A study of the deity of the world's three dominant monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In a dynamic interplay between religion and society's ever-changing beliefs, values, and traditions, human beings' ideas about God have been transformed. Ideas about God have been molded to apply to the spiritual needs of the people who worship him in a particular place and time. The author explores and analyzes the development and progression of the various perceptions of God from the days of Abraham to present times--Adapted from book jacket.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of Zealot explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Few topics are as broad or as daunting as the God of Israel, that deity of the world's three monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, who has been worshiped over millennia. In the Hebrew Bible, God is characterized variously as militant, beneficent, inscrutable, loving, and judicious. Who is this divinity that has been represented as masculine and feminine, mythic and real, transcendent and intimate? The Origin and Character of God is Theodore J. Lewis's monumental study of the vast subject that is the God of Israel. In it, he explores questions of historical origin, how God was characterized in literature, and how he was represented in archaeology and iconography. He also brings us into the lived reality of religious experience. Using the window of divinity to peer into the varieties of religious experience in ancient Israel, Lewis explores the royal use of religion for power, prestige, and control; the intimacy of family and household religion; priestly prerogatives and cultic status; prophetic challenges to injustice; and the pondering of theodicy by poetic sages. A volume that is encyclopedic in scope but accessible in tone, The Origin and Character of God is an essential addition to the growing scholarship of one of humanity's most enduring concepts.

Belief in the One male God of Judaism, Christianity and Isl m can be traced back for something over 2,500 years to the time when the Hebrew scripture of Genesis was compiled in the 6th century BC. The narrative content of Genesis was clearly derived from older traditions but, on the face of it, we have no documentary evidence from any other source of a monotheistic culture in respect of this particular God from before that date.In The Origin of God, written but not published before his untimely death in August 2010, Laurence Gardner, author of the international bestsellers Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Genesis of the Grail Kings and Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark, undertakes a biographical exploration of the deiform character variously known as Yahweh, All h, or simply The Lord. He seeks to uncover and evaluate His original identity, as against His eventual religiously motivated portrayals. Beginning with documents that pre-date the Bible, Laurence Gardner's final quest was to discover from all available sources what evidence there is, if any, to support the long-standing and widespread notion of God's existence, posing the question: If the Bible had never been written, would we know about God from any more original source?

Many Christians and Jews believe that their faiths developed independently from each other, and that their religions are distinct, even antagonistic towards each other. A Portable God dramatically departs from the idea that the birth of Judaism and Christianity are two separate, unrelated events. Judaism and Christianity's origins are not seen as following a linear, chronological process that places the Israelites in the beginning, followed by the Jews, and finally the Christians. On the contrary, A Portable God shows that both Judaism and Christianity emerge from the same religious tradition--that of ancient Israel--at the same time. By telling the common story of Jewish and Christian origins, A Portable God shows Jews and Christians as siblings, rather than as parent and child, showing that the similarities between Judaism and Christianity far outweigh their differences, ultimately fostering appreciation for the shared heritage of Judaism and Christianity.

Infants have a lot to make sense of in the world: Why does the sun shine and night fall; why do some objects move in response to words, while others won’t budge; who is it that looks over them and cares for them? How the developing brain grapples with these and other questions leads children, across cultures, to naturally develop a belief in a divine power of remarkably consistent traits––a god that is a powerful creator, knowing, immortal, and good—explains noted developmental psychologist and anthropologist Justin L. Barrett in this enlightening and provocative book. In short, we are all born believers. Belief begins in the brain. Under the sway of powerful internal and external influences, children understand their environments by imagining at least one creative and intelligent agent, a grand creator and controller that brings order and purpose to the world. Further, these beliefs in unseen super beings help organize children’s intuitions about morality and surprising life events, making life meaningful. Summarizing scientific experiments conducted with children across the globe, Professor Barrett illustrates the ways human beings have come to develop complex belief systems about God’s omniscience, the afterlife, and the immortality of deities. He shows how the science of childhood religiosity reveals, across humanity, a “natural religion,” the organization of those beliefs that humans gravitate to organically, and how it underlies all of the world’s major religions, uniting them under one common source. For believers and nonbelievers alike, Barrett offers a compelling argument for the human instinct for religion, as he guides all parents in how to effectively encourage children in developing a healthy constellation of beliefs about the world around them.

“It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion, science offers a surer path to God than religion…science has actually advanced to the point where what were formerly religious questions can be seriously tackled” (Paul Davies, Astrophysicist). Anthony Walsh’s latest riposte to atheistic arguments against God's existence draws on Natural Theology, a knowledge of God based on evidence from both the natural and social sciences. Covering everything from the Big Bang and the origins of life to the mystery of intelligent consciousness, Walsh makes even the most technical scientific writings accessible to the general reader and tackles a question few books on the relationship between science and religion have ever sought to address: how does Christianity positively affect societies, families, and individuals in terms of democracy, justice, happiness, health, and prosperity?

As science integrates the in-depth knowledge of the physical world accumulated over the past three centuries, it will be channeled into a new and exciting line of inquiry that acknowledges the expanded reality of consciousness as a creative force in the universe and the spiritual creative power embodied in our own minds. This book summarizes the thoughts of an inquisitive, but open-minded, scientist. What I present here is a theory that looks promising, not scientific proof. It should not be surprising, however, if some of what I propose coincides with theories propounded by others who claim a more intimate relationship with the Almighty. After all, if I am on the right track, and if they are, it would be worrisome if we were not, ultimately, in agreement. All I ask is that you seriously consider the logic of my theory, especially if it challenges you to question what you were taught - in Sunday school, in catechism or, dare I say, in physics class. I offer this book, not as a theological treatise, but as a short, readable exposition of a worldview that can bring sense and purpose into individual lives, and tolerance and peace to a planet whose future is in serious jeopardy - in large part because of the irrational dogmatism of both religion and science. If I am correct, we are literally all one being (God) in many individual forms. Why, then, would we continue to harm one another?