God

by Alexander Waugh

Where does God come from? Has he always existed? What kind of food does He eat? The answers to all these questions, small and large, are in the Bible, or have been written about by those who know Him best - saints, popes and visionaries. In this fascinating account of God's life, Alexander Waugh, author of TIME, tackles the biggest subject of them all in his uniquely refreshing and enthusiastic style. So many stories about God have been forgotten, or edged out of the familiar tales that we have lost our understanding of Him and how he has been viewed by mankind throughout the ages. Now we can once again find out more about who it is that we pray to.

Genres: Religion, Theology

352 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2002

About the author

Alexander Evelyn Michael Waugh (born 1963) is an English eccentric, businessman, writer, critic, journalist, composer, cartoonist, record producer and television presenter. He is best known for his biography of the Wittgenstein family (The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War) published in 2009.

He was a founding director and Chairman of Xebras Management Ltd, the now-dissolved digital media company. He has also served on the boards of Concert Agency, Manygate Management Ltd, and of the award winning Travelman Publishing Ltd. He is currently an independent Non-Executive Director of Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc and Chairman of the Remuneration Committee.

Reviews

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is something like God’s biography. Not that the author had interviewed God, His friends, relatives or acquaintances and then had written about His life (as what biographers do), but this is solely based on what other people, living or dead, had said or had written about the Supreme Deity.

The God written about here is a living God. Not one among the many other gods of old who had passed on to obscurity and death because people had ceased to believe in them. The God here is also the most powerful one since He is the god of three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These three systems of belief proclaim that there is only one God. So if they are right, then they worship the same entity whose powers have no limits and who knows everything: past, present and future.

Or do their followers really worship one and the same God? It surely makes one wonder why, if only one Supreme Being had instructed their respective priests, prophets, imams, rabbis, dreamers and seers about the true worship, their are vast and often contradictory differences in their beliefs in the afterlife, their dos and don’ts, their permissible cuisines, their days and manners of worship? Maybe three, not one, Gods are involved here? Or is it that only the God of one of them is the true God and the two others are false ones? Many in each religion think the latter is the case, making them infidels to each other.

Anyway, this one God spoken of in this book started out as many gods:

“El, supreme God, throughout much of the Middle East, was once known as Al to the Muslims. The origin of these names probably stretches back to the ‘Ali’ of ancient Egypt who were, in effect, spin-off gods—the limbs, lips, joints etc. of Amon, high god of the Egyptian deities. To Islam, Allah or AL-LAH means simply ‘the God’, but this is not the only name he is given. The Qur’an contains ninety-nine sacred names which are regularly chanted in prayer: AL-QAHTAR (he who overpowers), AL-HALIM (he who acquiesces); AL-GHANI (abundant and infinite); AL-MUHYI (giver of life); AL-KALIMAH (giver of speech); AL-BASIT (the generous giver); AL-QABID (the taker awayer) and so on and so forth. As Arab legend has it there are one hundred names in all but Muhammad (in gratitude to a camel that once shaded him from the heat of the sun) whispered the hundredth name into the camel’s ear. It was probably AL-SOMETHING but nobody knows what. That is why camels are able to look so conceited to this day.

“…The word ELOHIM, strictly speaking, means ‘gods’ (it is a plural word) and most specifically refers to the heavenly assembly of the sons and daughters of El which, at one time, ruled over the ancient Canaanite and Israelite religions. The word has caused no end of embarrassment in Jewish and Christian circles since it occurs over 1,500 times in the first 15 books of the Bible (the most sacred manifesto of both Jewish and Christian monotheism) in which only ONE god is SUPPOSED to exist. To solve the problem ELOHIM has been mistranslated as God (with a capital G) such as we find at Genesis 1:26: ‘And God said, Let US make man in OUR image, after OUR likeness’—-whoops!

