A History of God
Karen Armstrong (1993)
Non-Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5
The downside to reading A History of God is that it really slowed down my goal of reading a book a week. I guess though that not every good book will be under 200 pages. A History of God covers 4000 years of the evolution of the Judeo/Christian/Muslim god.
It's quite a good read, and I can't possibly write enough in this blog about the interesting parts. It should be pointed out that, as my partner says, I am a heathen, and so of course a lot of this was information to me.
God's early years were particularly interesting. God, as we tend to think of 'him' (I'd write 'it' but it doesn't flow well) is an amalgam of two different gods that were locally worshiped by the folks who became the Jews. One was a rather distant and remote sky god, the other was Yaweh, who was basically a god of war. This really explains a lot about the god of the old testament - all the vengeful stuff is because he was a war god! It was also pretty interesting that one of God's first tasks was to take out all the other gods who were around and in the neighboring lands. This actually took hundreds of years - people really did worship God plus others, as convenient, for quite a while. Especially if you went traveling to other kingdoms, because it was generally accepted that all gods were localized. Even God, at least for a while. [If anyone is a biblical/god scholar, sorry for the hack job I'm doing on this]
Also pretty interesting was learning about how during the first millennium CE Muslims, Jews and the Eastern Christians all developed a more mystical (and less literal) sense of God. The Western Christians never quite got there, and this had lots of ramifications that we are still dealing with. While evolving ideas of science can fit in well with a more mystical (read - metaphorical) vision of God, a direct crisis of faith was set up in Western Christendom by the sort of absolutist reading of the religious texts. In other words, (western) Christianity really sowed the seeds of its own conflict by insisting that the words of the bible were literally true. Of course, this later came into conflict with scientific rationalism, which, due to W. Christianity's absolutist view of religious experience, slowly created a giant pool of agnostics/atheists, who had to reject Christianity in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the Bible could not be literally true.
Also quite interesting was to learn more about the Reformation period, when Christian fundamentalism seemed to, like our own time, rise in the public conscious. The Reformation of course gave us the Inquisition, witch hunts, and other panicky excesses.
It's increasingly interesting to me to think about the general new swing in fundamentalist thought that is leading the US down a path in terms of it's politics (see Carter, for example). It seems to increasingly impact our foreign policy (it seems to guide our approach to globalization to some extent, I'd argue), and certainly domestic policy is impacted. While religious fundamentalists I know think that liberals are leading the US to immorality and eventual destruction, it's ironic to think that their own inability to examine the historical context and motivations of their own movement might be the very thing that causes the collapse of US hegemony.
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