Transcription
In 1882, Nietzsche infamously declared that God was dead. This was emblematic of the waning power of the church and the growth of skepticism and secularism. Blasphemy became respectable.
In the 2000s, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett gained momentum as they continued Nietzsche's funeral march. They were dubbed "The Four Horsemen," after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, when they met to discuss their ideas on atheism. Like many people, I became influenced by the so-called new atheist movement at the time, and was impressed by Dawkins' bestseller, "The God Delusion." I was extremely dismissive of, not only religious dogmatism, but the religious experience in general.
This changed upon discovering the work of Erich Fromm. Referring to Nietzsche's infamous statement, Fromm said: "The problem of religion is not the problem of God but the problem of humanity. In the 19th century, the problem was that God is dead. In the 20th century, the problem is that people are dead. In the past, the danger was that people became slaves. The danger of the future is that people may become robots. Is God dead? The question should be divided into its two aspects. Is the concept of God dead or is the experience to which the concept points and the supreme value which it expresses dead? People are in danger of becoming things, of being more and more alienated, of losing sight of the real problems of human existence, and of no longer being interested in the answers to these problems. If we continue in this direction, we will ourselves be dead, and the problem of God as a concept or as a poetic symbol of the highest value, will not be a problem anymore."
Fromm spoke of the "true religious experience as the capacity to feel deep love, deep oneness with my fellow people, with nature, and if I were religious in the conventional sense, then I would say with God. But it doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't. What matters is which experience a person has."
Fromm said that: "Following the maturing idea of monotheism can only lead to one conclusion. Not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence. God becomes truth, love, justice. God becomes the symbol of the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena, the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within us. God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, something finite. How can God have a name if he is not a person, not a thing?"
This passage significantly impacted me and completely changed my view of the concept of God. Fromm captured it beautifully when he wrote: "In Zen, God is neither denied nor insisted upon."
Fromm said: "I believe that the concept of God was a historically conditioned expression of an inner experience. I can understand what the Bible or genuinely religious persons mean when they talk about God, but I do not share their thought concept. I believe that the concept God was conditioned by the presence of a socio-political structure, in which tribal chiefs or kings have supreme power. God, one of many different poetic expressions of the highest value in humanism, not a reality in itself. It is unavoidable, however, in talking about the thought of a monotheistic system, I use the word "God" often, as it would be awkward to add my own qualification each time. The evolution from the concept of God as a tribal chief, to the concept of a nameless God, whom no representation is permissible, finds its most advanced and radical formulation in the theology of Moses Maimonides. Maimonides is one of the most outstanding and influential scholars in the Rabbinic tradition. He was also the most important Jewish philosopher or theologian of the Middle Ages. In his main philosophical work, 'The Guide for the Perplexed', written in Arabic, he developed his "negative theology", which declares it to be inadmissible to use positive attributes to describe God's essence. When Maimonides discusses the concept of God for those who are not simple-minded, he concludes that: "You must understand that God has no essential attribute in any form or in any sense whatever. The rejection of corporeality implies the rejection of essential attributes. Those that believe that God is one and that he has many attributes, declare the unity with their lips and assume plurality in their thoughts. It will now be clear to you that every time you establish by proof the negation of a thing in reference to God you become more perfect, while with every additional positive assertion you follow your imagination and recede from the true knowledge of God. Maimonides concludes this discussion by remarking that Psalm 4:4: "Silence is praise to thee", expresses best his idea of the inadequacy of positive attributes."
