I am, in my essential reality, God made manifest. We all are. So then, worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe – for the universe is God. Pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. Recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. Root your moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hope of eternal reward. Instead, recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they were God – because they are.What I found most interesting about Reza Aslan's God was the author's own evolution of belief – when he was a child, he thought of God as a scary authoritarian figure who resembled his own father, he then embraced his family's Muslim faith, later converted to the more anthropomorphic Christian religion, switched back to studying traditional Islam, and eventually adopted its mystical Sufi branch (as detailed in the above quote). It would be impossible to miss that this book – which traces the evolution of humanity's understanding of the divine – completely mirrors Aslan's own journey (he even tells us this is so), and this neat dovetail made me uncomfortable: as though the steps he took from childish to mature faith are the natural and ineluctable steps taken by any person/society as they grow in wisdom and sophistication; as though they who don't embrace his own concept of God (which Aslan reveals in an abrupt conclusion to his book-length history lesson) are immature in their faith. On the other hand, in view of all we have done to each other and the planet because of presumed differences and power imbalances, it would be a different world if we all recognised everyone and everything as a manifestation of the same God that animates our own selves. Imagine all the people, living life in peace... (Note: I read an ARC of this book and quotes may not be in their final forms.)
I often got the sense that Aslan's claims were unsupported (despite the allure of 80 pages of footnotes, I rarely tracked down his sources), and so I just had to take his word for much of this timeline: The emergence of ritualised burial around 100 000 years ago was proof in itself that early humans were aware of their own souls (why bother to bury the body if nothing survives death?): “It is a belief so primal and innate, so deep-rooted and widespread, that it must be considered nothing less than the hallmark of human experience”. Because these early humans had brains that worked in every way like our own, we can infer that they experienced the Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device (we ascribe human agency to inexplicable events) and Theory of Mind (because we can sense our own minds, we assume everyone/everything else has one, too), and it was because of these two cognitive tools that the early humans began to place humanity outside themselves and into the inanimate. Aslan, more than once, insists that practising a religion confers no evolutionary advantage – not even to cohere a community – and indeed, the formal practise of religion predates civilisation and even agriculture (apparently, the vast Göbekli Tepe temple [dated to the 10th millennium BCE] was built by hunter-gatherers; building this permanent complex may have prompted the Agricultural Revolution, which turns the accepted archaeological timeline of human progress on its head). When the Sumerians invented writing, that forced the gods to become “actualised” – the gods didn't require specific attributes until someone began writing about them, and these early writers couldn't help but give the gods human foibles; which led the ancient civilistions we know about (the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians) to have thought of the gods as big, squabbling families. Eventually, as city-states evolved into empires under the rule of their supreme kings, so, too, did religions begin to give their pantheons a supreme ruler (as in Marduk, Zeus, Amun-Re). The Zoroastrians simplified their pantheon into one Dualistic God, Ahura Mazda, who was made up of good and evil. And then Yahweh appeared to Moses and declared himself the one God – only problem being that before this, “Yahweh” was a lesser deity of the Canaanites, and the God worshipped by Abraham and his line of Israelites was known as “El”. So in composing the books of the Old Testament, its writers combined the two names into “El Yahweh”, meaning, “Lord God”, and recognised that this “one God” had two components (why haven't I heard that before?): it wasn't until Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians and the Israelites were sent into exile that Yahweh stepped forward and true monotheism was born. Just five hundred years later, Jesus called himself the Son of God, which eventually led to Christianity and the “one true God” being split into three equal parts. And six hundred years after that, Muhammad received the revelations that led to him declaring that Allah is Yahweh, is the Christian God: one, eternal, and separate from humanity.
And so, at last, we arrive at the inevitable endpoint of the monotheism experiment – the climax of the fairly recent belief in a single, singular, nonhuman, and indivisible creator God as defined by postexilic Judaism, as renounced by Zoroastrian Dualism and Christian Trinitarianism, and as revived in the Sufi interpretation of tawhid; God is not the creator of everything that exists. God is everything that exists.It's the word “inevitable” there that sticks for me: of course a devotee of Sufism would see his chosen faith – the faith he embraced after years of search and scholarship – as the inevitable endpoint of this history of religion as he recounts it. I had the same kind of uneasy feeling about Yuval Noah Harari's scholarship, and was unsurprised to see Aslan quote his Sapiens (and if I don't completely trust the reliability of the one source I've actually read, I have questions about the rest.) The bottom line is that I did enjoy this as a “speculative history”, and as I respect what the author has shared of his personal philosophy, it feels like no harm done. Not unhappy to have read it.
