God: A Human History

2017·6 MB·English

by  Reza Aslan

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: In Our Image
Part One: The Embodied Soul
Chapter One: Adam and Eve in Eden
Chapter Two: The Lord of Beasts
Chapter Three: The Face in the Tree
Part Two: The Humanized God
Chapter Four: Spears into Plows
Chapter Five: Lofty Persons
Chapter Six: The High God
Part Three: What Is God?
Chapter Seven: God Is One
Chapter Eight: God Is Three
Chapter Nine: God Is All
Conclusion: The One
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
By Reza Aslan
About the Author
Introduction
In Our Image
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I thought God was a large, powerful old man who
lived in the sky—a bigger, stronger version of my father, but with magical
powers. I imagined him handsome and grizzled, his long gray hair draped over
his broad shoulders. He sat on a throne enwrapped by clouds. When he spoke,
his voice boomed through the heavens, especially when he was angry. And he
was often angry. But he was also warm and loving, merciful and kind. He
laughed when he was happy and cried when he was sad.
I’m not sure where this image of God came from. I may have glimpsed it
somewhere, painted on stained glass or printed in a book. It could be that I was
born with it. Studies have shown that young children, no matter where they are
from or how religious they may be, have a difficult time distinguishing between
humans and God in terms of action or agency. When asked to imagine God, they
invariably describe a human being with superhuman abilities.1
As I grew older, I left behind most of my childish views. Yet the image of
God remained. I was not raised in a particularly religious household, but I was
always fascinated by religion and spirituality. My head teemed with half-formed
theories about what God was, where he came from, and what he looked like
(curiously, he still resembled my father). I didn’t want to simply know about
God; I wanted to experience God, to feel his presence in my life. Yet when I
tried, I couldn’t help but imagine a great chasm opening up between us, with
God on one side, me on the other, and no way for either of us to cross over.
In my teens, I converted from the tepid Islam of my Iranian parents to the
zealous Christianity of my American friends. All at once, that childhood urge to
think of God as a powerful human being crystallized into the worship of Jesus
Christ as literally “God made flesh.” At first, the experience felt like scratching
an itch I had had my entire life. For years, I’d been searching for a way to bridge
the chasm between me and God. Now, here was a religion that claimed there was
no chasm. If I wanted to know what God was like, all I had to do was imagine
the most perfect human being.
It made a certain amount of sense. What better way to remove the barrier
between human beings and God than by making God a human being? As the
famed German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach said, in accounting for the
enormous success of Christianity’s conception of God, “only a being who
comprises in himself the whole man can satisfy the whole man.”2
I first read that Feuerbach quote in college, just around the time I decided to
embark on a lifelong quest to study the religions of the world. What Feuerbach
seemed to be saying is that the near-universal appeal of a God who looks, and
thinks, and feels, and acts just like us is rooted in our deep-seated need to
experience the divine as a reflection of ourselves. That truth hit me like a clap of
thunder. Is that why I was drawn to Christianity as a kid? Had I been
constructing my image of God all this time as a mirror reflecting back to me my
own traits and emotions?
The possibility left me feeling bitter and disillusioned. Seeking a more
expansive conception of God, I abandoned Christianity and returned to Islam,
drawn by the religion’s radical iconoclasm: the belief that God cannot be
confined by any image, human or otherwise. I quickly recognized, however, that
Islam’s refusal to depict God in human form did not translate into a refusal to
think of God in human terms. Muslims are just as likely as other people of faith
to ascribe to God their own virtues and vices, their own feelings and flaws. They
have little choice in the matter. Few of us do.
It turns out that this compulsion to humanize the divine is hardwired in our
brains, which is why it has become a central feature in almost every religious
tradition the world has known. The very process through which the concept of
God arose in human evolution compels us, consciously or not, to fashion God in
our own image. In fact, the entire history of human spirituality can be viewed as
one long, interconnected, ever-evolving, and remarkably cohesive effort to make
sense of the divine by giving it our emotions and our personalities, by ascribing
to it our traits and our desires, by providing it with our strengths and our
weaknesses, even our own bodies—in short, by making God us. What I mean to
say is that, more often than not, whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless
of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when
we think about God is a divine version of ourselves: a human being but with
superhuman powers.3
This is not to claim that there is no such thing as God, or that what we call
God is wholly a human invention. Both of these statements may very well be
true, but that is not the concern of this book. I have no interest in trying to prove
the existence or nonexistence of God for the simple reason that no proof exists
either way. Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert
you. You either choose to believe that there is something beyond the material
realm—something real, something knowable—or you don’t. If, like me, you do,
then you must ask yourself another question: Do you wish to experience this
thing? Do you wish to commune with it? To know it? If so, then it may help to
have a language with which to express what is fundamentally an inexpressible
experience.
That is where religion comes in. Beyond the myths and rituals, the temples