“…The supreme god of the ELOHIM is El himself, father and master of all the heavens. He is the ‘el’ of Israel, the ‘el’ of Bethel and the ‘el’ of Ishmael; the ‘el’ of Gabriel, Michael and Uriel. His divine name is omnipresent throughout the history of most Middle Eastern religions; it is Babylonian, Phoenician, Aramaic, Canaanite, Arabic and Hebrew. God introduces himself to Abraham as EL SHADDAI (Gen 17:1) meaning ‘God of the Mountain,’ and elsewhere in the Bible he is EL ELYON (Most High God), EL ROI (God of Vision), EL SABAOTH (God of the Heavenly Hosts), EL CHAY (Living God), EL NEQAMAH (God of Vengeance), EL MA’AL ( God above), EL QANNA (Jealous God) and EL BETHEL (God of the Covenant). …

“…By the beginning of the First Millennium BCE, Yahweh, once the lucky-mascot battle God of a little group of itinerant Israelites, had become a unique symbol of Israelite supremacy over neighbouring tribes. ‘Yahweh is indubitably the cause of our success on the battlefield,’ they would cry, ‘Without Yahweh we shall be defeated.’

“Loyalty to Yahweh thus became the single most important creed in the battle-torn tribe of ancient Israel. As victory followed victory so the mascot of Yahweh was vaunted on ever higher poles, while the rival mascots of their tribal enemies, Dagon and Ba’al, were smashed and trampled in the mud. How long would it be before the Yahwist Israelites proscribed the worship of any god but Yahweh?

“‘We must worship Yahweh and Yahweh alone. We must call him God and have no other gods besides him.’”


And that was how the ancient Israelites came to have one God only after having so many, although the habit of polytheism didn’t die out so easily (remember Moses coming down from Mount Sinai only to find his people worshipping, again, a golden calf?). This one God became the God of the Old Testament, the New Testament and later Islam’s.

Now, what kind of God have we in the Old Testament? Imagine yourself experiencing this today: your father, wanting you to prove your love for him, asks you in all seriousness to kill your own son (his grandchild). And you prepared to oblige him. Never mind if, in the end, it turns outs he was just kidding. Nowadays both of you would have been declared mentally ill and a threat to society. That was the Old Testament story of God, Abraham and Isaac. Abraham was prepared to stab his son Isaac and burn his body later, hoping that the smell of the burning corpse will be pleasing to the Lord.

This same God also said that if your brother, or sister, or son or daughter or a dear friend comes to you and invites you to worship another God, then you must kill him/her (Deut. 13:6-10).

Once, the Israelites caught a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. God then told Moses to put this man to death. The whole community then dragged the man outside the camp and stoned him until he was dead (Num: 15:32-6).

Do you have disobedient children? God said kill them too by stoning (Deut: 21:18-21). In Exodus 32: 27-8 we also see around 3,000 men killed when God told Moses to instruct his people that: “Every man must buckle on his sword and run up and down the camp, from gate to gate, slaughtering his brother, his friend and his neighbour.” In Deuteronomy 32:25 we see God boasting: ‘I shall destroy both the youth and the virgin maid, the suckling infant and the man of grey hairs.’ So when the Israelites fought the Midianites Moses commanded his people to ‘kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who is not a virgin.’ (Num. 31:17). When God ordered Saul to exterminate the Amalekites ‘and utterly destroy all that they have’ he was horrified that one Amalekite had survived the genocide he ordered and regretted that he had chosen Saul to be the king of Israel (1 Sam. 15:35).

Three men named Korah, Dathan and Abiram complained to Moses about how he and his half-brother Aaron were running the priesthood. They were supported by 250 respected community leaders who said Moses and Aaron were being unfair. Moses did not deny the charges but ‘flew into a rage.’ God stepped in and bellowed to Moses: ‘Stand back, I am going to destroy them here and now.’ God then split the ground with a wide crack swallowing the three men and their families into the death. As to their supporters, God sent a blast of fire and burned them into cinders. And when the Israelites mourned their dead, God, still furious, sent a retributive plague which caused 14,700 of them to perish (Num. 16-17).

And how about the Pharaoh who wouldn’t let Moses’s people go? As a finale, God killed every first-born thing in Egypt: including innocent children as well as animals (Exod. 14:28).

A balding preacher named Elisha was walking towards Bethel when some boys saw him and started teasing him shouting ‘Go up, baldy! Go up, baldy!’ Alisha then cursed them in the name of God who heard him and sent two bears who mauled 42 of the children, tearing them from limb to limb (Kings 2:23-24). Even in the New Testament there is this disturbing tale of Ananias who sold his property and gave the proceeds to the Christian church except that he kept a little of the proceeds for himself. When Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter discovered what Ananias had done he was furious that he did not give all the proceeds of the sale of his property to the church. God killed him. When Ananias’ wife Sapphira came, expecting to be thanked for their generosity, God struck her dead too (Acts 5:1-11).

