A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Leslie

Rating: really liked it
Whew. I thought I'd never finish this book. But two months later, I somehow managed to get to the end. Now, what to say about it?

I started this book knowing a moderate amount about the history of Christianity, a small amount about Judaism, and much too little about Islam. I relied heavily on my previous knowledge of Christianity and Judaism to make sense of Armstrong's extremely dense, often repetitive, and (to use her favorite word) esoteric prose. I found it a real challenge to keep up with her train of thought; her chapters are very long (as well as her paragraphs) and she has no sections or headings whatsoever to help prime and guide the reader. I came away with a much fuller understanding about the evolution of the concept of God in Christianity and Judaism, and a somewhat better understanding of the origins of Islam. But not knowing much about Islam to begin with, I felt at a disadvantage as I tried to follow along and take in the massive amounts of information she shares. This is not the right book to introduce you to any of these religions. You will gain much more if you already have a moderate level of knowledge.

On a personal note, as I am someone for whom religion (organized or otherwise) has played very little role in my life for close to ten years, this book sparked a great deal of introspective processes for me. Some of her writing confirmed my frustrations with organized religions while other portions encouraged me to have a more open mind about the innumerable ways to conceive of and worship God. I have appreciated this book immensely in this regard.

A final note: Armstrong seems to have considerable beef with Christianity, and to an extent Judaism, and she considerably elevates Islam above the other two. Just a note to be prepared for that if you read this book. It didn't bother me too much given that I don't consider myself a member of any of the three faiths or prefer one over the other, but I can see how it might really annoy others. It's not an attempt to be objective or balanced, by any stretch.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
A MAJOR PROBLEM WITH RELIGION

(You may have already thought of a few, but this is my current thing.)

Religious thought is metaphorical and the constant danger is that the unlettered will take the metaphor literally. For instance, the Holy Trinity in Christianity - sorting out a satisfactory formula expressing the relationships between God the Father & Jesus the Son & the Holy Spirit presented hideous problems which took around 300 years to resolve and - it seems to me - the whole enterprise was utterly - utterly - futile because it stemmed from a misreading of a metaphor in the New Testament, i.e. Jesus as Son of God.

You don't need to figure out the relationships between metaphors, but if you think they're actually describing realities, then you do.

Fundamentalists appear to be unable to either grasp the idea of metaphorical language, or, allowing them that degree of intelligence, unable to accept that the Bible is poetry which uses metaphor all the time

- And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day

And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and it was not consumed.

And indeed, Christ is a metaphor - that is, the idea of his incarnation, and the idea of him being a sacrifice for our sins, and the idea of salvation itself - all metaphors.

Religion has its educated few and its unschooled many - the elite develop the metaphorical philosophical reading of the text and leave the credulous literal reading to the laity and they bowl along on separate levels, mostly. But then it comes unstuck.

You can see the incorrect understanding of metaphor right there in the New Testament. Various parables of Jesus have been transformed by error into miracles of Jesus - the stilling of the storm, the feeding of the 5000, turning water into wine, and the weird story of the withering of the fig tree - these make no sense until you read them as parables. We recall that Jesus explicitly rejects miraculous acts of this sort in the Temptation:

And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.

And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

So these mistakes were being encrypted into the canon at the point where the oral tradition was being written down. It was simple confusion, but it sowed the seeds for centuries of wrongheadedness.

Karen Armstrong makes the excellent point that by the time of the Reformation even the learned in the West had become literalistic, and that this exposed their faith to the undermining effects of science as science extended its authority. The Church painted itself into a stupid corner. If it had remained the mystical transcendental Church it wouldn't have had to make any of those numerous embarrassing climb-downs it had to do. But maybe it would have been abandoned by the majority if it had.

A MAJOR PROBLEM WITH THIS BOOK

Karen Armstrong is a poor writer. Other goodreaders say stuff like :



My braincells are rebelling against me for continuing to read this, giving up. It's all the waffle and blather about Ultimate Reality, I just can't put myself through it.

