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The Age-old Yearning for God and Meaning

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

If you want to explore the history of the three religions whose members are currently engaged in conflict throughout much of the world, you will learn a great deal from A History of God *by Karen Armstrong. The author spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. After leaving her order in 1969 she took a degree at Oxford University and taught modern literature. She has become one of the foremost British commentators on religious affairs and now teaches at the Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism and the Training of Rabbis and Teachers. She is also an honorary member of the Association of Muslim Social Sciences. Her published works include Through the Narrow Gate,* Beginning the World, The Gospel According to Woman,* Holy War* and Muhammad.*

— Arlene F. Harder, Learning Place Online Editor-in-Chief

[* NOTE: By clicking on the title and buying this book from Amazon.com, you help support LPO.]

In the introduction to her seminal work on The History of God, she writes the following [I have broken some of the paragraphs into smaller ones to make it easier to read on a computer screen]:

". . . My study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of the beautiful yet terrifying world."

"Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused, but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative minds and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment unprecedented in human history."

". . . This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points in time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement "I believe in God" has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is no one unchanging idea contained in the word "God"; instead, the word contains a whole spectrum of meaning, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the greatest human ideas."

"When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discard and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is antihistorical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of "God"; each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. The same is true of atheism. The statement "I do not believe in God" has meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed "atheists" over the years have always denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the "God" who is rejected by atheists today the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the 18th century deists?"

"All of these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points in their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called "atheists" by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a "God" which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?"