But why would God be like this? The belief is that God created Man and then revealed Himself to the latter. History, however, points to the exact reverse: Humans creating gods some of which have survived to this day as objects of religious worship. Indeed, human beings have this predilection of creating gods. I’ve read somewhere that in all known human history, we’ve created at least a total of around 200,000 gods already. When Diego Maradona was still alive, some Argentinians claimed that soccer is a religion (at least in Argentina) and had proclaimed him as their god. The perceptive Xenophanes of Colophon, as early as the 6th century, had already made the observation that it is men who create gods and not the other way around.

Are all religions, then, just stories narrated by ignorant, superstitious men, and rightfully to be placed under the category FICTION? And is this the reason why, even if oftentimes they have a common main protagonist—the one God—they are completely contradictory to each other? For 800 years, for example, the Catholic church had this doctrine about Limbo. This came about because the bible has this story about the need to have the sacrament of baptism, heaven and hell, The bible storytellers, however, forgot about dead unbaptized babies so nothing was mentioned about them in their stories. Surely, the dead babies can’t go to hell because they were not evil, but neither is it logical to put them in heaven since it would undermine the story about baptism. So the church made up a story within the stories and said these dead babies’ souls would first go to Limbo, somewhere between heaven and hell (like purgatory which, by the way, isn’t in the bible also). They’ll go under some purification there, or maybe baptized, before they can go to heaven (no mention of dead unbaptized muslim or hindu babies, however).

The 3-in-one God, the Holy Trinity, the prized concept in christianity, is also nowhere to be found in the bible. What, then, is the story here?


“…On 20 May 325 CE, the Christian church officially acknowledged that God was one substance consisting of three emanations or manifestations, an indivisible Trinity, made up of the Father, the Son (Jesus or the Word) and the Holy Ghost. The discovery of God’s tripartite structure was made by a wily Alexandrian bishop’s secretary called Athanasius, at Nicea (now Iznik, North West Turkey) and introduced into the dogma of Christendomwith the full support of Emperor Constantine I.

“The only serious objections came from Arius, a Libyan presbyter, whose opinion that Jesus could not possibly be eternal is now pilloried as the heresy of Arianism. Arius’ point, though, was that if Jesus HAD been the son of God, he must, by definition, have been born AFTER his father and therefore, at some time or other, he did not exist at all. Aries stuck to his logic, stubbornly refusing to endorse the Trinity and was promptly dismissed into exile.

“As it happened the trinity idea was not exactly ‘revealed’ to Athanasius, nor did he glean it from the scriptures, where it is never mentioned; rather he, and his boss, Bishop Alexander, worked it out as the best solution to a seemingly irreconcilable problem: ‘How can we claim to believe that there is only one god if we go about saying that Jesus was also divine? And what about the Holy Ghost? Surely we shall be accused of worshipping three gods if we carry on like this? Everything was resolved in Athanasius’ famous creed:

“‘I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is, of the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father…And I believe in the Holy Spirit.’


“The Athanasian solution was sublimely simple and uniquely belligerent. Instead of renouncing belief in the divinity of Jesus (as Arius had) Athanasius boldly asserted, ‘I believe in all three, and all three are one.’ The statement, of course, is meaningless; but was ratified, nevertheless, at the Council of Nicea and, with a few delicate reinterpretations, has endured as a central plank of the Christian message ever since. From the Christian point of view, the holy Trinity is not supposed to be a logical structure. It is a poetic and mysterious procession, consciously reflecting the infinite, ineffable nature of God. To Jews and Muslims, however, the Trinity is not monotheistic, it reveals nothing about the true nature of God and is profoundly blasphemous.”