Fromm said that: "Even from a strictly monotheistic standpoint, the use of the word God constitutes a problem. The Bible insists that people must not attempt to make an image of God in any form. One aspect of this injunction is that of a tabu, guarding the awesomeness of God. Another aspect, however, is the idea that God is a symbol of all that which is in people, and yet which people are not, a symbol of a spiritual reality which we can strive to realise in ourselves and yet can never describe or define. God is like the horizon which sets the limitations of our sight. To the naive mind, it seems to be something real which can be grasped, yet to seek the horizon is to seek a mirage. When we move, the horizon moves. When we climb even a low hill, the horizon becomes wider, but it still remains a limitation and never is a thing to be taken hold of. That an idea, the conceptual expression of a human experience is so prone to be transformed into an ideology, has its reasons not only in people's fear of committing themselves fully to the experience, but also in the very nature of the relationship between experience and idea. A concept can never adequately express the experience it refers to. It points to it but it is not it. It is, as the Zen Buddhists say, "the finger that points to the moon" - it is not the moon. The god-concept is only the "finger that points to the moon". This moon is not outside of ourselves but it is the human reality behind the words. What we call the religious attitude is an x that is expressible only in poetic and visual symbols. This x experience has been articulated in various concepts which have varied in accordance with the social organisation of a particular cultural period. In the near East, x was expressed in the concept of a supreme tribal Chief or King and this God became the supreme concept of Judaism, Christianity and Islam which were rooted in the social structures of that area. In India, Buddhism could express x in different forms. Another aspect remains to be mentioned. That is making an experience unreal by cerebration. I refer to this by the fact that I believe I see, but I only see words. I believe I feel, but I only think feelings. The cerebrating person is the alienated person, the person in the cave who, as in Plato's allegory, sees only shadows and mistakes them for immediate reality."
In the allegory 'The Cave', Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoner's reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world.
"The process of cerebration is related to the ambiguity of language. As soon as I've expressed something in a word, an alienation takes place and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience actually only exists up until the moment when it is expressed in language. Even if the concept is not alienated from the experience, the concept, or the symbol is only an approximate expression of the experience. This is necessarily so because no person's experience is ever identical with that of another. It can only approximate it sufficiently to permit the use of a common symbol or concept. Even the experience of one person is never exactly the same on different occasions, because nobody is exactly the same at two different moments of their life. The concept and the symbol have the great advantage that they permit people to communicate their experiences. They have the tremendous disadvantage that they lend themselves easily to an alienated use."
Fromm said that: "It is not true that we have to give up the concern for the soul if we do not accept the tenets of religion. The psychoanalyst finds that the question is not whether we return to religion and believe in God, but whether we live love and think truth. If we do so, the symbol systems we use are of secondary importance. If we do not, they are of no importance."
"In psychology, sometimes the poetic way of putting things is the most precise one, or rather, the most, if you please, scientific one. Because the so-called scientific words in psychology, that is to say in the world of understanding people, are really quite useless because our language does not have such words. We don't have any words for the most important feeling-experiences. I mean we have many words for various kinds of cars and we have many words for the things that seem important to us, but we don't have many words for different genuine feelings. You have to go to poetry, or to mythology, or to the great literature for finding the words that would adequately refer to the most essential experiences. Well, it might not be so bad because most people don't feel much anyway, so they don't miss the words. But in a way, this is bad too because our own awareness of experience is greatly hindered if our language has no words for it, and it is probably a vicious circle in which we find ourselves in."