and cathedrals, the dos and don’ts that have, for millennia, separated humanity
into different and often competing camps of belief, religion is little more than a
“language” made up of symbols and metaphors that allows believers to
communicate, to one another and to themselves, the ineffable experience of
faith. It’s just that, throughout the history of religions, there has been one symbol
that has stood out as universal and supreme—one grand metaphor for God from
which practically every other symbol and metaphor in nearly all the world’s
religions has been derived: us; the human being.
This concept, which I call “the humanized God,” was embedded in our
consciousness the moment the idea of God first occurred to us. It led to our
earliest theorizing about the nature of the universe and our role in it. It informed
our first physical representations of the world beyond ours. Belief in humanized
gods guided us as hunter-gatherers, and then, tens of thousands of years later, led
us to swap our spears for plows and begin planting instead. Our first temples
were built by people who thought of the gods as superhuman beings—as were
our first religions. The Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans,
the Indians, the Persians, the Hebrews, the Arabs, all devised their theistic
systems in human terms and with human imagery. The same holds true for
nontheistic traditions, such as Jainism or Buddhism, both of which conceive of
the spirits and devas that populate their theologies as superhuman beings who
are, like their human counterparts, bound by the laws of karma.4
Even those contemporary Jews, Christians, and Muslims who strive so hard to
profess theologically “correct” beliefs about a sole, singular God who is
incorporeal or infallible, ever-present or all-knowing, seem compelled to
envision God in human form and to speak of God in human terms. Studies
performed by a range of psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that
the most devout believers, when forced to communicate their thoughts about
God, overwhelmingly treat God as though they were talking about some person
they might have met on the street.5
Think about the way believers so often describe God as good or loving, cruel
or jealous, forgiving or kind. These are, of course, human attributes. Yet this
insistence on using human emotions to describe something that is—whatever
else it is—utterly nonhuman only further demonstrates our existential need to
project our humanity onto God, to bestow upon God not just all that is worthy in
human nature—our capacity for boundless love, our empathy and eagerness to
show compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is vile in it: our aggression
and greed, our bias and bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence.
There are, as one can imagine, certain consequences to this natural impulse to
humanize the divine. For when we endow God with human attributes, we
essentially divinize those attributes, so that everything good or bad about our
religions is merely a reflection of everything that is good or bad about us. Our
desires become God’s desires, but without boundaries. Our actions become
God’s actions, but without consequence. We create a superhuman being
endowed with human traits, but without human limitations. We fashion our
religions and cultures, our societies and governments, according to our own
human urges, all the while convincing ourselves that those urges are God’s.
That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history,
religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why
the same faith in the same God inspires love and compassion in one believer,
hatred and violence in another; why two people can approach the same scripture
at the same time and come away with two radically opposing interpretations of
it. Indeed, most of the religious conflicts that continue to roil our world arise
from our innate, unconscious desire to make ourselves the apotheosis of what
God is and what God wants, whom God loves and whom God hates.
It took many more years for me to realize that the conception of God I was
looking for was simply too expansive to be defined by any one religious
tradition, that the only way I could truly experience the divine was to
dehumanize God in my spiritual consciousness.
And so this book is more than just a history of how we have humanized God.
It is also an appeal to stop foisting our human compulsions upon the divine, and
to develop a more pantheistic view of God. At the very least it is a reminder that,
whether you believe in one God or many gods or no god at all, it is we who have
fashioned God in our image, not the other way around. And in that truth lies the
key to a more mature, more peaceful, more primal form of spirituality.
Part One
The Embodied Soul
Chapter One
Adam and Eve in Eden
IN THE BEGINNING was the void. Darkness. Chaos. A vast sea of emptiness
without shape or substance. No sky, no earth, no waters parted. No gods made
manifest nor names pronounced. No fates decreed until…a flash, some light, and
a sudden expansion of space and time, of energy and matter, of atoms and
molecules—the building blocks of a hundred billion galaxies, each studded with
a hundred billion stars.
Near one of these stars, a particle of dust, a micrometer in size, collides with
another and, through hundreds of millions of years of accretion, it begins to
whirl, gathering mass, forming a crust, creating oceans and land and,
unexpectedly, life: simple, then complex; slithering, then walking.
Millennia pass as glaciers advance and retreat over the surface of the earth.
The ice caps melt and the seas rise. Sheets of continental ice soften and slide
over the low hills and valleys of Europe and Asia, transforming vast forests into
treeless plains. And into this refuge step the incunabula of our species—the
“historical” Adam and Eve, if you will: Homo sapiens, “the wise human.”
Tall, straight-limbed, and powerfully built, with broad noses and unsloped
foreheads, Adam and Eve began their evolution between 300,000 and 200,000
B.C.E. as the final branch in the human family tree. Their ancestors trudged out of