A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Karen Armstrong. 

2/5 rating. 399 pages.

Book #47 of 2020. Read July 19, 2020.

I was super excited to read this book because anthropological looks at religion are some of my favorite books (wow, writing that sounds like a joke, but it’s not! 😂), but unfortunately, this book was very dry and just much too long.

This book looks at the histories of the Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It would probably shock adherents of all three religions, but many practices that are part of the official dogma now were actually implemented long after the Koran, Torah, and Bible were written:

– the Prophet Muhammad was all-too happy to accept his adherents’ belief in other gods as long as they also believed in his spoken words of what became the Koran

– “Indeed the Koran is clear that there is to be ‘no compulsion in religion.’ In the Koran war is held to be abhorrent; the only just war is a war of self-defense.”

– the creation story by God (or Allah) was not thought to be ex nihilo, or to be taken as literal in the early days of their religion

– “[I]n the Gospels Jesus never claimed that he had come to atone for the sins of mankind. That idea, which had become central to Western Christendom, could only be traced to St. Paul, the true founder of Christianity.”

These are just a few of the interesting aspects of religion that have been included, but “religion” as a concept is always changing. Both the religious and not are always subtly – or sometimes more explicitly – affecting the practice of these ancient beliefs. We, in a sense, create what we worship, as Karen says:

“Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself.”

While there were a decent amount of quotes that I enjoyed from this book, it really wasn’t worth the slog to get through it. You can definitely skip this one.

Quotes:

“Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life, and, once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away.”

“Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.”

“Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to.”

“The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community.”

“One of the reasons why religion seems irrelevant today is that many of us no longer have the sense that we are surrounded by the unseen.”

“The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate, ontological sphere: divinity was not essentially different from humanity. There was thus no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from on high. The gods and human beings shared the same predicament, the only difference being that the gods were more powerful and were immortal.”

“Yet to modern ears, this is a terrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this tale as children reject such a deity.”

“This is a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war who would be known as Yahweh Sabaoth, the God of Armies. He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his own favorites and is simply a tribal deity.”

“The God who may have inspired the first successful peasants’ uprising in history is a God of revolution. In all three faiths, he has inspired an ideal of social justice, even though it has to be said that Jews, Christians and Muslims have often failed to live up to this ideal and have transformed him into the God of the status quo.”

“When Buddhists experience bliss or a sense of transcendence in meditation, they do not believe that this results from contact with a supernatural being. Such states are natural to humanity; they can be attained by anybody who lives in the correct way and learns the techniques of Yoga. Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves.”

“Religion starts with the perception that something is wrong.”

“This continues to be the case; the religion of compassion is followed only by a minority; most religious people are content with decorous worship in synagogue, church, temple and mosque.”

“Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute.”

“We know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life was St. Mark’s Gospel, which was not written until about the year 70, some forty years after his death. By that time, historical facts had been overlaid with mythical elements which expressed the meaning Jesus had acquired for his followers.”

“Mark’s Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib. He had not been marked out during his infancy or adolescence as remarkable in any way.”

“There were, however, no detailed theories about the crucifixion as an atonement for some ‘original sin’ of Adam: we shall see that this theology did not emerge until the fourth century and was only important in the West.”

“This is not an unfamiliar attitude today: many of the people who attend religious services in our own society are not interested in theology, want nothing too exotic and dislike the idea of change. They find that the established rituals provide them with a link with tradition and give them a sense of security.”

“Indeed, many people in the Greco-Roman world found the biblical God a blundering, ferocious deity who was unworthy of worship.”

“Supremely a religion of adversity, [Christianity] has never been at its best in prosperity.”

“A religion which looks askance upon half of the human race and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart and body as a symptom of fatal concupiscence can only alienate men and women from their condition.”

“It also reinforced the Western image of a harsh God who could only be satisfied by the hideous death of his own Son, who had been offered up as a kind of human sacrifice.”

“Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”

“Instead of fearing that the younger generation was going to the dogs, as in former times, the older generation expected their children to live better than they. The study of history was dominated by a new myth: that of Progress. It achieved great things, but now that damage to the environment has made us realize that this way of life is as vulnerable as the old, we are, perhaps, beginning to grasp that it is as fictitious as most of the other mythologies that have inspired humanity over the centuries.”

“People began to believe that better education and improved laws could bring light to the human spirit. This new confidence in the natural powers of human beings meant that people came to believe that they could achieve enlightenment by means of their own exertions. They no longer felt that they needed to rely on inherited tradition, an institution or an elite – or, even, a revelation from God – to discover the truth.”

“Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, & for that reason to like best what they understand least.” – Isaac Newton

“It was disturbing for many of the faithful to see that fundamental dogmas about the nature of God and Christ had developed over the centuries and were not present in the New Testament: did that mean that they were false?”

“He was ‘the righteous God, the angered God’ and ‘the embittered God,’ whose demands for strict retribution filled so many Christians with fear and taught them to recoil from their own ‘sinfulness.’ More and more Christians were embarrassed by the cruelty of so much Christian history, which had conducted fearful crusades, inquisitions and persecutions in the name of this just God.”

“As this account of the future salvation of the world progresses – through the exploits of King David, the exile to Babylon, the birth of Christ and so forth – it occurs to the reader that there must have been an easier and more direct way to redeem mankind. The fact that this tortuous plan with its constant failures and false starts is decreed in advance can only cast grave doubts on the intelligence of its Author.”

“This sense of an imminent God helped Jews to see humanity as sacred. Rabbi Akiva taught that the mitzvah ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ was ‘the great principle of Torah.’ Offenses against a fellow human being were a denial of God himself, who had made men and women in his image.”

“The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not reject the idea of God, however. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason.”

“Religion created gods because people could not find any other explanation to console them for the tragedy of life in this world. They turned to the imaginary comforts of religion and philosophy in an attempt to establish some illusory sense of control, trying to propitiate an ‘agency’ they imagine lurking behind the scenes to ward off terror and disaster.”

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