"Since Aristotle," Fromm said, "the Western world has followed the logical principles of Aristotelian philosophy. The logic is based on the law of identity which states that A is A, the law of contradiction - A is not non-A, and the law of the excluded middle - A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A. This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be natural and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that x is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of x. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus and then again under the name of dialectics it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly expressed by Lao-Tse: "Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical." "Gravity is the root of lightness, stillness the ruler of movement." Or: "The Tao in its regular course does nothing and so there is nothing which it does not do. In Taoist thinking, just as in Indian and Socratic thinking, the highest step to which thought can lead is to know that we do not know. It is only a consequence of this philosophy that the highest God cannot be named. The ultimate reality, the ultimate One, cannot be caught in words or in thoughts. "He who knows the Tao does not care to speak about it: he who is however ready to speak about it does not know it." The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. Paradoxical logic is a significant bearing on the concept of God. Inasmuch as God represents the ultimate reality, and inasmuch as the human mind perceives reality in contradictions, no positive statement can be made of God. The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness. Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's loving God, but the act of experiencing Oneness with God. This attitude had several consequences. First of all, it led to the tolerance we find in Indian and Chinese religious development. If the right thought is not the ultimate truth, and not the way to salvation, there is no reason to fight others whose thinking has arrived at different formulations. This tolerance is beautifully expressed in the story of several men who were asked to describe an elephant in the dark. One, touching his trunk, said "this animal is like a water pipe." Another, touching his ear, said "this animal is like a fan." A third, touching his legs, described the animal as a pillar. The opposite is true for the mainstream of Western thought. Since one is expected to find the ultimate truth in the right thought, major emphasis was on thought, though right action was held to be important too. In religious development, this led to the formulation of dogmas, endless arguments about dogmatic formulations, and intolerance of the non-believer or heretic. It furthermore led to the emphasis on believing in God as the main aim of a religious attitude. This of course did not mean that there was not also the concept that one ought to live right. But nevertheless, the person who believed in God, even if they did not live God, felt themselves to be superior to the one who lived God, but did not believe in him. In scientific thought, the correct thought is all that matters both from the aspect of intellectual honesty as well as from the aspect of the application of scientific thoughts to practice, that is, to technique. Unfortunately, the discussion centered around religion since the days of the Enlightenment has been largely concerned with the affirmation or negation of a belief in God, rather than with the affirmation or negation of certain human attitudes. 'Do you believe in the existence of God' has been made the crucial question of religionists and the denial of God has been the position chosen by those fighting the church."
Fromm said that: "In accordance with Zen's attitude towards intellectual insight, its aim of teaching is not, as in the West, an ever increasing subtlety of logical thinking. Its method consists of putting one in a dilemma, out of which one must contrive to escape not through logic, but through a mind of a higher order. Accordingly, the teacher is not a teacher in the Western sense, they are a master, inasmuch as they have mastered their own mind and hence are capable of conveying the only thing that can be conveyed: their existence."
Fromm beautifully expressed the spirit of paradoxical logic in a lecture he gave at UCLA in 1964. He said: "What is all this for? What is a human being? And what is that which a human being should be striving for? Now, of course, you might say, so here speaks a preacher who will now introduce a chapter on admonishing you to return to religion. Well, I am not only not a preacher, I am a person who does not believe in God, so I will not try to admonish you to return to God. But I would like to say that the question whether you formulate your beliefs in terms of God or not is really quite secondary. There is another dimension which transcends the thought concept, and that is the dimension of the reality of the human core of a person. You might say that there are believers in God that are utterly unreligious, and there are unbelievers in God who are religious. Or you might put it this way, somebody can believe in God, and not to do God's will, and somebody may not believe in God, and try to do God's will."
"The first quality which is common to a truly religious or spiritual attitude is that of faith. Now if you hear of faith you think right away of religion. But there is another faith, and that is the faith that has nothing to do with God and yet is essentially as a human experience no different. Perhaps I might say I do not believe in original sin, but I do believe in original faith. And by that I simply mean the faith with which every child is born. A child has faith that the mother will nurse them when they are thirsty and cover them when they feel cold."
"Is faith necessarily a matter of belief in God or in religious doctrines? Is faith by necessity divorced from rational thinking? Faith is part of the basic attitude of a person, a character trait which pervades all our experiences. It is difficult to think of faith not primarily as faith in something, but as faith as an inner attitude, the specific object of which is of secondary importance. Can humans live without faith? Indeed, without faith, we become sterile, hopeless, and afraid to the very core of our being. One usually associates faith with God and with religious doctrines, in contradistinction to rational and scientific thinking. To many, this division is untenable. If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture, and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. The modern towards faith was reached after a long drawn-out struggle against the authority of the church, and its claim to control any kind of thinking. Thus skepticism with regard to faith is bound up with the very advance of reason."
Fromm said: "Thought and judgement are not the only realm of experience in which faith is manifested. In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant relationship. Having faith in a person refers to the faith we have in the potential of others, of ourselves, and of humankind. The presence of faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realise their potential. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potential. There is no is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potential. There is no need for faith in the robot since there is no life in it either."
