God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

animal bones are believed to possess a mediating power—they are inside the flesh but not of the flesh.

Cognitive theorists have a term for what Eve just experienced. They call it her Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. This is a biological process that arose deep in our evolutionary past, all the way back in the days when hominids were still stooped and hairy. In its simplest terms, HADD leads us to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event: a distant sound in the woods, a flash of light in the sky, a tendril of fog slithering along the ground.

His research shows that we are more likely to absorb, retain, and share an idea if that idea is slightly anomalous. If an idea violates one or two basic, intuitive assumptions about a thing, it has a far stronger chance of being recalled and transmitted.

There is a term for this phenomenon—politicomorphism, or “the divinization of earthly politics”—and it is, to this day, one of the central features of nearly every religious system in the world.

Zarathustra presented Ahura Mazda as pure animating spirit—without shape or form—utterly transcendent and apersonal.

Islam is founded upon a complex theological idea called tawhid. Arabic for “making one,” tawhid is less an affirmation of God’s singularity than it is a description of God’s essence. It does not mean there is only one God. It means that God is, in form and nature, oneness.

concept of tzimtzum, or “divine withdrawal”—the belief that God had to make room within himself to allow for the universe to come into being.

Numerous studies on the cognition of children have shown an instinctual propensity for “substance dualism”—the belief that the body and mind/soul are distinct in form and nature.

Lévi-Strauss’s observation that certain natural species were selected in these cases as the subject of rock art not because they were ‘good to eat’ but because they were ‘good to think.’

Girard believed that violence was caused by mimetic rivalry, which occurs when our desires are “borrowed” from other people in our community.

The consensus among scholars regarding the rise of agriculture and the factors that might have contributed to its development is that there is no consensus.

“According to panentheism, the universe is finite and within God, but God is truly infinite and so cannot be totally within or otherwise limited to the finite universe.”