You Shall Be As Gods

What from a mundane standpoint was the tragedy of the Jews—the loss of their country and their state—from the humanist standpoint was their greatest blessing: being among the suffering and despised, they were able to develop and uphold a tradition of humanism

By radical humanism I refer to a global philosophy which emphasizes the oneness of the human race, the capacity of man to develop his own powers and to arrive at inner harmony and at the establishment of a peaceful world.

the nation, and for all of mankind

Testament is a revolutionary book; its theme is the liberation of man from the incestuous ties to blood and soil, from the submission to idols, from slavery, from powerful masters, to freedom for the individual, for th

history that ascribes the same importance to all facts is nothing but an enumeration of events

But the x, the goal, was soon converted into an absolute; a system was built around it; the blank spaces were filled with many fictitious assumptions, until what is common in the vision almost disappeared under the weight of the fictitious “additions” produced by each system.

Frequently the awareness of the qualitative difference between the “fragments” and “the additions” is missing because of the intensity of the wish for certainty

What is common is the idea that neither nature nor artifacts constitute the ultimate reality or the highest value, but that there is only the ONE who represents the supreme value and the supreme goal for man: the goal of finding union with the world through full development of his specifically human capacities of love and reason.

there is permanence and change in any concept reflecting the experience of a living man.

I do not share their thought concept; I believe that the concept “God” was conditioned by the presence of a sociopolitical structure in which tribal chiefs or kings have supreme power.