I don't want to say that I have given up on this book. I enjoyed it so far, but I just moved on... It sits here out of my guilt, and becasue I haven't given it up completely. I may go back to it anyday now

haven't picked it up for several months, hope to get back to it someday
I predict that there will be a new religion created by the time I finish this book

Earnest readers drag themselves through this book. That can't be good. She has the knowledge but she is turgid, she has no light touch, no human anecdotes, no humour, okay what was I expecting, Bill Bryson? No, but Karen really got on my wick. She's boring. You have to keep plugging away, then another big thinker from 17th century Lithuania hoves into view and you think... hey, I haven't watched Paranormal Activity 2 yet! I did not read every word of this. i flipped forward, backwards, sideways, hemmed & hawed, put it down for months, walked around it glaring at it, hoped someone would steal it, they didn't, finally took it on holiday where there wasn't a wifi connection, and really, I think the whole thing needed some oomph. It was oomphless. It was an oomph-free zone.

A FAVOURITE ANECDOTE FROM PAGE 431

Speaking as an atheist, I love this story. In fact, I revere this story.

One day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charged him with betrayal and cruelty. Like Job, they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problems of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over, it was time for the evening prayer.

April Sheridan

Rating: really liked it
I still can't decide if it's good or not. That's that problem with being kinda dumb.

Jan-Maat

Rating: really liked it
This is at once a very simple and a very complex book. Simple in its argument, complex in the array of detail marshalled to tell Armstrong's story.

Her view, it seemed to me, was firstly that monotheism was wide spread - well beyond the limits of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but that there was always a tension between two basic ideas within that belief across all these religions. On the one hand a faith in an objective reality of something like an old man with a beard out there somewhere who was generally keen on smiting people, on the other hand a subjective individual striving within oneself that can lead to a sense of the numinous (
"The mystical experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths" (p259) ). She approves of the latter, while disliking the former whose finest or worst examples depending on your point of view she finds in the Western European Catholic and Protestant traditions which finally, in her opinion, hoisted themselves on their petards by embracing a literal faith in the Bible shortly before the age of Lyle and Darwin and Mendel.

Armstrong's history of God then is the history of styles and manners of belief in God. The problem with the way she does it is that she unleashes, not hell, but such a mass of prophets, mystics, and philosophers upon the reader that we can move across the thought and ideas of three or four people in a single page - almost all of whom are men, Julian of Norwich, Bridget of Sweden, and Theresa of Avila just manage to squeeze in. I did wonder how representative and reasonable some of the judgements were at times - but then this is always the case in dense surveys like this.

What is particular, and maybe refreshing for some readers, is that Armstrong doesn't much like her own native Western European tradition of Christianity. Every other approach to faith comes across as simply better. Sufis, Buddhists, and Hassidic Jews among others leap out of the pages as less anxious, more compassionate, kinder, and generally less inclined to self abuse. This may or may not be fair, but in the context of a post colonial world is certainly interesting, although I suppose not original. If belief in a single God is widespread, so is faith that the grass is always greener in the next field. Still her passion and commitment towards certain kinds of manifestation of faith is clear as evidenced by phrases like "religions such as Buddhism, which have the advantage of being uncontaminated by an inadequate theism" (p251), one can't claim that she hides her point of view.

The sense of her struggle with her own religious background is palpable, but also the relief and comfort that she has found through learning about the three major monotheisms. The ideal reader for this book might well be someone who for all their Jewish, Christian, or Muslim faith feels estranged or simply somewhat distanced from the particular Synagogue, Church, or Mosque they are familiar with. This is a book that can provide that reader with a broader perspective.

She compares trends in Hinduism and Buddhism to the big three monotheisms, this is something she could have made more of. The way that Buddhist Nirvana is described seems to her to be analogous to the experience of God as experience by mystics from the monotheistic religions for instance. Her survey is a wealth of detail, often curious. I particularly liked her account of the disappointment of the pagan philosopher Plotinus that he didn't get to visit India to study with its sages, he had thought of joining the Roman army as a means of getting there. Somehow turning up in armour, sword in hand, doesn't strike me as the best way to introduce yourself and your philosophical longings to the wise people of a different land. Maybe a similar thought occurred to Plotinus. Another point that caught my attention was the question of if the God of Abraham and the God of Moses were one and the same, equally she didn't soft pedal the polytheistic sides of Hebrew practice prior to the Babylonian captivity.