What, then is God? The New Testament says: “God is Love.” But the Old Testament interjects: “Hey, not too fast. Saying that God is Love is just telling half of the story.” As the author observed:

“…(S)een from as many angles as possible, God is the most perplexing and yet most compelling figure in human history, revealed by a myriad of diverse sources, to be mighty, jealous, rude, babyish, deluded, omniscient, vicious, ratty, benign, merciful, duplicitous, mysterious, wise, ignorant, grand, humorous, cruel, loud, racist, just, unjust, both mutable and immutable, visible and invisible, oafish, fragrant, anarchic and so on and so forth—there is probably not an adjective in the dictionary that couldn’t be made to fit somewhere.”

But if the Old Testament God is that conflicted and seemingly evil at times, why did the New Testament writers tie their God up with that of the Old Testament? The answer is obvious: they had no choice. For without the Old Testament, Jesus would not have been God. The coming of the Messiah was foretold in the Old Testament.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

There have been many Waugh's in English literature.

I had previously read novels by Alexander Waugh's grandfather Evelyn, all of which were excellent, albeit somewhat lacking in the milk of human kindness. I had read a novel by his mother, Teresa Waugh, which was terrible. I have a collection of novels by his father, Auberon, which my sister bought me as an Xmas present a few years ago but I have not got around to reading yet.

Now this, a book by Waugh the younger; not a novel, but an investigation into the history and character of God himself no less, in His own words so to speak.As I expected given his ancestry, Waugh's intentions are mostly satirical. It's a pithy and irreverent look at the origins and evolution of the two pre-eminent monotheistic Gods, as per the Bible, the Koran, apocrypha etc.

In truth, it's difficult to resist the temptation to extract the St. Michael out of God when you focus almost exclusively on the nonsense of the Old Testament, which Waugh does. I mean, have you read that absurd gibberish lately?

Here is a typical example of Waugh's tone throughout: "Picking up a small cluster of dust, he sculpted it into an image that resembled his own, and breathing into his nostrils, Hey Presto! God created Man."

It's not all flippancy though. In the first chapter, 'Mewling and Puking, Waugh informs of how Yahweh was originally merely a son of El, who gained his ascendency over El and his brothers and sisters (the Elohim) with the victory of the Israelites over the Canaanites, and how the inconsistencies of this position are still inherent in the early books of the Bible.

However, Waugh either doesn't seem to know much about Islam, and certainly isn't so keen to mock Allah, perhaps not fancying the same fate as Salman Rushdie. He decides instead to inform rather than ridicule, telling us of the Islamic God's exhausting number of names, and how the 100th name of Allah remains unknown because Mohammed whispered it to a camel as thanks for shading him from the sun.

Probably a wise choice. Some gods can take a joke, some can't.

[Carl T. Grimm · Rating 2 out of 5]

Antidote to fundamentalism

The author insisting on a literal understanding of various scriptures sets up a series of straw men to decimate in this smackdown of the God of Israel, Christendom, Islam with the LDS thrown in for equal measure. Literalism in biblical studies is a relatively recent phenomena. Traditionally the Bible was seen as but one pillar of the Roman Church, the others being Christian tradition and the Magesterium of the Church. And so it goes. A fun read for Atheists and angry agnostics.

[Pat spain · Rating 5 out of 5]

God can be funny if you think about it in the right way. Hysterical in-depth look at the God of the Bible. Almost an outsiders look at some of the more absurd ideas surrounding this figure.

[Sebastian Palmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Waugh's colourful and irreverent romp through huge swathes of material - mostly biblical, but casting his net a bit wider in terms of sources (albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity) - much of which is either arcane, pure gibberish, oa mixture of both, is both educational and enjoyable.

Not a book likely to be admired by the devout (I was made aware of it - indeed, given a copy of it - by a believing friend, who refuses to read it, for fear it will undermine their faith: exactly why he should read it, in my view), Waugh is more than a little disingenuous in his intro. Long before the end of the book one gets a strong sense that he finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of the almighty one glimpses through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description rather than any want), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.

It is remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our 'apostasy'. I think it just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion is. I might share the desire of many naturalists and free-thinkers in wishing to see humanity's consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, but unlike Dawkins and some others, who at some points seemed to believe such a state was imminent, I think we're a massively long way from choosing rationality over superstition. But that's why books such as this are so important.

Waugh is at times flippant, and frequently very funny, but underlying all this (and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-gods) is the very serious desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth this damnable god is exactly. Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Witty refutation of theism.