God biography
God: A Biography
1). so, my favorite video game of all time is pillars of eternity. I think it’s pretty neat. there are lots of things I love about it, but one of its most interesting themes, in my opinion, is the way the narrative handles its theology.
(I am about to spoil pillars of eternity here btw, assuming that most people don’t care, but it really is a wonderful game and you should play it if it appeals to you.)
you go through this whole story, right, the setup to which involves a lot of “gods messing around in mortal affairs,” and towards the latter half of the game–and in the dlc–you even get to converse with some of the gods personally. most of them are at best petty, at worst wholly immature. there’s this sense of frustration, yeah, when you finally have the opportunity to talk to them, after all this time dealing with the consequences of their actions, and the only thing you can get out of them (despite the richly varied dialogue tree) is a sense of self-righteous obfuscation. and then–
and then!
right at the end of the game, just before the climax, you discover something: there are no gods. not really. millenia ago, a technologically advanced civilization, tired of existential uncertainty and religious warfare, went searching for the true gods, to finally bring peace and coherence to their world. instead, what they found, devastatingly, is that no gods exist; the universe is existentially a vacuum, with no purpose or meaning or ultimate authority in sight. faced with this, these ancient people decided that, if such a truth became known, mankind would no longer be able or willing to live. so they took it upon themselves to use their technology and become “the gods”—read, very powerful and godlike beings—and then they brutally erased every trace of what they had done, so that future generations would believe their divinity to be authentic and immutable, the way they themselve
God: A Biography: Q&A
Below are Q&As about God: A Biography submitted by readers.
Question:
Thank you for allowing me to read this book, I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was well written and obviously well researched. The question I would have for Jack Miles:
The premise of your book seems to be that God was vengeful and overreacted to the sin of Adam and Eve, and though He continued to be a warrior God, somewhere in history He changed His mind or personality and became "kinder and gentler". Was it ever a consideration that His gift of "free will" was His true mistake, with free will and the presence of Satan, making it almost impossible for human beings to be faithful, requiring God to find another way to save His creation?
Answer:
In the Genesis story of the creation of the human species, no reference is made to free will as such. However, at first, God places no restrictions whatsoever on the activity of the first human couple, and later he does, which may reflect some concern on his part. At first, he prohibits nothing. His only two commands are both positive: [1] "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and [2] subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis ). The actions commanded imply free will in those receiving the command. The mood, moreover, is one of confidence and bounty. In Genesis 2, however, which historical scholars read as a separate account of creation but which, read in a more literary way, must be taken as a fuller or corrected account of the creation of the human species, God's grant of liberty is not so expansive. The first couple no longer have the whole earth as their domain. They are placed in a garden, which the man (not the woman) is commanded to cultivate, and there is, after all, a prohibition: They may not eat of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis ). Th
The Biography of a God
- Title
- The Biography of a God
- Subtitle
- Mahasu in the Himalayas
- Author
- Asaf Sharabi
- Price
- € ,00 excl. VAT
- ISBN
- Format
- Hardback
- Number of pages
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 01 - 05 -
- Dimensions
- x cm
- Series
- Religion and Society in Asia
- Categories
- Anthropology
- Contemporary Society
- Religion and Theology
- South Asia
- Discipline
- Asian Studies
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Table of contents
Notes on Transliteration
Acknowledgment
Meet Mahasu
1. Gods on the Road
Getting into the Field
The Devta Institution
2. A Stormy Biography
Mahasu Appears Vs.1
Mahasu Appears Vs.2
The Gods They are a-Changin’
3. The Four Brothers
Personalities and Identities
The Four Kings
Mahasu as Shiva
Gods Between Here and Everywhere
4. Local Traditions in Times of Change
Local Rituals Fade, Gods Persevere
From Carnivore to Vegetarian
When Gods Settle Down
The Agency of Mahasu
5. Communicating with Mahasu
The God's Management
Mediums
Talking with Mahasu
Testing Mediums
Agency, Doubt, Mediation
Index
Asaf Sharabi
Mahasu in the Himalayas
Mahasu is the joint name of four gods whose influence is widespread throughout the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Like other deities in the Western Himalayas, they are regarded as royal gods who rule over territories and people. This book traces changes in faith and practices surrounding the Mahasu brothers, and shows how the locals understand these changes by emphasizing the dominant role of humans in the decisions of the gods. The locals are also constantly testing the authenticity of the human mediumship. Thus, the book presents the claim that the gap between local conceptions of divinity and the perceptions of anthropologists regarding gods may be narrower than we think. literary criticism book by Jack Miles First edition Publication date God: A Biography is a non-fiction book by Jack Miles. The book recounts the tale of existence of the Abrahamic deity as the protagonist of the Hebrew Tanakh or Christian Bible Old Testament. The Tanakh and the Old Testament contain the same books, but the order of the books is different. Miles uses the ordering found in the Tanakh to provide the narrative on which his analysis is based. The book's central structure is that God's character develops progressively within the narrative. The accounts of God's actions in the various books are then used to deduce information about God's nature and motivation. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
The Biography of a God: Mahasu in the Himalayas is based o God: A Biography
Author Jack Miles Language English Genre Religion Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Publication place United States Media&#;type Print (Hardcover) Pages ISBN OCLC References