Something that Armstrong I felt did well was the sense of how ideas from one tradition oozed over to others. The influence of the pagan philosophers on Christianity is, I imagine, fairly well known, but she points out as well the interrelationships of developments in Judaism and Islam, and Islam also had a strong engagement with Aristotle in particular. She even makes Origen's self-castration, as inspired by the Gospels, sound like a reasonable action for a good half a page (view spoiler)[ which is quite an achievement (hide spoiler)].

On the downside the mass of characters can be overwhelming, and you are probably best off approaching a book like this with a reasonable background knowledge to start with. If you don't know your Avicenna from your Aquinas this book may well be a struggle.

Camille

Rating: really liked it
If I could give a book six stars, I would give them to this book. I feel like I learned something new on nearly every page.

This book is truly a history book on a grand scale. It reminds me of the type of history Will Durrant wrote, where he would take a period of time and write extensively about all the facets of history within that time. Armstrong, on the other hand, takes just one facet of history and writes extensively about it over a long (4000 year) period of time. Reading it has allowed me to see patterns and connections in history that I never considered before. I know I will continue to think upon what she said and use it as I try to make sense of the world.


And, to make it even better, I learned recently that Karen Armstrong was a winner of the 2008 TED prize. I highly recommend her talk where she makes her wish. (I highly recommend all the TED prize winners' talks!)

John

Rating: really liked it
This is one of those books that make me feel woefully deficient in a certain subject. Having never taken a comparative religion class, and in fact bordering on an antiestablishment stance when it comes to organized religion, I can only conclude that this book was not the place to start.
The first couple of chapters which reviewed mankinds evolution from a polythesim to the monothesims of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam were interesting, and for me blessedly linear and understandable. From there things rapidly deteriorated as Armstrong ran through the impact and thought process that philosophy, mysticism, reform and enlightenment had on the three monothestic faiths.
These chapters were filled with dense pondorous examples of each of these disciplines, crammed wtih foreign names and terms, forcing me to reread pages and chapters, still without making much headway.
I hate to indulge myself this way, but to illustrate my point I quote from page 270 a part of a paragraph which starts, "Luria gave a new meaning to the original image of the exile of the Shekinah. It will be recalled that in the Talmud, the Rabbis had seen the Shekinah voluntarily going into exile with the Jews after the destruction of the Temple. The Zohar had identified the Shekinah with the last sefirah and made it the female aspect of divinity. In Luria's myth, the Shekinah fell with the other sefiroth when the Vessels were shattered." Granted, it is taken out of context, but it borders on reading a foreign language.
And it goes on...Further compounding the problem are a lack of any headings on subgroupings in Armstrong's chapters, which are composed of paragraphs that run nearly a page long each.
It is this amount of dense detail that continually makes rereading a necessity, rather than a luxury. I was tempted on multiple occasions to put this book down, and finished with a sense that I had read line for line the entire 2008 federal IRS tax code. Overall, not the place to start.

Riku Sayuj

Rating: really liked it
The Tendencies of Religions

A facebook conversation:

Started with this post, with the following Ambedkar quote:

"The Hindus criticise the Mahomedans for having spread their religion by the use of the sword. They also ridicule Christianity on the score of the Inquisition.

But really speaking, who is better and more worthy of our respect—the Mahomedans and Christians who attempted to thrust down the throats of unwilling persons what they regarded as necessary for their salvation, or the Hindu who would not spread the light, who would endeavour to keep others in darkness, who would not consent to share his intellectual and social inheritance with those who are ready and willing to make it a part of their own make-up?

I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mahomedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean; and meanness is worse than cruelty."

Response (Professor X):What is worse?
A. Use force to make others join your faith
B. Use force to keep out of those who want to join your faith

Me: an additional dimension is there: you keep them out and then you discriminate and degrade based on religion.

Professor X: I wanted to strip the discussion of dalit angle, but, YES, this has got me thinking.

