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God: A Human History - Hardcover

Aslan, Reza

 
9780553394726: God: A Human History
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 055339472X ISBN 13: 9780553394726
Verlag: Random House, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God.
 
In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large.
 
In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “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.”
 
But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments.
 
More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives.

Praise for God

“Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost

“Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times

“A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions whose books include No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three sons.

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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 Africa roughly 100,000 years ago, at a time when the Sahara was not the empty barren it is today but a land of generous lakes and lush vegetation. They crossed the Arabian Peninsula in waves, fanning north across the Central Asian steppes, east into the Indian subcontinent, across the sea to Australia, and west over the Balkans, until they reached southern Spain and the edge of Europe.

Along the way, they encountered earlier species of migrating humans: the upright Homo erectus, who had made a similar journey into Europe hundreds of thousands of years earlier; the hearty Homo denisova, who roamed the plains of Siberia and east Asia; the barrel-chested Homo neanderthalensis—the Neanderthal—whom Homo sapiens either annihilated or absorbed (no one knows for sure).

Adam is a hunter, so when you picture him, picture a javelin at his side, a mammoth’s fur split and draped across his shoulders. His transformation from prey to predator has left behind a genetic imprint, an instinct for the hunt. He can track an animal over seasons, patiently waiting for the right moment to strike in a blur of violence. When he kills, he does not tear into the meat and devour it on the spot. He brings it back to his shelter to share with his community. Huddled under a broad canopy made of animal hide and framed by mammoth bones, he cooks his food in stone-ringed hearths and stores the leftovers in pits dug deep in the permafrost.

Eve, too, is a hunter, though her weapon of choice is not a javelin but a net, which she has spent months, perhaps years, weaving out of delicate plant fibers. Crouched on the forest floor in the dim early light, she carefully sets her snares along the mossy surface and waits patiently for a hapless rabbit or fox to step into them. Meanwhile her children scour the woods for edible plants, unearthing fungi and roots, scooping up large insects and reptiles to bring back to camp. When it comes to feeding the community, everyone has a role.

The tools Adam and Eve carry are made of flint and stone, but these are not simple gadgets gathered from the ground and easily discarded. They are part of a permanent repertoire: durable and intricately cast; made, not found. Adam and Eve take their tools with them from shelter to shelter and trade them occasionally for better tools, or for trinkets made of ivory or antler, pendants made of bone and teeth and mollusk shells. Such things are precious to them; they set them apart from the rest of their community. When one of them dies and is buried in the ground, these objects will be buried, too, so the deceased can continue to enjoy them in the life to come.

There will be a life to come, of that Adam and Eve are certain. Why else bother with burial? They have no practical reason to bury the dead. It is far easier to expose the bodies, to let them decay out in the open or be stripped clean by the birds. Yet they insist on interring the bodies of their friends and family, on shielding them from the ravages of nature, on according them a measure of respect. They will, for example, deliberately pose the corpse, stretching it out or curling it into fetal position, orienting it toward the east to meet the rising sun. They may scalp or flay the skull, reinter it in a secondary burial, or remove it entirely for display, complete with artificial eyes to simulate a gaze. They may even crack the skull open, scoop out the brain, and devour it.

The body itself they will dust with blood-red ochre (the color a symbol for life) before laying it on a bed of flowers and ornamenting it with necklaces, shells, animal bones, or tools—objects that were dear to the dead; objects he or she may need in the next life. They will light fires around the body and make offerings to it. They will even place stones on the mound to mark the grave so they can find it again and revisit it for years to come.

The assumption is that Adam and Eve do these things because they believe the dead are not really dead but merely in another realm, one that the living can access through dreams and visions. The body may rot but something of the self persists, something distinct and separate from the body—a soul, for lack of a better word.

Where they got this idea we do not know. But it is essential to their awareness of themselves. Adam and Eve seem to know intuitively that they are embodied souls. It is a belief so primal and innate, so deep-rooted and widespread, that it must be considered nothing less than the hallmark of the human experience. Indeed, Adam and Eve share this belief with their forebears, the Neanderthal and Homo erectus. They, too, appear to have practiced various forms of ritual burial, meaning that they, too, may have conceived of the soul as separate from the body.

If the soul is separate from the body, it can survive the body. And if the soul survives the body, then the visible world must teem with the souls of everyone who has ever lived and died. For Adam and Eve, these souls are perceptible; they exist in numberless forms. Disembodied, they become spirits with the power to inhabit all things—the birds, the trees, the mountains, the sun, the moon. All of these pulse with life; they are animated.

A day will come when these spirits will be fully humanized, given names and mythologies, transformed into supernatural beings, and worshiped and prayed to as gods.

But we are not there yet.

Still, it is no great leap for Adam and Eve to conclude that their souls—the thing that makes them them—are not so different in form or substance from the souls of those around them, the souls of those before them, the spirits of the trees, and the spirits in the mountains. Whatever they are, whatever makes up their essence, they share with all creation. They are part of a whole.

This belief is called animism—the attribution of a spiritual essence, or “soul,” to all objects, human or not—and it is very likely humanity’s earliest expression of anything that could be termed religion.

Our primitive ancestors, Adam and Eve, are primitive only with regard to their tools and technology. Their brains are as large and developed as ours. They are capable of abstract thoughts and possess the language to share those thoughts with each other. They speak like us. They think like us. They imagine and create, communicate and reason like us. They are, quite simply, us: full and complete human...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
055339472X
ISBN 13 
9780553394726
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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