Fromm also differentiated between irrational and rational faith. He said: "For irrational faith, the sentence 'credo quia absurdum est' - I believe because it is absurd - has full psychological validity. Irrational faith is a fanatic conviction in someone or something, rooted in submission to a personal or impersonal irrational authority. It is the acceptance of something as true only because an authority or the majority say so. Rational faith, in contrast, is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own productive observing and thinking."
1979 saw the release of Monty Python's 'Life of Brian', which soon became a sort of blasphemous cult classic. John Cleese and Michael Palin met Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood on 'Friday Night, Saturday Morning' to discuss the film. One of the points Cleese and Palin emphasise is that the film is challenging closed systems of thought. Indeed, the crowd who blindly follows Brian around is arguably one of the most memorable comedic depictions of irrational faith. However, Muggeridge and Stockwood were having none of it, calling the film third-rate and insisting it ridiculed Jesus. Interestingly, when John Cleese said Jesus was executed for blasphemy, Mervin Stockwood argued that "they accused him of blasphemy because he was obedient to the will of God."
Fromm said that: "The history of science is replete with instances of faith in reason and vision of truth. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton were all imbued with an unshakable faith in reason. For this, Bruno was burned at the stake and Spinoza suffered excommunication. At every step from the conception of a rational vision to the formulation of a theory, faith is necessary.
Fromm said that: "From the very beginning, God was meant to be obeyed precisely in order to prevent people from obeying idols. The worship of the one God is the negation of the worship of people and things."
Fromm said that: "It is the tragedy of all great religions that they violate and pervert the very principles of freedom as soon as they become mass organisations governed by religious bureaucracy. The religious organisation and the people who represent it take over to some extent the place of the family, tribe, and state. It is no longer God who is worshipped, but the group that claims to speak in his name. This has happened in all religions. The real conflict is not between belief in God and atheism, but between a humanistic religious attitude and an attitude which is equivalent to idolatry, regardless of how this attitude is expressed or disguised in conscious thought."
Fromm said that: "I think we should take religion seriously, and should see that a great deal of what is today praised as religious revival, is nothing but the crudest form of idolatry. We think if we speak of God, we speak of God, but if one speaks of Baal and Astarte, or of any other heathen idol, we speak of an idol. The name doesn't matter. The revolutionary idea of monotheism was to choose as an object for worship that which is not limited, which is not a thing, and today we are today in the great danger of worshipping God as an idol, and in addition to make him a partner in business. And in government, I'm afraid so too. Inasmuch as we are concerned with the essence and not the shell, with the experience and not with the word, with people and not with the church, we can unite in firm negation of idolatry and"
Find perhaps more of a common faith in this negation than in any affirmative statements about God. Certainly, we shall find more of humility and of love.
One aspect of the religious experience is that the wonderment, the marvelling, the becoming aware of life and of one's own existence and that of one's fellow people, is not taken for granted but is felt as a problem, is not an answer but a question. Socrates' statement that wonder is the beginning of all wisdom is true not only for wisdom, but for the religious experience.
Fromm said that: "If I could define my position approximately, I would call it that of a non-theistic mysticism." However, Fromm separated mysticism from what he called 'mystification'. He said the two were "used more or less interchangeably to signify a lack of rational clarity, dwelling in the realm of feeling and pious enchantment, and implying flight from the social reality as well as a worldly passivity and a continuous state of mystical contemplation. To be sure, there are mystics for whom this description is more or less correct, but it is completely false as far as Eckhart and certain other mystics are concerned, such as Dionysus the Areopagite and the author of 'The Cloud of Unknowing.'"
As Albert Schweitzer has put it: "Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends in mysticism."
For Meister Eckhart: "The Divine one is a negation of negations and a denial of denials. Every creature contains a negation: one denies that it is the other." Meister Eckhart was a German mystic born in the 13th century. Fromm said that Eckhart was amongst the greatest mystics, noting that Eckhart died before the trial against him was finished and he was sentenced for heresy. Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx were two figures who both had a significant influence on Fromm's thinking.
