GOD: A Human History

Whether you believe in one god, many gods, or no god at all, this is a book to challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions and here she takes on a subject even more immense - God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, he narrates the history of religion as one long and remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. This innate desire to humanise God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. But we bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature - our compassion and thirst for justice - but all that is bad in it - greed, bigotry, violence. All the qualities inform our religions, cultures and governments and more than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanising impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Chapters include Adam and Eve in Eden, The Lord of the Beasts, The Face in the Tree, Spears into Ploughs, Lofty Persons and The High God. The book is an appeal to stop foisting our human compulsions upon the divine and in that truth lies the key to a more mature, more peaceful and more primal form of spirituality. 300pp, illus. Remainder mark.