While they were all polytheistic, paganism, as a religious perspective, was receptive to a multitude of influences and interpretations.

#2 The pre-Islamic Arabs were not a unified group, but rather a variety of different tribes and sects. The pilgrims who visit the Ka‘ba rotate around it seven times, some pausing to kiss each corner of the sanctuary before being swept away by the current of bodies. It is where the gods of pre-Islamic Arabia reside. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Ka‘ba is a small, nondescript sanctuary in Mecca that the pagan Arabs refer to as the Cube. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three sons.Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. He is also the author of How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror (published in paperback as Beyond Fundamentalism), as well as the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Reza Aslan is an acclaimed writer and scholar of religions whose books include No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. 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.

All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. 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. 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.”īut this projection is not without consequences. 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. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. 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.

Reza Aslan, God: A Human History, Random House, 2015

No god but god aslan