Me: ah. okay. wouldn't majority of early religions (tribal) been exclusivist? missionary religions were probably an innovation. which is the more natural tendency? need to study more :)

Professor X: No. This man has hit the nail on the head. Hinduism is the only one that opted to have exclusion as a theme and that, I suspect, because there was no occupation effort.

The same religion in south east asia saw the need to absorb locals in :)

Me: Ambedkar claims elsewhere that early Hinduism was an evangelizing religion and that once caste and varna systems were hardened, it had to stop being one.

if a religion obsessed with purity starts absorbing, it will also try to exclude at the same time. this will have to give rise to a varna and then even a caste system as more and more walls are erected for more and more minute exclusions. eventually the evangelizing had to stop and thus occupation. that is the chain of causation i glean from reading ambedkar, not the other ay round. what say?

now, if i assume that tribal religions are exclusivist and accept this line of reasoning, it would seem to imply that religions once they pass a critical mass, will become missionary in nature (religion and politics going together). however if they do not reinvent themselves to lose completely their exclusivist tendencies (as happened with islam etc), then they will eventually reach another critical mass when they harden and cant expand anymore. with that both religious evangelism and political expansion will end. [simplistic, i know. but seems to make some sense to me...]

Me: btw, Hinduism is not the only such religion. there are other religions too that are exclusivist. a good example to prop up my case would be Judaism, a more or less tribal religion which probably never reached the first critical mass point. Judaism discourages missionary activities and maintains an exclusivist doctrine, again based on purity of the chosen people.

we could say that Judaism once it came close to the first critical mass reinvented itself as Christianity - an evangelist religion but with no exclusivist tendencies - and hence it didnt have to hit the second point. could spread and spread :) islam too - another variation of the same theme.

Does this seem like a useful line of enquiry? Are there any books that explore the tendencies of religions? Would love to read a few.

India M. Clamp

Rating: really liked it
A different approach is taken here by a former Roman Catholic nun named Karen Armstrong. Confounded with the question of God. Naturally we assume Armstrong approaches this topic by utilizing a Catholic lens to color her bias and concept of God. Yet in this, we are wrong. Novel is key here. She courts the idea of God as if she were a scholar/journalist. Therefore, the book surveys the startling and sometimes contradictory forms and symbols God occupies in the mind. How does one discern God? Shall we review what his signature is “dat deus incrementum?”

“A History of God” is like a safe “Pandora’s Box” depicting how humans worship and put faith in a higher source. Karen is the tour guide and she gently shows us how to delineate the actions of God as he is breaking bread with Prophet Abraham and “how the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:14).” Most substantively Karen Armstrong illuminates---with a natural light---how God has evolved for the last 5,000 years and how we bring the divine closer.

“Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples, which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm.”
---Karen Armstrong

Consideration is noted that male clerics undergo some transfixing criticism and specifically mentions how they expropriated rituals attributed to wholeness and harmony and such were removed to the disgrace of women. Thus propelling women down to a lower step and marginalizing the love, divinity and healing coming from interactions with divinely inspired goddesses making it a "opus vitae" to assist humans in articulating their sense of weighty (yet unseen) forces surrounding them.

Mentions of intolerance that is focused on a particular religion and she regards Islam most sympathetically. In her scholarly approach she questions, how will the idea of God survive in the years to come? She looks to what survives or remains. Though she is a Catholic Nun, she did not regard her experience of God as being unique and conclusively found that religion is more than fear or the propagation of such. This is definitely a book for religious scholars and is not a casual read. Auspicious is an understatement. A History of God delivers (not lightly) the idea of God comparatively in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Absorb this one slowly.

Jan

Rating: really liked it
Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun and studied at Oxford. Her book, The Spiral Staircase, is a good description of the struggles that led to her leaving the convent.

There have been several good books written on the historic Jesus Christ, but very few on the historic God. As other reviewers have noted, this is a somewhat scholarly book, which it would have to be if one wanted to thoughtfully trace back man’s evolving beliefs on God. And, yes, over a sweep of 4,000 years, evolving is clearly the correct word.

If you apply the same tools to the study of history of God that one would apply to the study of history of anything over 4,000 years, you will see it through the lens of different periods of time.

