The Ultimate Sin

By Ronald J. Karpf

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0761000127
• ISBN13: 9780761000129
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Northwest Pub
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Read

A Jewish Psychologist and protégé of the late Alan Watts, the author uses Watts' understanding of Asian religions as a bridge to the better understanding of, and becoming better grounded in, Western life -- including of course Western religion. He establishes his own hypothetic-deductive system as parts one and three of what he sees as a normal three-part life cycle: Theorize (plan)-test (live)-theorize (recap). Karpf's belief is that we begin life by building it on a foundation of rationalism, a foundation, which is then tested empirically throughout the middle part of our lives. Life is then summed up with another around of rational system building at its end. The book is an attempt to understand the role human consciousness plays in attempts to get our hands around the middle part of life - the "lived" or "empirically testable part." Importantly, Karpf (very much in the vein of Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death,") makes a sophisticated, radical, and even convincing argument that language is both the problem and solution to most of man's existential dilemmas. Leaning heavily on Arthur Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine," Professor Karpf sets forth the thesis that "the expressive and symbolic functions of human language cause us to exaggerate the symbol a word expresses, rather than the concrete reality the word is supposed to symbolize. This substitution of the "symbol," for the thing to be symbolized -- i.e., forgetting that symbolism is a representation of reality and not reality itself -- is the fatal error (what the philosophers call a "category error") that leads to an undue reliance on systems of beliefs, rather than on "lived experience" as the ultimate basis for ascribing meaningfulness to life. It is this error that leads to what Karpf calls the "Ultimate Sin: fervent believing, a kind of "symbolic idolatry," a theology of devotion to symbols, or passionate conviction - the conviction that one's own belief system is unquestioningly and unerringly correct. Like Koestler, Karpf believes that man's aggression stems from two sources, biological (primary) and the social environment (secondary). History has shown that because our identities are wrapped up in what we believe (our own passionate convictions); and because it and they can still be wrapped further in political and religious packages, aggression stemming from the social environment is far and away the more dangerous of the two sources. Karpf falls just short of Koestler's recommendation of doing away with religion altogether since it is the greatest and most blind purveyor of symbolic aggression. Like Sam Harris (The End of Religion), Karpf recommends a kind of middle ground as the answer: ridding the world of passionate convictions rather than of religion is the correct solution. While some of the material is dated, it was so far ahead of its time when written that there is still much meat here to be considered and mulled over. Anyone who digests Alan Watts, Sigmund