HistoryOfGod

History of God (Karen Armstrong)

  • Very good in places. Somewhat repetitive. I learned a lot.
  • The concept of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves was suited to mankind at a certain stage but no longer works for an increasing number of people. Understanding the ever-changing ideas of God in the past and their relevance and usefulness in their time is a way to begin the search for a new concept for the 21C.
  • Human beings are spiritual animals. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizable human: they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to be something we've always done. our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work.
  • This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day.
  • When once conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people to today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of "God": each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.
  • Atheism has often been a transitional state: Jews, Christians, and Muslims were all called "atheists" by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence.
  • Despite its other worldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. It is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound.
  • Buddhists would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source: they see them as natural to humanity.
  • This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception.
  • Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality are often considered to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. The history of the idea of God must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much of Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people.
  • Theology often comes across as dull and abstract, but the history of God has been passionate and intense.
  • The sky God certainly seems to be disappearing from the lives an increasing number of people. God has played a crucial role in our history and has been one of the greatest human ideas of all time. To understand what we are losing – if he really is disappearing – we need to see what people were doing when they began to worship God, and what he meant and how he was conceived. To do that we need to go back to the ancient world of the Middle East, where the idea of our God gradually emerged about 14k years ago.
  • From the first Yahwism demanded a violent repression and denial of other faiths.
  • The techniques of Yoga had made people aware of an inner world. These disciplines of posture, breathing, diet and mental concentration have also been developed independently in other cultures and seem to produce an experience of enlightenment and illumination which have been interpreted differently but which seem natural to humanity.
  • The system that the Buddha discovered had objective reality not because it could be demonstrated by logical proof but because anybody who seriously tried to live that way would find that it worked. Effectiveness rather than philosophical or historical demonstration has always been the hallmark of a successful religion.
  • Yahweh was encouraging Israelites like Exekiel to see that the blow of history were not random and arbitrary but had a deeper logic and justice. He was trying to find a meaning in the cruel world of international politics.
  • In exile, the lure of paganism had lost its attraction and the religion of Judaism had been born. Yahweh became the means that enabled people to find hope in impossible circumstances.
  • Marks Gospel, which as the earliest is usually regarded as the most reliable, presents Jesus as a perfectly normal man, with a family that included brothers and sisters. No angels announced his birth or sang over his crib.
  • The doctrine that Jesus had been God in human form was not finalized until the 4th C. The development of Christian belief in the Incarnation was a gradual, complex process. Jesus himself certainly never claimed to be God.
  • From the Roman perspective, Christianity had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and had none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions.
  • Christianity seemed a barbaric creed. The Christian God seemed a ferocious, primitive deity, who kept intervening irrationally on human affairs: he had nothing in common with the remote changeless God of philosophers. It was one thing to claim that men of the caliber of Plato or Alexander had been sons of a god, but a Jew who had died a disgraceful death in an obscure corner of the Roman empire was quite another matter.
  • A religion which looks askance upon half the human race (women) and which regards every involuntary motion of mind, heart, and body as a symptom of fatal lust can only alienate men and women from their condition.
  • The Arabs during the lays years of the 6th century, had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm.
  • We know more about Muhammad than about the founder of any other major religion, we can see how his vision gradually evolved and developed, becoming every more universal in scope.
  • The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the "signs" or "messages" of God, this attitude enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity.
  • It is as though Muhammad had created an entirely new literary form that some people were not ready for but which thrilled others. Without this experience of the Koran, it is extremely unlikely that Islam would have taken root. We have seen that it took the ancient Israelites some 700 years to break with their old religious allegiances and accept monotheism, but Muhammad managed to help the Arabs achieve this difficult transition in a mere 23 years.
  • The 1st Crusade of 1096 had been the first cooperative act of the new West, a sign that Europe was beginning to recover from the long period of barbarism (the Dark ages).
  • In all three faiths, with the exception of Western Christianity, it was the God experienced by the mystics which eventually became normative among the faithful.
  • Contemplative experience (like in meditation) is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involved an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind – imagination – rather than through the more cerebral logical faculty. It is something that the mystic creates in themselves deliberately.
  • The 15th and 16C were decisive for all the people of God. It was a particularly crucial period for the Christian West, which was about to overtake the other cultures. By the end of the 16C the West was about to create an entirely different kind of culture. Despite their secular success, people in Europe were more concerned about their faith than ever before.
  • In the long term, Luther was less important than John Calvin, whose Swiss Reformation, had a profound effect on the emerging Western ethos.
  • The major religions were all in one sense products of civilization and, more specifically of the city.
  • Once the bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions. The "God" of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant.
  • God may have made the reformed Christians of the West efficient and powerful, but he did not make them happy.
  • Questioning the existence of God was a new development in the history of monotheism. Pascal was the first person to concede that, belief in God could only be a matter of personal choice. In this, he was the first modern.
  • Questions about the origin of religion were more important to Christians than, say to Buddhists because their monotheistic tradition had always claimed that God was revealed in historical events.
  • The philosophers of the enlightenment did not reject the idea of God. They rejected the cruel God of the orthodox who threatened mankind with eternal fire. They rejected mysterious doctrines about him that were abhorrent to reason, but their belief in a Supreme Being remained intact.
  • For Spinoza Got is simply the principle of la the sum of all the eternal laws in existence. God is a material being, identical with and equivalent to the order which governs the universe.
  • Not everybody could make his way into modernity via the difficult paths of science and philosophy: the mystical creeds of radical Christians and Jews enabled them to work toward a secularism that they would once have found abhorrent by addressing the deeper, more primitive regions of the psyche. Some adopted new and blasphemous ideas of God that would enable their children to abandon him altogether.
  • Once "God" has ceased to be a passionately subjective experience, "he" does not exist.
  • For centuries monotheists in each of the God-religions had insisted that God was not merely another being. He did not exist like the other phenomena we experience. In the West, Christian theologians had got into the habit of talking about god as though he really were one of the things that existed. They had seized upon their new science to prove the objective reality of God as though he could be tested and analyzed like anything else.
  • Though the idea of God as the Supreme Being had gained ascendancy in the West, other monotheistic traditions had gone out of their way to separate themselves from this type of theology. Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians had all insisted in their different ways that our human idea of God did not correspond to the ineffable reality of which it was a mere symbol. All had suggested, at one time or another that it was more accurate to describe God as "Nothing" rather than the Supreme Being, since "he" did not exist in any way that we could conceive. Over the centuries, the West had gradually lost sight of this more imaginative conception of God. The atheistic philosophers of the 19C rebelled against this God with good reason. Although they seemed to be saying something new, they often unconsciously reiterated old insights by other monotheists in the past.

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