Category: Religion

In his book Psychoanalysis and Religion Erich Fromm draws a distinction between two types of religion: authoritarian and humanistic. He writes:

“The essential element in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian religious experience is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, its cardinal sin is disobedience. Just as the deity is conceived as omnipotent or omniscient, man is conceived as being powerless and insignificant. Only as he can gain grace or help from the deity by complete surrender can he feel strength. Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which man escapes from his feeling of aloneness and limitation. In the act of surrender he loses his independence and integrity as an individual but he gains the feeling of being protected by an awe-inspiring power of which, as it were, he becomes a part.”

There are two basic approaches to stock market investment: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. A fundamental analyst studies individual companies in detail, looking at the quality of their balance sheets, the calibre of their management, the competitiveness of their products etc. Technical analysis, on the other hand, focuses on the performance of companies’ or whole sectors’ share prices in relation to the rest of the market, searching for historical trends that will indicate a good moment to buy or sell.