This book was not available as an audiobook, so I was afraid it would take me quite a while to get through it. It did take two or three weeks, but I found myself carrying my Kindle with me everywhere so I could read it in any spare moments. I found the contents absolutely fascinating and learned so much about Judaism and Islam. A major takeaway for me was how Western Christianity (as opposed to the Eastern Orthodox tradition) took a literalistic view of scripture and viewed God as Supreme Being and also focused heavily on dogma (“correct” belief). Western Christianity has really not had much of a mystical tradition, and it has been the poorer for it. This lack of a mystical influence has made Western Christianity uniquely antagonistic to science; something that neither Judaism nor Islam have had much issue with. Mystical traditions view God as Being as opposed to Supreme Being, which means that God is in everything and everyone and also that people’s experiences with God-in-them are subjective and therefore it doesn’t make sense to make objective, rationalistic arguments about the nature of God. I also loved the author’s extensive use of quotations from influential thinkers in all three of the monotheistic religions. Really felt like I was getting a pretty thorough overview of the histories and forces that shaped all the religions over the years.

If this is a topic that interests you, I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s worth the investment of time.

tough read esp the middle part

but basically liked the end because:

(1) for believers - you'll see how the conception of GOD changes through time and it's sort of inevitable ( however real GOD is and can be). We fit GOD into our needs

(2) for atheists - that even at the end of the day when you remove GOD from your life, you'll end up filling that emptiness with sth else. Basically you still need that spiritual stuff there in your brain (whatever you call it)

Other salient points:
(1) one has to take a stand on the existence of GOD

(2) FOR: this world emphasizes too much on Science and with it scientific methods to prove or disprove things. BUT spiritual stuff is really like an art where you need to feel it ( like a song. how do you determine it's good? Yes, you need some basic logic to construct it, but you experiencing it is all that matters ( and determines its merit)

(3) AGAINST: that we move from monotheism to polytheism and back to monotheism (YES, it may shock some of us). Why? To fit our needs at the particular time.

(4) your final verdict...

Read it...it's dense but worth a shot

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.

I had a really hard time keeping my attention focused on this one, but I think I was more at fault than the writer. I really enjoyed the last three chapters, which covered material that was already familiar to me. I think the words and concepts of the early days of Judaism and Islam were just too foreign for me to absorb. Lots of information to digest and even more thoughts to ponder. It's probably one I'll pick up again when I've done more studying.

As an inside joke to anyone who has studied Western philosophy, I was impressed that she could spend a whole page discussing Martin Heidegger without once using the phrase ontico-ontological!

الله والإنسان

للأسف لم يحظ كتاب بهذه الأهمية بترجمة جيدة، أتمنى ألا تعاني بقية كتب كارين أرمسترونغ من ذات المشكلة، خاصة وكتبها مهمة وتتناول مواضيع متعمقة في الأديان أو التجربة الدينية، في كتابها هذا والذي تم تغيير عنوانه ليتلاءم مع الرقيب العربي – العنوان الأصلي (تاريخ الإله)-، تؤرخ أرمسترونغ للطريقة التي فهم بها الناس الإله، وهي تركز في ذلك على الديانات التوحيدية، متناولة صورة الإله في اليهودية والمسيحية والإسلام، من خلال الفرق والمذاهب الدينية التي ظهرت وتصارعت في الأديان الثلاثة.

كتاب مهم جداً، ومن الأفضل قراءته بلغته إن أمكن.

For biblical quotes Armstrong uses The Jerusalem Bible which is an interesting contrast to any of the translations I've read such the New American Standard. For example page 56 quoting Jeremiah 20:7 is

n  Yahweh, you have seduced me and I am seduced, You have raped me and I am overcomen

King James:

n  O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailedn

New American Standard:

n  O Lord, Thou hast deceived me and I was deceived; Thou hast overcome me and prevailed.n

The portrayal of god as both romantic seducer and rapist has been bowdlerized in later translations.

Each year I visit my friends in the Puget Sound, I ask D, who is much better read than me when it comes to history, to recommend me one of the books on his shelves. This was the choice for this year, and it was a doozy. I had to read slowly and carefully, but I found it valuable since this is an excellent deep dive into comparative religion. Despite the claims of another reviewer who says she is a bad writer, I found her to be precise and careful with her language, and I appreciated her mostly neutral tone, especially with respect to Islam of which I had no serious understanding, given my US centric education on that topic. I remain unconvinced by most of the factual claims of any of these religions, but I understand better the ideas of the various mystics. It seems they go to great lengths to prevent any rational analysis of their claims, which means I'll never buy into them, but at least they recognize the problems. Yet another book I feel deserves multiple readings, but there's always so many other books.

