Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from God: A Biography:
The profound originality of a divine-human pact in which both parties complain endlessly about each other has too rarely been acknowledged as such.
Religion [...] may be seen as literature that has succeeded beyond any writer's wildest dreams.
Lord can restore a covenant with Israel and yet continue
Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being?
Philosophers of religion have sometimes claimed that all gods are projections of the human personality, and so it may be. But if so, we must at least recognize the empirical fact that many human beings, rather than project their own personalities upon gods wholly of their own creation, have chosen to introject - take into themselves - the religious projections of other human personalities.
God is no saint, strange to say. There is much to object to in him, and many attempts have been made to improve him.
And yet the writer who first brought monotheism to full formulation and who so clearly felt that this idea was destined to sweep the world was, in point of historical fact, quite correct. The spread of this idea, principally through Christianity and Islam, has not been what he foresaw; and in the diffusion of the idea the Jews have been more often vilified than glorified. Yet Christianity and Islam do understand themselves to worship the same being that Israel first worshiped
Polytheistic Greek mythology includes some stories that tell of intervention by Zeus in human affairs but others that tell of Zeus’s life among his fellow gods. In the Bible, God, being the only god, does not have that second kind of action through which to present himself. But the peculiarity of God’s character does not end there. God could conceivably engage in some kind of demonstrative action that would serve his own self-presentation apart from any interaction with man: miraculous displays, cosmic disruptions, the creation of other worlds. But in fact he refrains from all such activity. Not only does he lack any social life among other gods but he also lacks what we might call a private life. His only way of pursuing an interest in himself is through mankind.
