Up@dawn 2.0

Friday, January 5, 2018

God: A Human History

Getting a jumpstart on the semester, thanks to an inquiry from new A&P classmate Don about Reza Aslan's God: A Human History. Saw Aslan on CSPAN's BookTV recently, where he made a more favorable impression than that reported by the Times reviewer who rejects Aslan's pantheism.
The idea of the book is fairly simple: Human spirituality can be explained in one cohesive, linear story about our universal desire to see ourselves in God. Aslan is skeptical of religion, which he sees as “little more than a ‘language’ made up of symbols and metaphors.” He’s more interested in “the ineffable experience of faith,” which for him is “too expansive to be defined by any one religious tradition.” While he claims he’s not interested in proving or disproving the existence of God, by the end, his metaphysical commitments become clear. He believes God is universal, present in everyone and everywhere, and no more capable of making moral demands on humanity than any person. “The only way I can truly know God is by relying on the only thing I can truly know: myself,” Aslan writes. It doesn’t matter whether people believe in God or not, he implies. “We are, every one of us, God.”
My response to that, to quote Monty Python: "I'm not."

But in Aslan's defense: there's really nothing "fairly simple" about pantheism, unless you want to call Albert Einstein and the author of Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata fairly simple... in which case, to quote MP again, "I'll have to ask you to step outside."

Aslan is an intriguing figure, that rare public intellectual who has repudiated the worst excesses of his native tradition without, as it were, relinquishing its residual value. And, he's highly quotable. For instance,
“...most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened, than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true.”
Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Aslan on CSPAN inDepth 

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