Comparing the two men's use of the god-concept, Fromm said that: "Eckhart's mystical theology was one step in the historical process of liberating the idea of God from its anthropomorphic authoritarian admixture. With the growth of the natural sciences, of technique, and the beginning of the new individualism and eventually the anti-authoritarian trend that culminated in the French Revolution, the traditional concept of God indeed became more and more vulnerable. All words that were used by the church became tabu for a revolutionary thinker such as Marx, and the concept of God, even if deprived of its authoritarian meaning, became an unspeakable word in any shape or form. Thus Marx was under the same culturally conditioned pressures as Eckhart had been, only in reverse. For Eckhart a world picture without at least the word God was unthinkable. For Marx, a world picture that contained words of religion and a philosophical idealism was equally unthinkable or, perhaps more correctly, to be avoided in theoretical discourse."
If Marx had been allergic to religious words, however, would the student Marx have attended a course of lectures on the prophet Isaiah as the only non-obligatory course in his study plan? Would he, many years later, have told his wife, who was interested in attending some lectures by a very liberal minister: "If you're really interested in religion, read the prophets instead of listening to banalities?" Indeed, Marx had great and empathetic understanding for the essence of religion, an attitude that has been completely distorted by vulgar Marxism and has been borne out by his statement on religion from which only one sentence, taken out of context, is widely quoted: "Religion is the opium of the people."
Fromm said that: "That we have a social life which is completely irreligious. Marx's idea was that we must fulfil the real life of society with the religious values of truth in which the development of people's functions of people's faculties is a supreme aim of all social society, of all social life, and not the state, and not production and consumption. And then we will have a society which is in itself a fulfilment of these religious values and does not need a religion apart anymore. You might say Marx's atheism was a religious atheism, in contrast to the 19th century bourgeois atheism, the materialistic atheism which said that is nonsense, if we have our fun and our pleasure and eat and drink well, and have everything else that is life."
Fromm reframed the infamous opium quote and said that "today one could say perhaps that sex is the opium for the people."
Fromm was also influenced by the ideas of Freud. He said that Freud "spoke about a certain type of religion which in fact I'm afraid as the kind of religion most people have, in which God is seen as an enlarged father figure, of whom one expects help if one if in need, whom one thanks if one is lucky or successful, but about whom one cares about very little otherwise. This is an illusion because we have to go by our own reason, our own energy, our own willpower, and our own conscience. Freud criticised religion from this standpoint. God is unknowable. God is a word for that which we do not understand and yet which is the aim of all our strivings. God represents the idea of truth and love. Our religious task in the world is not simply to believe in such an idea but to take it seriously, that developing our capacity for love, and for reason are the main aims for which our whole life is devoted. Freud did not see this side of religion. He was in an anti-clerical tradition of rationalism. But I would not say that Freud was an enemy of religion. It seems today that there was a good deal of rapprochement between psychoanalysis and religion. Some people think that it is a very good thing. But I'm afraid that sometimes this is not such a good thing, that sometimes the ministers don't have enough faith in the truth of the religious teaching, and that psychoanalysts might not have enough faith in the efficiency of their therapy, and that sometimes they get together, each hoping that the other one would remedy the defects of their own procedure."
Fromm believed that: "Thought concepts are secondary to the human reality behind the thought." For example, he mentioned a Hasidic story about an adherent of a Hasidic master who was asked whether he visited his master to hear his words of wisdom. "No," he answered, "I want to see how he ties his shoelaces." He said: "I hope you don't underestimate the significance of the way one sits or the way one walks, or the significance of any gesture. This is indeed much more significant than talking about God and many other ideas because to talk about God and freedom is very easy from quoted from 'The Heart of Buddhist Meditation' to list a number of "trivial talking points" that we should avoid, according to the Buddha: "I shall not engage in the kind of low talk that is vulgar, worldly, and unprofitable. Namely, talk about kings, thieves, ministers, armies, about eating, drinking, clothing, women and wine, the gossip of the street and the well, about various trifles, tales about the origins of the world and the sea. Instead speech should focus on frugality, contentedness, solitude, seclusion, application of energy, virtue, concentration, and wisdom."
