Reza Aslans Human God

[mia]

Nice book review - wish I could post the whole thing.

THESE DAYS it may seem like people are abandoning religion to the fundamentalists, but they’re not. Religion has been around forever, and it’s not likely going anywhere soon.

In fact, the story of human religion begins before humans as we know them even existed. We’ve found Neanderthal caves with circular stone altars dating to 176 thousand years ago, which means religious expression is pre–Homo sapiens. Around 40 thousand years ago, we start seeing mythogramic caves in which our earliest ancestors made paintings that can be considered scripture. They initially painted mysterious dots, followed by palm prints, animals, and, around 18000 BCE, the first depiction of a god — The Lord of Beasts. This is where author, scholar, and multimedia force Reza Aslan begins his slim, yet ambitious book God: A Human History. It’s the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing....

...With the idea of Jesus being God made flesh, early Christians had to account for some pretty tricky theology. How can God be both Jesus and God? Moreover, how can Yahweh — the jealous deity who gleefully calls for the slaughter of anyone who fails to worship him — be the same God of love and forgiveness who Jesus calls Father? Around the time the Gospel of John was being written, 100 CE, Marcion proposed a two-god theory known as ditheism. There must be two gods: the cruel creator God of the Hebrew Bible known as Yahweh, and the loving, merciful God who has always existed but revealed himself to the world for the first time in the form of Jesus the Christ. [3] We know that ditheism was eventually rejected in favor of Trinitarianism, and God became Three. Tertullian coined the word Trinity, and the Fathers of the Church clarified the matter: God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each of which existed at the beginning of time and share the same measure of divinity. Finally, things seemed to be all wrapped up.

But no. In seventh century Arabia, a 40-year-old shepherd turned merchant turned prophet named Muhammad received revelations from a god he called Allah, the only ancient Arabian god who seems to have never been represented by an idol. Muhammad identified this god with Yahweh and Elohim, saying it was really Allah all along. He devoted the rest of his life to replacing Zoroastrian dualism and Christian trinitarianism with the “Jewish view of God as One,” thereby making Islam the culmination of monotheism. Aslan closes the story with the Sufis and their pantheistic conception of God: interpenetrating the universe, God is all, and all is God. But then Aslan pushes it further by saying that since we project our humanity onto God, we are God. Each one of us....

https://www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/reza-aslans-human-god#!

[Jim__]

1. It does sound like an interesting book.

I wonder if scholars generally agree with his ideas about Göbekli Tepe and his contention that organized religion led to the development of agriculture.

[marylandblue]

2. Most scholars do not agree with that

I think he made it up and ventured outside his field of expertise too. It's really a question for archeologists, not religious historians.

[Voltaire2]

4. Nope. It is not settled at all what Gobekli was.

[yallerdawg]

3. For Aslan:

...the origin of the religious impulse is “the result of something far more primal and difficult to explain: our ingrained intuitive, and wholly experiential belief that we are, whatever else we are, embodied souls.”

There still remains this central mystery of our existence. While we may "fashion God in our own image" in a mass context:

Aslan doesn’t negate divinity, however. In fact, by presenting the perhaps paradoxical idea that humans are God, Aslan is pointing to a crucial belief in contemporary spirituality, which is that whether one believes or disbelieves in God or any divine being is less important than acting kindly, compassionately, and otherwise divinely. And one way to do that, he suggests, is to appreciate the divinity in each other.