BROADCASTS.com

Cass talks with Dr. Edmund Cohen. Bob was not able to be there, but joins in for the post-show. Ed is 73 years old. He was raised in a secular Jewish household, earn a PhD in Psychology at age 26, earned a law degree at age 35, and began a 4 year tryst with Christianity at age 36. It started with a liberal Methodist church, then Pentecostalism, the Reformed Calvinism. After a brief study at Westminster Theological Seminary he realized he was wrong and began writing his 300 page tome entitled, \u201cThe Mind of the Bible Believer.\u201d

You are going to fall in love with Ed Cohen. Early on, Ed\u2019s parent\u2019s tapped Ed\u2019s older brother as the heir to the family business and told Ed that he wasn\u2019t college material and could work for his brother. Ed is an overcomer, and exploded out of the box his parents built to contain him. He\u2019s really sharp and highly insightful. It\u2019s hard to believe how wrong his parents were in their assessment of this intellectual.

Cohen wrote in an article titled \u201cHow I Walked Away,\u201d \u201cDevoutness had brought out some of my worst tendencies. I had grown not in righteousness, but in rigidness, not in purity, but in priggishness - not in holiness, but in ass-holiness! I had been on my way to becoming a regular little Savonarola, a regular little Calvin itching to get a Servetus burned at the stake. Show me a fundamentalist who does not become like that, and I will show you one who conveniently finesses the Bible's harder teachings! The absurdity of it all overwhelmed me. I realized that biblical Christianity is all a devious psychological rigmarole, ingeniously designed to make people compliant. No wonder that in the places and times in history when preoccupation with Christianity was at its height, mankind progressed very little. No wonder that the accomplishments of contemporary fundamentalists in the arts and\xa0Sciences are so pathetically few.\u201d \u2013Ed Cohen

Ed\u2019s book \u201cC.G. Jung and the Scientific Attitude\u201d

Ed\u2019s Amazon seller name: Schriftsteller43

Ed\u2019s article, \u201cHow I Walked Away\u201d

Ed\u2019s Facebook page

Austin Miles\u2019 book, \u201cDon\u2019t Call Me Brother\u201d

Ed\u2019s footage of Pat Robertson used on NBC

The ebook version of \u201cThe Mind of the Bible Believer\u201d

We taped this talk on Feb 21st, 2016. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and most podcast platforms.\xa0 If you\u2019re feeling grateful for our podcast, Patreon.com is like a per episode tip jar for our work. That\u2019s www.patreon.com/eapodcast.

Credits:\xa0
"Towering Mountain of Ignorance" intro by Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxU
Intro bumper "Never Know" by Jack Johnson
The segue music on this episode is Duke\u2019s Lullaby by Steve Gadd

Thanks for listening and be a yes-sayer to what is.

\xa0

\xa0

\xa0

\xa0

\xa0

\xa0