Jacques Berlinerblau: Self

Jacques Berlinerblau is Associate Professor, Director of the Program for Jewish Civilization, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. Explore interesting quotes on self.
Jacques Berlinerblau: 14   quotes 0   likes

“That God is quoted verbatim, that God is said to be speaking (when, in fact, he is being spoken for) points to either the remarkable arrogance of the biblical contributors or their unshakeable conviction that their access to the deity was total.
The fateful, and perhaps even unwitting, manipulation performed by the Hebrew Bible is to have convinced its readers that what stands in front of them is not a hodgepodge of texts worked over by countless men position across time and motivated by mundane political and theological interests. Instead, it presents itself as a self-evident treasury of the actual words, though, actions, political opinions, and future aspirations of Yahweh. From early on, apparently, interpreters wholly swallowed this argument.”

Jacques Berlinerblau

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 65

Men , God , Fate , Quotes

“Today's secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about religion, and even less desire to learn. This is problematic insofar as their sense of self is constructed in opposition to religion. Above all, the secularist is not a Jew, is not a Christian, not a Muslim, and so on. But is it intellectually responsible to define one's identity against something that one does not understand?”

Jacques Berlinerblau

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 1

Religion , Understanding , Knowledge , Sense

“Secularism, at its absolute best, comprises an unrelenting commitment to judicious and self-correcting critique. … Secularism’s “job” consists of criticizing all collective representations. Its analytical energies should be inflicted on any type of mass belief or empowered orthodoxy, whether it is religious, political, scientific, aesthetic, and so on. … Secularism, as we envision it, is elitist and heretical by nature. When it aspires to become a popular movement, an orthodoxy, or the predicate of a nation-state, it betrays itself.”

Jacques Berlinerblau

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 7

Nature

“The Hebrew Bible, as a document, displays an astonishing lack of textual self-consciousness. It alleges to know what God thinks, but it does not know itself. It is not aware that it is called the Hebrew Bible. … Jews and Christians have venerated an unself-conscious artifact, one whose embarrassing gaps in self-knowledge have always had to be filled in by later interpreters.”

Jacques Berlinerblau

Source: The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), p. 28

God , Knowledge , Thinking