God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

Yet this insistence on using human emotions to describe something that is—whatever else it is—utterly nonhuman only further demonstrates our existential need to project our humanity onto God, to bestow upon God not just all that is worthy in human nature—our capacity for boundless love, our empathy and eagerness to show compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is vile in it: our aggression and greed, our bias and bigotry, our penchant for extreme acts of violence.

We fashion our religions and cultures, our societies and governments, according to our own human urges, all the while convincing ourselves that those urges are God’s. That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love and compassion in one believer, hatred and violence in another; why two people can approach the same scripture at the same time and come away with two radically opposing interpretations of it.

It is also an appeal to stop foisting our human compulsions upon the divine, and to develop a more pantheistic view of God. At the very least it is a reminder that, whether you believe in one God or many gods or no god at all, it is we who have fashioned God in our image, not the other way around.

Adam and Eve seem to know intuitively that they are embodied souls. It is a belief so primal and innate, so deep-rooted and widespread, that it must be considered nothing less than the hallmark of the human experience.

In northern Spain, a large red disk painted on a cave wall in El Castillo can be traced to approximately 41,000 years ago, just around the time that Homo sapiens first arrived in the region. Southern France is perforated with such caves—from Font de Gaume and Les Combarelles in the Vézère valley, to Chauvet, Lascaux, and the Volp caves in the foothills of the Pyrenees.10

Archaeologists in the Golan Heights recently discovered a lump of rock, about one and a half inches tall, that had been carved into an idol with the distinct shape of a large-breasted, possibly pregnant woman. Called the Berekhat Ram Venus, the idol is estimated to be at least 300,000 years old; that’s before our species even existed.

Dreams are not real. Mana is not real. Spirits are not real. What are real, Durkheim maintained, are the concrete actions of a community bound together by blood and kinship and working as one to adapt and survive in a hostile environment. The origins of the religious impulse, therefore, must be grounded in social life, in the rites and rituals that help a community form a collective consciousness.

The cognitive scientist Paul Bloom has conducted years of research on how religion and religious belief affect moral views. His conclusion is that there is little evidence that “the world’s religions have an important effect on our moral lives.” In fact, study after study has demonstrated that the good and bad moral effects of religion are no more or less powerful than the good and bad moral effects of any other social practice.16

The gods of Mesopotamia and Egypt were savage and brutal; their primary interest in human beings was as slaves to their whims. The Greek gods were capricious, vain, entitled beings who toyed with humanity for sport. Yahweh is a jealous god who regularly demands the wholesale slaughter of every man, woman, and child who does not worship him alone. Allah is a martial deity who prescribes an array of draconian punishments—in this life and the next—to those who oppose him. How are these gods, who are at best beyond morality and at worst simply immoral, supposed to serve as the source of moral behavior among humans?

Religion, they say, is not an evolutionary adaptation; religion is the accidental byproduct of some other preexisting evolutionary adaptation.

HADD explains why we assume every bump in the night is caused by someone doing the bumping. Our innate willingness to attribute human agency to natural phenomena can have clear evolutionary advantages. What if it hadn’t been a tree that Eve saw? What if it had been a bear? Isn’t it better to err on the side of caution?

Göbekli Tepe, or Potbellied Hill.

The word Sumer is actually Akkadian—a Semitic language that was the most widely spoken in Mesopotamia. It means “land of the civilized kings.” The Sumerians referred to themselves as “the black-headed people.” Yet wherever they came from and however they arose, by 4500 B.C.E., the Sumerians had cemented their dominance over Mesopotamia by founding what is regarded as the first major city in the world, Uruk.

For example, the word for “god” in Sumerian is ilu, which means something like “lofty person,” and so that became precisely how the gods were envisioned in Sumerian writings: as elevated beings who had human bodies and wore human clothes, who expressed human emotions and exhibited human personalities.

They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic. And, not surprisingly, everywhere the myths of Mesopotamia spread, so, too, did the Mesopotamian perception of the gods as “lofty persons.”4

Nevertheless, no Mesopotamian would have thought that the small idol hoisted up in the air by a priest was actually a god. This is a complete misunderstanding of the term “idol worship.” Ancient peoples did not worship slabs of stone; they worshiped the spirits that resided within them. The idol was not itself a god; it was imbued with the god. The god was thought to take form within the idol.

The Mycenaeans also gave the Greeks many of their gods, in particular Poseidon, the god of the sea, who may have been the supreme god of the Mycenaean pantheon (Zeus, a martial deity, was derived from the Indo-European sky god, Dyeus, and seems to have ascended to the top of the Greek pantheon at a much later date).

As the deification of the primordial waters, Poseidon was naturally linked to the Earth Goddess, or Gaia, another major Mycenaean deity (Poseidon’s name means “Earth’s husband”).

One day, while attending a sacred spring festival near the Sabalan mountains in northwest Iran, Zarathustra waded into a river to fetch some water for a dawn ceremony. When he turned to head back to shore he was struck by a blinding white light. In a vision, he was brought into the presence of an unfamiliar god, one that was not a part of any known pantheon of the time.

Although Zarathustra would come to call this god Ahura Mazda, meaning “the Wise Lord,” that was merely an epithet; this god had no name. It could be known only through six divine “evocations” that it brought forth into the world from its own being: wisdom, truth, power, love, unity, and immortality. These are not so much Ahura Mazda’s attributes as they are the six substances that make up its essence. They are, to put it another way, the reflections of Ahura Mazda in the world.

This claim would have come as something of a surprise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because the fact of the matter is that these biblical patriarchs did not worship a Midianite desert deity called Yahweh. They worshiped an altogether different god—a Canaanite deity they knew as El.

King Saul, the first king of Israel, even named two of his sons after the god Baal— Eshbaal and Meribbaal—alongside the son he named after Yahweh: Yehonatan, or Jonathan.12

As Moses stood atop “the mountain of god” to receive a new covenant from Yahweh (the Ten Commandments), meant to supplant Abraham’s covenant with El, the Israelites down below had already reverted to the worship of Abraham’s god, fashioning for themselves an idol in the shape of a golden calf—the primary symbol of El.14

When the nation of Israel became the kingdom of Israel around 1050 B.C.E., the merging of Yahweh and El was reinforced. Even their names were occasionally fused together as Yahweh-El or Yahweh-Elohim, presented in most English translations of the Bible as the Lord God: “My son, give glory to the Lord God [Yahweh-Elohim] of Israel; give thanks to him and tell me what you have done” (Joshua 7:19).16

According to Sufism, if God is truly indivisible, then God is all beings, and all beings are God.