Люди постоянно меняли свое восприятие и понимание Бога последние 4000 лет. Автор хорошо показывает этот непростой путь. Английский религиовед собрала в одной книге много фактов, имен и теорий. Читается тяжело, но я заметил, что когда продираюсь через дебри подобных книг, у меня происходят сдвиги в понимании многих вещей. После прочтения "Истории Бога" большинство вопросов по религии, которые были мне не понятны, встали на свои места. Например, мне стало ясен ответ на вопрос о том, как можно одновременно верить и быть при этом полноправным членом современного интеллектуального мира.
Книгу рекомендую тем, кто хочет фундаментально разобраться в истории религии, понять почему люди продолжают верить и во что можно верить сейчас, когда кажется, что наука победила религию.

This book was very difficult to read. I'm not sure who the audience is supposed to be. If it's other academics, then the book is too general. If it's the intelligent reading public, then it's way to dense and detailed. There's no real organization to it. She just keeps throwing all these theologists' names at you and describing their different theories, until you're dizzy and they all sound like they're saying the same thing in different ways. Very dense, old-fashioned writing style. I prefer academic writers who can take deep, difficult material and organize it so that it is easy to understand for a lay person, and write in a lively style so that it holds the interest of an intelligent general reader. I ended up skimming through sections of this book that interested me less than others. But, by reading carefully the sections that did interest me, I was inspired to think some more about what I really believe about God. So it was not a waste of time.

سيرة الله لكارين أرمسترونغ

الكتاب يبحر في مفهوم الإله في الديانات الثلاثة الكبرى
اليهودية - المسيحية - الإسلام

لقراء الإنجليزية يمكنكم مشاهدة هذا الوثائقي الممتع
والذي يعتمد على أفكار الكتاب الرئيسية

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx4m1...

Very poorly written and features a lot of falsehoods about the three religions. The author wants to make her point without having sufficiently studied any of the religions she's talking about.

3.5 stars

A very impressive book that I found very difficult to read. Theology, as it turns out, is not for me! But this book was worth reading anyway, because it provides such a big-picture, eye-opening framework for understanding the many different ways people (mostly in the monotheistic world) have conceived of religion over the centuries. I had the vague sense that it was basically all “anthropomorphic disciplinarian in the sky” unless maybe you were a Sufi, which as it turns out is very far from the truth.

So, this book essentially traces the history of religious thought in Judaism, Christianity and Islam from the birth of these religions up through the early 1990s, when the book was written. It is decidedly not a history of religion, or a history of religious people, but rather a history of the philosophy of religion, which can make for tough going at times. The more you already know about theology, and about the background history, the better, as Armstrong is most focused on the ideas, with brief discussions of the environments from which they arose.

Surprisingly to me, as far back as the ancient world people rebelled at the idea of an anthropomorphic god and worried about people simply attributing their own ideas to God. Throughout the book we hear about conceptions of God as “ineffable” and “beyond human words and concepts”—which seems to be the conclusion, broadly speaking, of both the philosophers and the mystics, though the philosophers’ god is a distant, detached creator while the mystics’ is ever-present, with the requirement that people cultivate a sense of God’s presence for themselves. (Neither version, needless to say, holds passionate opinions on current political issues.) Reading this book might give the impression that very few people actually thought of God as a harsh old man in the sky, though I suspect it’s more that really serious thinkers didn’t believe that. It’s clear that Armstrong herself doesn’t find the idea very appealing or interesting, though she also seems to do a thorough job of making her way through the influential theologians. She seems to be agnostic (after an unsuccessful tenure as a nun) and is most drawn to mysticism. She also takes a very practical approach to the idea that each new era develops an idea of the divine that works for current conditions.

I am skeptical about the argument that nobody could possibly have been an atheist before the Enlightenment, though. Armstrong has no surviving records of anyone self-identifying as an atheist, which is different. (People accused each other of it, often meaning “that person does not share my ideas about religion” and not “that person has none,” but this still implies that they could conceive of the notion.) I’ve seen very detailed complaints from priests going back to the Middle Ages about people not believing in any gods, and even some of the conceptions of religion described here are barely, if at all, theistic. In Armstrong’s view, religion is less about answering practical questions like “how did the world come to be?” and “why does the sun rise?” (and many people found the literal interpretation of Genesis implausible long before science could prove otherwise), and more about issues of the meaning of life and how to feel at home in the world, which aren’t exactly challenged by geology. In fact, Western Christianity is typically portrayed as the outlier here for its literal rather than symbolic interpretations of scripture, its obsession with dogma and sectarian disputes, its beef with science, and its tendency to find religion a struggle. I don’t know how much of this is the author reacting against her own tradition (certainly that’s some of it), but it’s an interesting view.

Overall, I’m not sure I entirely understood this book: there are a ton of names and what seemed to me very slight variations on similar ideas. And I perhaps lacked the patience or the training to understand some parts, like the Kabbalah section. But there are also some fascinating ideas that were new to me, it is readable despite being erudite, and it provides a useful framework for understanding ideas about religion. Glad I read it, and glad to be finished.

Das Buch hält was es verspricht: es gibt einen Zeitstrahl vor, wie die Bibel entstand und sich weiterentwickelt. Leider fehlt eine kritische Perspektive darüber. Dieses Wissen muss man sich über andere Bücher ergänzen.