal and conservative proponents of Christianity, inform those concerned with the mental-health problems fundamentalism causes its unsuspecting participants and warn of its potential adverse social effects.
Edmund D. Cohen is the author of C.G. Jung and the Scientific Attitude. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Case-Wester Reserve University in 1968, taught in callege and was a postdoctoral trainee at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland. Later he earned a J.D. from the National Law Center of the George Washington University and was a respected general-practice attorney and hearing officer in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. He is currently a full-time author and lecturer.