Review: God: A Human History

God: A Human History by Reza Aslan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was my first ever book of Reza Eslan. It was really amazing. This book is as interesting as Sapiens, and in certain theoretical aspects, much better than it,when it comes to explaining the origin of religions. This is short and crisp filled with many interesting facts about the origin of religions, especially in the middle eastern regions. Let me tell you, what this book is not about. This book doesn’t talk about the origins of far eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism or Shintoism, though you will find the mention of Hinduism here and there. It exclusively deals with Abrahamic religions to be precise.

What makes this book a pleasant read is that it explains even the most abstruse cognitive mechanisms that lead to the origins of some kind of belief in Supernatural phenomena in very simple terms. This book has concepts such as HADD( Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device),Theory of Mind(ToM),Substance Dualism, Cognitive Dissonance and much more. Instead of I explaining what these concepts are, you should read the book to know more about them. Reza Eslan, being a religious scholar and a creative writing professor has done a fabulous job at explaining these concepts, which I believe, anybody who wants to understand the religion should know.

Sapiens made me think that it is the power of story telling, which led to the origin of religions, is the sole domain of Homo Sapiens . But Reza Eslan says no. The extinct human species such as Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Denisova and even Neanderthals indulged in some spiritual practices  in some form or the other. One of the anthropologists in the book goes so far in calling Homo Sapines as Homo Religiosus(The worshipping human). But that name should not be restricted to Homo Sapiens alone in my opinion.

Two factors have played a very important role in the origin of religions: dreams and complexity of the world in which our pre-historic ancestors lived.It is only in our dreams that we conjured up weird images, and that, coupled with certain cognitive mechanisms, made our ancestors believe in some super natural power. To add to that, our creation of our Gods were limited to our imagination. To give you an example, if horses had the capacity to draw and were asked to draw a version of their Horse God, they would draw their God which would look just like a horse. Same was the case with the humans too.

To delve even more deep into the subject, this book says that, animism is  the foremost form of beliefs our ancestors had. Animism is a belief that everything, whether living or non living has a soul. We sustained on this belief for tens of thousands of years. Slowly, this was also one of the reasons why we developed manism, the belief that, our ancestors have souls and they go on to live in some celestial world.Just to give you a tidbit, it is the reason why whenever someone died, the people of  Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, buried the body with the heads decorated.Because they believed that the soul resides in the head.

Gobekli Tepe, a place in Turkey, the book mentions remains a very importance place for the study of origin of religions. It is the receding  of Ice Age, I thought that gave birth to Agricultural revolution.But no. As per the sculptures found in Gobekli Tepe, Reza hypothesizes that the people of Gobekli Tepe;to satisfy their spiritual inclinations were so much involved in the building of sculptures that, they had to give their hunter-gatherer  lifestyle as it was not feasible anymore. Then, they started rearing crops and that is how the Agricultural revolution came into place and spread throughout the world.

Then the book goes on to explain in detail, how the monotheistic religions took their birth deep rooted in concept of henotheism; meaning, one supreme God presiding and ruling over other Gods.It all changed with Egyptian Pharoah Anekhetan, who was the world’s first ever person to get revelation from the Egyptian sun God Re and established the world’s first monotheistic practice in the Egyptian empire. Then, followed by a tribe in the Canaanite region whom they called their God Elohim or Eloha(coming from the Sumerian word Ilu, which means the lofty person),who went on to be called later as Jews . 

With the coming of Moses, he reshaped the canaanite spiritual tradition by establishing the supremacy of Yehowah over the pre-existing Gods of the Israelites. Then,the same kind of spiritual revolution happened in Persia when a person belonging to the priest class  by name Zarathustra Spitoma receives a revelation about the God called Ahura Mazda. As the time passed by,it was the time for Jesus to come and declare that, “ I and my father are one” which was a revolutionary thought at that point of time followed by the Arabian Prophet Muhammad, who unified the tribes in Arabia with his revelation from Allah.

He concludes the book by explaining the concept of Pantheism- everything is God. This was in line with the Spinoza’s God. Predominantly this book deals with the humanization of the Divine, and as the book progesses,with the Divinization of the human.All in all, it was a great read, especially for some one who wants to know the origin of the Abrahamic religions in particular. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I encourage you too to read this book, because, we are after all, the ultimate expression of God.

Good Job Reza Eslan! I loved it. Waiting for your next book to come.















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