Aslan has a way of framing his ideas about religion that I find really compelling, so after reading and loving Zealot, I decided to pick up this volume and hear his thoughts on God. Because I’m interested in history, I really loved all the threads Aslan followed from prehistory to the early middle ages. I also really liked that his arguments were well-grounded and explained in a straight-forward manner. Most of my complaints are less a criticism on how Aslan goes about his argument than a request for more, and while I am always loathe to ask for more work from a scholar, I think in this case, more would have benefited the thesis of the book.

Because this book is a work of non-fiction, my usual review format won’t apply. I hope what I have below is sufficient enough to communicate my thoughts.

Aslan’s prose is styled in such a way to make his scholarly work accessible to a non-specialist audience. It’s personable and flows well, combining narrative with history to make cultures different from our own feel familiar and human. He never uses academic jargon and achieves a good balance of respecting the reader’s intelligence and explaining basic terms and concepts so as not to leave anyone feeling confused.

The premise of his argument is also very compelling. Even before I got to the supporting evidence, the idea that humans project themselves onto God was convincing - we tend to see it happen all the time in the USA, so I didn’t feel like Aslan was making an outlandish claim. Instead, it felt like he was articulating something we sort of know inherently, but aren’t sure how to talk about, and I think he does a good job of making this claim without saying that humans invented God. In other words, you can still read this book if you’re a believer in any deity because the claim is about human behavior rather than about the nature of the divine.

The structure of the book as a whole followed a fairly logical progression. Section one, “The Embodied Soul,” provided an overview of how religion arose in our hunter-gatherer ancestors with a special emphasis on exploring how religion is rooted in cognition. I was quite convinced by Aslan’s claim in this section that religious belief stems from the initial belief that human beings have a soul separate from (but still dwelling within) their physical body. Section two, “The Humanized God,” takes readers through the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sorting through theological problems such as how Christ can be God and how God can be all.

In terms of things that didn’t work for me, I personally found the narrative elements (which were meant to illustrate Aslan’s points) more distracting than enlightening. I much preferred the “harder” evidence, drawn from psychology and archaeology, but I’m an academic, so the narrative technique might be helpful for those who don’t regularly engage with academic writing. I also am not sure how centering the narrative examples around Adam and Eve helps if the argument is about all religions (not just Abrahamic ones), but I did think it was a good idea to portray “Adam and Eve” as homo sapiens living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, rather than some proto-modern version of human.

I also wish this book had gone a little further than the early middle ages. In the intro, Aslan alludes to modern-day politicians and their tendency to depict God in their political image. I think another section which tracts the development of modern religion would have been beneficial here, though I realize that such a topic would be a book in itself.

Recommendations: I would recommend this book if you’re interested in the history of religion/religious studies, psychology and cognition, prehistory, and early Church history.

My.only complaint is that he got on paper what I've had in my head for years and wish I could have gotten down.

I feel seen in the conclusion and I feel challenged in the anthropological and psychoanalytic approach to tracing a monotheistic... But truly Pantheistic evolution of "God" over the course of history.

4 stars? I thoroughly enjoyed the history of this book, but it wasn't as good as Zealot. Aslan is a great historian and I enjoy his ideas and arguments, but when he occasionally deviated from history into science/human psychology his foundation clearly was not as firm. This was a great attempt at a very long and broad history, but I was left... Wanting more? A more solid conclusion? Even more, diverse religious history and examples? Im not exactly sure what is wanting from this book, but I still learned a lot and it was fascinating!

I enjoyed it, though I feel it has an extremely hasty and abbreviated conclusion.

God and Homo Religiosus:

As a fellow Muslim I do wholly agree with his beautiful thesis that the pantheistic concept of God akin to Ibn-e-Arabi's 'Wahdatal Wujood' (Unity of Being) is the only way to go if one is to live in the pluralistic and muti-religious world of today:

"There is a modern term for this conception of the divine: pantheism, meaning 'God is all' or 'all is God'. In its simplest form, pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are one and the same that nothing exists outside of God's necessary existence. In other words, what we call the world and what we call God are not independent or discrete. Rather the world is God's self-expression. It is God's essence realized and experienced. Think of God as a light that passes through a prism, refracting into countless colors. The individual colors seem different from each other but in reality they are the same. They have the same essence. They have the same source. In this way what seems on the surface to be separate and distinct is in fact a single reality and that reality is what we call God.

