I bought it from Books Kinokuniya (紀伊國屋書店) of Kuala Lumpur two years ago. This is a monograph about the evolution of the concept of god (specifically, the god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in the past 3000 years. The topic is one of my favorite subjects (relation between philosophy and theology), but, to begin with, I do not have a high hope. This paperback is over 400 pages, with densely packed words, full of names and professional terms, and no figure.
But, I am happily proved wrong. It is true that the text is boring here and there. Nonetheless, there are a lot more insightful chapters. The first one-third of the book is largely around the two anonymous authors of Genesis (denoted as E and J in the book), how their views differ from the other, how they affected, individually and together, the concept of god in the following centuries, and how it ends up as the idea of Trinity. The last third is about the concept of god amongst famous philosophers – Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and so forth, and why modern man consider the god is dead.
It is a bit heavy, I know.
No comments:
Post a Comment