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, “The Mind of the Bible Believer.”
You are going to fall in love with Ed Cohen. Early on, Ed’s parent’s tapped Ed’s older brother as the heir to the family business and told Ed that he wasn’t 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’s really sharp and highly insightful. It’s hard to believe how wrong his parents were in their assessment of this intellectual.
Cohen wrote in an article titled “How I Walked Away,” “Devoutness 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 Sciences are so pathetically few.” –Ed Cohen
Ed’s book “C.G. Jung and the Scientific Attitude”
Ed’s Amazon seller name: Schriftsteller43
Ed’s article, “How I Walked Away”
Ed’s Facebook page
Austin Miles’ book, “Don’t Call Me Brother”
Ed’s footage of Pat Robertson used on NBC
The ebook version of “The Mind of the Bible Believer”
We taped this talk on Feb 21st, 2016. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn and most podcast platforms.  If you’re feeling grateful for our podcast, Patreon.com is like a per episode tip jar for our work. That’s www.patreon.com/eapodcast.
Credits: "Towering Mountain of Ignorance" intro by Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxUIntro bumper "Never Know" by Jack JohnsonThe segue music on this episode is Duke’s Lullaby by Steve Gadd
Thanks for listening and be a yes-sayer to what is.