This initially struck me because I used to think the origins of the universe, a frequent point of contention in the god debate, was a deeply profound question. How could it be considered a trivial talking point? However, as Fromm wrote: "Some of the examples cited for trivial conversation may not appear trivial to a non-Buddhist, such as the question of the origin of the world. However this may be, the whole list and its bold summation of topics, some of which are sacred to some and dear to many, is very impressive because it conveys the flavour of banality. Fromm asks how many billions of conversations like these take place? And how often do these conversations go beyond the obvious and penetrate to the roots and causes of the problems? "Perhaps the most trivial is a need to talk about oneself. It is the function of trivial conversation to answer the question 'How do I remain alone without being lonely?' Talking becomes an addiction. As long as I talk I know I exist, that I am not a nobody, that I have a past, that I have a job, I have a family. However, I need someone to listen. If I were only talking to myself, I would go crazy. The listener produces the illusion of a dialogue, when in reality there is only a monologue."
Fromm said that: "If the spirit and the hopes of the Prophets are to prevail, it will depend on the strength and vitality of a new humanism. For the non-theistic humanists a further question arises: what could take the place of religion in a world in which the concept of God may be dead, but in which the experiential reality behind it must live?"
Erich Fromm was a psychoanalyst, philosopher, and humanist. He was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and raised in an environment of orthodox Judaism. Although Fromm stopped practising Judaism in his twenties, he remained deeply concerned with the religious experience and the history of religion, which he explored in many of his books, including 'The Fear of Freedom,' 'The Dogma of Christ, 'Psychoanalysis and Religion, 'Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis' which he co-authored with the Buddhist monk D.T. Suzuki, and 'You Shall be as Gods' - his radical interpretation of the Old Testament.
In 'You Shall be as Gods', Fromm touched upon the influence of the Jewish tradition upon his thinking, despite his departure from practicing Judaism. He wrote: "Although I am not a specialist in the field of biblical scholarship, this book is the fruit of many years of reflection, as I have been studying the Old Testament and the Talmud since I was a child. Nevertheless, I would not have dared to publish these comments on scripture, were it not for the fact that I received my fundamental orientation concerning the Hebrew Bible and the later Jewish tradition from teachers who were great Rabbinical scholars. All of them were representatives of the humanistic wing of the Jewish tradition and strictly observing Jews. They differed greatly, however, from each other. One, Ludwig Krause, was a traditionalist, little touched by modern thought. Another, Nehemia Nobel, was a mystic, deeply steeped in Jewish mysticism. The third, Salman B. Rabinkow, rooted in the Hasidic tradition, was a socialist and a modern scholar. Although none of them left any extensive writings they were well known to be among the most eminent Talmudic scholars living in Germany before the Nazi Holocaust. Not being a practicing or a "believing" Jew I am, of course, in a very different position from theirs, and least of all would I dare to make them responsible for the views expressed in this book. Yet my views have grown out of their teaching, and it is my conviction that at no point has the continuity between their teaching and my own views been interrupted. I was also encouraged to write this book by the example of the great Kantian Hermann Cohen, who in his 'Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums', used the method of looking at the Old Testament together with the later Jewish tradition as a whole. Even though this little work cannot compare with his great opus, and although my conclusions sometimes differ from his, my method has been strongly influenced by his way of looking at the Bible."
"Another interesting Hasidic comment may be mentioned. It is asked why God does not say I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but rather "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." The answer is that this formulation indicates that no two people have the same God, that God is always an individual experience of each person. Thank you for watching and listening to another episode on 'The Erich Fromm Channel'. If you enjoyed this video then please like it, and share it with anyone who you think might find it interesting, and subscribe for more content. Thank you very much.