Perhaps, somewhat unfortunately for religion and for God, we are in a period marked by the predominance of rationality. Ever since Kant, philosophers have admitted the existence of a god cannot be logically supported (and of course, Kant still willingly chose to believe).

So where does Ms. Armstrong take us in world after Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the like?

She worries about the intolerance inherent in monotheism (if I believe in the one true god, your god must be wrong). She reminds us that although the Existentialists told us we are better off without god since the pat answers and the certainty that god gives stifles our wonder of the world and negates our freedom, the growing drug addiction and crime rates are not signs of a spiritually healthy society.

Apparently although Ms. Armstrong left organized religion, she never left her search for spirituality.

I found the best statement of her conclusion was actually in The Spiral Staircase: “Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment because it dethrones the ego from the center of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from the experience of the sacred.”

Interestingly, Huxley, who wrote the magnificent Perennial Philosophy on the similarities of mystical experiences across all religions said “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.” '

A fascinating book that can be recommended to any thoughtful seeker about spiritual matters.

Margitte

Rating: really liked it
I haven't finished reading the book. I still plan to though, but not in one sitting.

The official blurb:
'Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have shaped and altered the conception of God is a tour de force. One of Britain's foremost commentators on religious affairs, Armstrong traces the history of how men and women have perceived and experienced God, from the time of Abraham to the present. From classical philosophy and medieval mysticism to the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the modern age of skepticism, Armstrong performs the near miracle of distilling the intellectual history of monotheism into one compelling volume.'

My reading is going extremely slow, merely because it requires concentration to read the book and I suspect that it will take a few months to get through it. However, it is an informative journey, educational in many instances, and thought-provoking throughout. It is not only the historical timeline of the development of religion (of God), the evolutionary process of polytheism to monotheism for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also a philosophical experience. I can only hope that all information in the book is accurate and worth learning. It certainly can be essential reading for those studying theology (science beliefs), mythology and comparative religion.

The God we all know, the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has a history. This book tells the story as it unfolded through the ages, changed according to needs, and ultimately split people into different groups honoring the same God.

Someone long ago said that people build different bridges to God, but in the end they worship their bridges instead of God. This book discusses this truth: the when, why and how of it all. The real story of mankind, widely accepted in the scientific world, is written down in the Enuma Elish, the Babilonian story of Creation which was discovered in the library of Ahurbanipal, estimated to have been written 1750 BCE. It is not the story as the Bible told it.

The first few chapters were really interesting. Fascinating, in fact. But from then on it becomes a philosophical discussion of concepts and names which makes me feel dumb and an-alphabetic! But with increased concentration, and a few rereads, several rereads of the same, very long paragraphs, I finally get it all.

There are several videos available on Youtube to enlighten the experience. My problem is that I constantly fall asleep.

However, I do think this book is worth reading for those who are interested in an objective approach to the bridges we built to God.

[Name Redacted]

Rating: really liked it
Karen Armstrong has no background in history nor in the academic study of religion, and it shows. This book's approach to the three Abrahamic religions is overly simplistic, presenting only Armstrong's often-erroneous views of these three prominent religions with almost no grounding in historical fact. She picks and chooses which sources to cite in accordance with her own biases and agenda, and it is clear that however much distance she might put between her life as a nun and her life as an armchair historian, she will never be able to escape her Catholic origins. Books like this are part of the reason why so many non-academics have such a poor understanding of the history of religion in the world, and do little more than contribute to the cloud of misinformation which surrounds the field.

Jay Delorenzis

Rating: really liked it
This is a phenomenal book. I've read this about 3 times. It has completely opened my mind about how religion works in the world. Karen Armstrong uses mind-numbing details to make her case as how the Bible became written and how we are to regard it. At the same time, we can have a personal relationship with that Being we call God. Religion is something purely human-made about a phenomena that is undeniable--God exists and He can exist purely for the benefit of the individual, however he or she defines God. This book is not for the light reader. It demands much attention and several rereads. I suggest reading the book quickly through first, to understand what the author is saying. Then concentrate on each chapter as a separate entity. Don't worry about understanding further chapters until earlier chapters are understood. I've underlined the original book until there was hardly a bare page in the earlier part of the book. I consider this one of my all-time favorite books. It is about time for another read.

