Buchcover - A God of One's Own - ISBN 978-0-7456-9290-6
Leseprobe - A God of One's Own - ISBN 978-0-7456-9290-6
"Beck does not claim to have found 'the' answer to religious conflict. What he does demonstrate very effectively is that one way of avoiding a polarised and terrifying future is to find hope in the mdoern world's many ironies, paradoxes and complexities„
New Humanist, four star review
“A volume with more than enough ideas to inspire the study of religion for the foreseeable future. The author's acclaimed individualization thesis is put to work in the context of an emerging debate concerning the cultivation of humanity: one between believers in various forms of religious universals, and a form of cosmopolitanism which acknowledges that variety is the spice of life. Whatever the 'god of one's own' owes to universalism, Beck's controversial argument is that the most effective god of one's own lies with non-essentialist, relatively modest and sceptical, cosmopolitanism realism.„
Paul Heelas, Lancaster University
“This new book from one of Europe's leading thinkers is a welcome, thoughtful engagement with the prominence of religion in the contemporary world. Writing as an unabashed sociological secularist, but one who refuses the simplifications of typical ideas of secularization, Beck explores religion's contradictory potentials, patterns of individuation and group identity, and the relation of religion to the „crisis of European modernity“. Beck should inspire other sociologists and secularists to think harder about phenomena they too often ignore."
Craig Calhoun, New York University and President, Social Science Research Council
A God of One's Own
Religion's Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence
Religion posits one characteristic as an absolute: faith. Comparedto faith, all other social distinctions and sources of conflict areinsignificant. The New Testament says: 'We are all equal inthe sight of God'. To be sure, this equality applies only to thosewho acknowledge God's existence. What this means is that alongsidethe abolition of class and nation within the community ofbelievers, religion introduces a new fundamental distinction intothe world the distinction between the right kind of believers andthe wrong kind. Thus overtly or tacitly, religion brings with itthe demonization of believers in other faiths.
The central question that will decide the continued existence ofhumanity is this: How can we conceive of a type of inter-religioustolerance in which loving one's neighbor does not imply war to thedeath, a type of tolerance whose goal is not truth but peace?
Is what we are experiencing at present a regression ofmonotheistic religion to a polytheism of the religious spirit underthe heading of 'a God of one's own'? In Western societies, where the autonomy of the individual has been internalized, individual human beings tend to feel increasingly at liberty totell themselves little faith stories that fit their own lives toappoint 'Gods of their own'. However, this God of
their own is no longer the one and only God who presides oversalvation by seizing control of history and empowering hisfollowers to be intolerant and use naked force.