This is essentially what our prehistoric ancestors believed. Their primitive animism was predicated on the belief that all things - living or not - share a single essence: a single soul, if you will. The same belief spurred the ancient Mesopotamians to deify elements of nature, long before they began to transform those elements into individual, personalized gods. It lay at the heart of the early Egyptian belief in the existence of a divine force that manifested itself in both gods and humans. It is what the Greek philosophers meant when they spoke of 'one god' as the singular, unified principle steering all of creation. All of those belief systems can be viewed as different expressions of the pantheistic conception of God as the sum of all things."

This particular opus is Aslan's most personal till date, setting out his circuitous spiritual journey both as a scholar of religions and a 'homo religiosus' man of faith, from 'a spiritually inclined child who thought of God as an old man with magical powers, to a devout Christian who imagined God as the perfect human being; from a scholastic Muslim who rejected Christianity in favor of the purer monotheism of Islam, to a Sufi forced to admit that the only way to accept the proposition of a singular, eternal and an indivisible God was to obliterate any distinction between Creator and creation'.

He urges the reader to consider the possibility that the entire reason us humans have a cognitive impulse to think of God as a divine reflection of ourselves is because we are, every one of us, a part of God and that rather than concerning ourselves with trying to form a relationship with God, we should instead become fully aware of the relationship that already exists: "What I believe now is that there is no chasm because there is no distinction between us. I am, in my essential reality, God made manifest. We all are."

Mr. Aslan encourages me to worship God through awe and to marvel at his creation (the universe); to pray to God to become one with God; to realize that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices and to root those moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hopes of eternal reward; to recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and to respond to everyone and everything as though they were God -- because they are. Finally, he urges that the only way for one to truly know God is by relying on the only thing one can truly know i.e. oneself.

As to those who make a choice of not believing in God, he says: "Believe in God or not. Define God how you will. Either way, take a lesson from our mythological ancestors Adam and Eve and eat the forbidden fruit. You do not need to fear God. You are God."

#FantasticRead #SoulSearching #Theology #Hope #HomoReligiosus #Spirituality #God #IchSucheGott

Little dry at times

Really interesting and accessible read on the history of religion. Quite short so not a huge amount of depth, and definitely more of a personal narrative/argument than objective views to follow.

The ideas around how religion first came about seem to make conceptual sense, but again this is more of a possibility rather than a certainty - which I think is how this book needs to be read. The arguments of polytheism as the natural starting point for people, Gods representing spirits or concepts (like weather, the hunt etc) before eventaully becoming personalised, in the human image and eventually monotheistic are again very interesting, but discussion points rather than fact.

And again the conflation of religion with institution, from spirituality to moral rules, is where lots of problems arise!!

Probably the coolest thing I didn't know much about before this was the introduction (at the end) of Sufism and Sufi doctrine - one to read up about some more!!

"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated."--Voltaire

I read this because I am going to see Reza Aslan speak at our local lecture series. The book is well-written and short, but I felt that it left a lot to be desired. It provides a nice survey of various religions, but that is likely covered better by others such as Karen Armstrong. It reminded me a lot of Sapiens, insofar as it includes vast, sweeping assertions about history that are presented with far too much certainty and an obvious lack of nuance. And I thought that the ending seemed especially rushed--suddenly a sort of pantheism is thrown in as implicitly the "right" way of looking at God. Finally, I also don't understand how pretty much all of the Eastern religions are swept aside as if the Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism (Aslan is Iranian) are the only religious traditions worth addressing.

All that said, it is a fascinating topic. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the extent to which people don't seem to be capable of recognizing that they are creating anthropomorphic gods that reflect their society and social group. For example, I recently saw a comment on Twitter to the effect that Jesus gets used as a ventriloquist dummy a lot. That is really apt--and not just for political views, even though those are the most blatant example. Jesus also serves as a great motivational therapist who espouses a lot of views that sound just like secular self-help advice.

One thing that occurred to me as I was reading was that strict monotheism might actually represent a step backwards in our spiritual evolution. Early monotheism whereby you worship your one god, but acknowledge that there are other gods out there that are worshiped by other people, probably would lead to a lot less fundamentalism as compared to insisting there is but one God that just happens to be your God. Given that most people stay broadly within the faith of their geographic region/family, it amazes me that people don't seem to consider the rather long odds that they just happen to be born into the "one true faith," given the scope of the varieties of religious expression throughout human history and among people living in different places right now. Again, that is not something that is dealt with directly in the book, but it is something that the book encouraged me to think about.