Kaelan Ratcliffe ▪ كايِلان راتكِليف

Rating: really liked it
Nuances Of The Religious Tradition

This was a great book that seriously, seriously bolstered my understanding of the history of God, and has ultimately ignited an interest in me to read further books on the more specific areas of religious practice (there is a massive 'further reading' section at the back that I look forward to raiding). As such, I had a number of things I wanted to say in my review, yet, I think a quick bit of advise would suffice as an alternative.

Unless you're moving into the field of Theology (in which case I doubt you'll read this anyway) I would advise NOT to try and kill yourself over remembering every name, every sub-catogary and every belief system held about God thought this book. You'll kill your enjoyment, and ultimately the point of the book along with it. Instead, try and cultivate a curious, open attitude whilst allowing yourself to be guided through the pages of Karen Armstrong's hard earned endeavour. I found that I enjoyed this text immensely when simply learning about how human beings tried to understand the ineffable. The different people who went up against this question have come up with some interesting thought trails, and it's quite fun to see how societies throughout time have deviated into their own systems of understanding, only for some of them to come to the same conclusion after much difference in doctrine.

My only other advise would be to test yourself whilst reading this. See where you stand with your beliefs after reading about the God of Mystics, then come back and re-evaluate. Believe me, you won't think quite the same afterwards.

Ultimately, this is just another story of human kind trying to make sense of what it is we're doing here, and I believe if the reader imagines this whilst reading A History of God, they won't be disappointed with the result.

Michael Finocchiaro

Rating: really liked it
Karen Armstrong does an outstanding job of describing the rise of the world's three most important religions besides Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. It is a daunting undertaking which she absolutely masters from end to end. I keep saying this in reviews, but with all the slander of islam in on Fox, CNN, TF1, etc and the long history on anti-Semitism particularly here in Europe, it is critical for truly understanding and interpreting our modern world to understand where The Big Three came from, how they are similar and how they are different.

May Ling

Rating: really liked it
I hated this book’s writing style and format. It’s written in 1994 and goes through 4000 years of history. The problem is that the author is really just retelling this history. In today’s day and age of tough editors and sound bits, you wouldn’t be allowed to do that. You’d have to have … like a point.

In so much of the book, it’s a series of names and stuff they did. But there is just no why to latch on to in any sort of meaningful way. That makes it utterly hard to last through the nearly 400 pages of it without wanting to drift off. And this is a travesty, because at various point she does say stuff that’s pretty insightful. For example, I love the section where she talks about how the way that religion was in the Greek times, the idea of the logus and the way in which Theory has transformed as a word into the English language vs. what it was during Roman times. Very fascinating. The transformations that then came to pass when Atheisim took hold, very cool. But my goodness if she could have actually structured around WHY vs. What, she would have had a better book.

The book does go through the 4000 years of history. It presents mostly the mono-god faiths dividing the world into various periods. I would say that in each section there is slightly a bit more than you would have gotten in your AP Euro History and college level religion classes. Slightly. For example, I like the section on Thomas Aquainas and the translations to Latin from the Arabic world. I had not before heard the anecdotal about how he felt utterly outsmarted after hearing what Aristotle had written.

I enjoyed the sections where he goes through and talks about the transformations that came to pass in philosophy and how over time that transformed as the thinking of the periods changed. Really makes you think about how science and societal advancement have an effect on things.

The thing with this book is that it’s not the history of God. It’s the history of Judio-Christianity as relates to other stuff going on around it, some of which is religion. I mean, a true history of god would have to say a whole lot more about the other religions. But even what is said about Islam is from – IMO the point of view of a Christian. In that regard, I just don’t quite feel this book. I mean, I get that the subtitle has the first two and islam is last. Buddhism is completely ignored. But I think it loses something in it's "why" and analysis as a result. Just saying.

So for writing style and for this bias, I’m a 3. That said, quite frankly, the sheer raw amount of work this likely took to write, means that if you are researching this subject, you probably should read this one. Just get a really good cup of coffee before you get into it as you will need to slug through a pretty painful writing style.