There is something fascinating to me about the wide variety of religious beliefs, often incompatible with each other, held by perfectly rational people around the world. Hence my interest in this scholarly treatise, based solely on the title, as I picked books to fill my time in social isolation. Unlike most people, the author, a professor at the University of California has not stayed with his childhood faith but has migrated from Islamism to Christianity, back to Islamism, then Sufism, and then to a nebulous pantheism.
This is a carefully researched endeavour with a 25 page bibliography, 79 pages of notes and an 18 page index. The author traces the development of various religions from the evolutionary rise of Homo sapiens to the scientific revolution. He emphasizes the universality of the development of religions in history and the almost universal assumption that we possess a soul or spirit that is separate from the body. Ergo, there is little discussion of the neuroscience revelations of what happens in the human brain during religious experiences. The author makes the gradual transition from diverse polytheism to monotheism over centuries seem logical, if not preordained.
Research into the origin of the stories in the Old Testament complement, update and expand Robert Green Ingersoll’s devastating critique of those myths in Some Mistakes Of Moses. In documenting the unlikely survival and growth of early Christianity, Aslan provides interesting background details, but unlike Richard Rubenstein in When Jesus Became God, he largely omits the key influence of Saul of Tarsus in early church history.
This is an interesting short book that can be devoured in one day. My only concern is that the pantheism that the author comes to espouse seems to me to be so ethereal and vague as to be a useless crutch to deny his atheism and to cling to the dubious idea of dualism of body and soul. I still think that Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death is one very plausible explanation for, or at least a contributor to, the emergence of many religions that promise an afterlife.
The Passionate Reader 