God: A Human History
This past week, I finished reading Reza Aslan’s God: A Human History to gather some research for my new book, and in addition to the fascinating academic pontification Aslan provides, I also found something deeply profound in his writing, that can really only be described as human.
“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.”
Aslan hypothesizes that the origins of God begin with our inherent belief in a soul. What naturally followed was giving our human traits to the divine, until we eventually transformed God into man, or as Aslan refers to him, the god-man: “a human being who is slightly altered in some way, who exhibits heightened physical or mental abilities, who may be invisible, or in all places at all times, who knows the past and the future, who knows everything” (44-45).
Throughout the book, Aslan describes God in His many forms, from The Lord of the Beasts, that primal humans identified and praised for the promise of the hunt, to the rise of organized religions that were primarily polytheistic, and that, due to the tendency for religion to follow the political and social norms of the time, polytheism gave way to henotheism (the belief in many gods with a primary focus on one higher deity) gave way to monotheism with the rise of Judaism.
Aslan then spends considerable time discussing the issues surrounding the indivisibility of God when henotheism gives way to monotheism, especially as it relates to the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire during the 4th century. Then he delves into the rise of Islam and the connection of the singular “God” in the Abrahamic faiths, as well as the implications the mystical offshoot of Islam, Sufism, makes.
In all of this, Aslan makes one controversial claim - that God is not one. Rather, God is all.
“In its simplest form, pantheism is the belief that God and the universe are one and the same — that nothing exists outside of God’s necessary existence.”
All of this to say, I’ve found some interesting information to include in my book, which has strong religious themes throughout, as the main character is a museum archivist with a specialization in world religions, though she herself is an atheist.
Here’s a small section I wrote this past week based on some of Aslan’s writings:
“Should we?”
“Yes.” You kissed me. “Without a doubt.”
Primal man is said to have confused the trees with God.
Which is to say, primal man saw a knotted, crooked thing and mistook it for a face, and there was fear and uncertainty and eventual understanding and the conflation of coincidence for something greater than us.
Us meaning the we that was before there were endings or beginnings or the eventual decline that comes with age.
Trees and rocks and rivers and french toast.
Powdered sugar.
I kissed it off your cheeks, and we always end up in bed, one way or the other, and we were naked save for the remnants of late Sunday brunches coating our skin like fresh paint, and you were holding a key chain in front of my face.
Primal humans came to worship the trees and the rocks and the rivers because they found something familiar in them that they couldn’t explain.
“Move in with me,” you said.
Fear is the driver of faith.
I nodded my head. Swallowed spit and neglect and the shaking, ancient thing that is safety.
“Okay.”
I’m really glad because it finally feels like I’m getting something more concrete down for my book. Anyway, I’ve decided to cut the gratitude section (it was getting a little too personal) and focus more on the substance of the blog. Don’t worry, though, I’ll still be supplementing your weekly dose of memes. ;)
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