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| God: A Brief History: Bowker, John |
Title: God: A Brief History | ISBN : 978-0-7894-8050-7 |
Author: John Bowker | Publisher: Dorling Kindersley, DK Publishing Inc. | Year: 1st edition (May 1, 2002) | ISBN-13 : 978-0789480507 | Pages: 404 | Language : English | file: pdf
God: A Brief History by John Bowker
Not just in words, but in art, dance, music and silence -- this book is the perfect overview for viewing divinity from every perspective. The history of God cannot possibly be told. How can you write the history of One who is outside time and space, and who has no beginning and no end? Nevertheless, the desire to understand and experience the divine is a fundamental human need. For billions of people, through many millennia, the quest to answer the basic questions of existence -- Why are we born? What will happen to us when we die? and how should we live out lives? -- has become a search for God. A Brief History of God explores the myriad ways in which humans have sought connection to the divine from the dawn of history to the present -- not just through religion and philosophy, but in art and literature, in music and dance, and in science.
Having already written a lushly illustrated overview of the beliefs and practices of the world's religions (World Religions, also from DK), Bowker turns his attention to God and produces a book chock-full of facts, stories, legends and illustrations about the ways that religious traditions have developed their beliefs in God. Bowker first examines the ideas of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud and others to demonstrate that all individuals and societies grapple with the meaning of God. In roughly chronological order, Bowker surveys the history of belief in God in animistic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He explores various aspects of this belief, such as the meaning of dharma, the concept of wisdom and the nature of pilgrimage. Yet Bowker's book contains numerous problems. First, he never explains what he means by God. Is God the same as the Sacred or the Divine? Without a clearer explanation, many of the religions that he examines—Buddhism, for example—cannot be said to have a God. Second, does God indeed have a history? That implies that God would have had a beginning and will have an end, which runs counter to the notion that God is eternal and ahistorical. Third, because he does not provide a clear definition of God, Bowker levels the differences among the world's religions so that it appears that the God of Judaism is the same as the God of Hinduism. At best, Bowker provides a superficial overview of the history of belief in God for the "religion lite" crowd.
