God: A Human History by Reza AslanMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you want to find an engaging book about religion written with clarity, objectivity, and audacity, find this book (or any other) by Reza Aslan. He does not disappoint.
God: A Human History is fairly short book, with almost half of its pages given to notes, but it is filled with big ideas, and it tells a story about religion in a way I've never seen before. I don't think anything here is original scholarship (thus the lengthy notes) but the book does a wonderful job of imposing narrative order on the chaos of the story of human religion. It explains the universal tendency toward certain spiritual beliefs, and the trajectory from seeing gods in all of nature to gods representing qualities or realms to, eventually, a single god--from animism to polytheism to monolatry to monotheism, by stages. It shows how pantheons are created, how gods rise and fall, how one god or another becomes preeminent among a people and even eliminates all others, and it all seems so obvious after he as explains it.
The description of the way gods are humbled when the people who worship them are defeated by another people worshipping another god was instructive; seeing how the Israelites, defeated and carried away into Babylonian captivity, overcame that setback by seeing their god a different way, a bigger way, was revelatory. (I remember learning about the Deuteronomic history of Israel way back in college, with punishment and reward for the nation depending on its righteousness, but this finally lets me take a step back so that idea makes sense to me historically, not just theologically.)
Though the author is a well-known religious person (WKRP), he writes with an academic's objectivity. His summaries of the stages of development in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are so direct and clear and unflinching, unhampered by hand-wringing or apologies, that they not only answer questions I didn't realize I had, but they do so in a deeply satisfying way. Stories out of the Old Testament (for example) that I always understood in a poetic or metaphorical way now make sense in a literal way; Aslan shows how they can represent an earlier stage of thought, one superseded by later teachings (from monolatry to monotheism, or the blending of Yahweh and El, for example), and once they are seen that way it all adds up. Religion, like politics and economics and every other aspect of society, is understood then to exist in a historical context, telling a story of change over time.
There is a lot here that is new to me, new information which I found interesting and entertaining, but what I like most is the way he has made the history of religion into a coherent story. There is a clear trajectory (I removed "progression," because of its connotations) in the religious thought of humans, one that is driven by our makeup, and having it analyzed and spelled out is very illuminating and very satisfying.
Recommended for eye-opening clarity.
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