God Against The Gods: The History Of The War Between Monotheism And Polytheism (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
One True God or Many?This is a study of the 2,000 year war between polytheism and monotheism, which ended in the victory of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam.I wish I could say I appreciated the book more than I did. I'm intuitively sympathetic to the approach of the author. However, I just don't think he did justice to a great subject. It's a Bit of a God's BreakfastWhile it's an interesting narrative in the style of historian Tom Holland, it seems that Kirsch is first and foremost a journalist who is heavily reliant on quotation of professional historians and secondary materials. He brings little to the cut and paste job in terms of insight or analysis.Each chapter has a main heading, a sub-heading and an appropriate epigraph. The body of each chapter also contains catchy headings. The problem is that they seem to have been superimposed on the text after it was written, as if the first draft was all text and someone was brought in afterwards to prettify it. The body of the chapters is often haphazard and doesn't always achieve what the chapter headings set out to achieve.Chapter 1 (sub-headed "A Young Pharaoh’s Experiment in Monotheism and Why It Failed"), which is of particular interest to me, totally failed to explain the reasons for its failure. Indeed, Akhenaton features in less than half of the chapter.Rigorism and Zealotry Beats ToleranceIf the book can be summarised in one sentence, it would belong to Freud: "Religious intolerance was inevitably born with the belief in one God."Implicit in this sentence is Kirsch’s view that monotheism has a dark side, that of rigorism and zealotry attached to the belief that there is Only One True God. He extrapolates that this same rigorism and zealotry "can be found in all totalitarianism, and nowhere more terribly than in such modern and supposedly secular phenomena as Nazism and Communism".In contrast, Kirsch argues convincingly that paganism was not crude and demonic, that the classical culture of Greece and Rome was a pagan culture, and that it was tolerant in nature, precisely because it was polytheistic and accepting of gods and cultures of all types, whether they were sourced locally or from afar.What Do You Believe?The study proceeds on the basis that "something deep in human nature prompts us to imagine the existence of a power greater than ourselves," whatever we call it or them.Atheism is almost totally ignored, except to the extent that Kirsch points out that the first use of the term was against Christian monotheists.As an atheist, I don’t believe that any gods exist. However, I maintain that the existence or non-existence of God is within the realm of "belief", not scientific fact. I accept that if you believe in a God, then it exists for you.The Pendulum of the GodsIn the past, I have used Akhenaton as my avatar, because it is evidence for me that the belief in one God rather than many is a social construct that is a product of the times.Kirsch documents the swinging of the pendulum from 1364 B.C.E. to 415 C.E. He shows how the momentum for one belief over another was personalized in individual historical figures. However, nowhere does he contemplate that all of the participants might have been wrong.That said, Kirsch forcefully makes the point that tolerance of diversity is more important for society than enforcement of conformity, particularly in matters of opinion and belief.
The book was recommended by statistic and finance professors of IUB during college years. It wan't until after graduation that I started to read it, and its interesting stories certainly refreshed my memories of joys i had in statistical and finance classes. But as reading progressed, the book unveiled profound thoughts of the author: the evolution of human's understanding of risk and risk management. Throughout the book, a few figures representing classic theories are given adequate exposure to readers. John Graunt established the doctrine of statistics; Daniel Bernoulli found it was imperative for a person to have probability and utility analysis in decision making; Abraham de Moivre discovered normal distribution from observation of numerous distributions of random events; Francis Galton invented regression analysis. But classic theories entail limitations. For instance, the tendency to overly rely on regression is nowhere recommended in this book. Instead, the author attributes president Hoover's failure to predict the Great Depression to excessive reliance on historical regression to forecast the future; the same attitude is given to Public's prediction of stock price in 1950S which was based on past regression and thus omitted future upward trends. In later chapters, new theories mostly prevailed in post-WWII era emerge. Chaos theory, which challenges the regression and normal distribution theory in academic field, failed to dorminate the industry's practice in the same way as it opponents did. Another theory is Black-Scholes model, which has been used extensively for derivatives and real option valuations in derivative and stock markets. Thus, an inference from the book would be that the evolution of risk theories reflected the evolution of American economy, a transformation from manufacturing economy to service economy, in which the nature of risk has changed. The book also raises a philosophical question of whether humans are really risk averse. The answer, according to the author, is no. Humans are not risk-averse, but loss-averse. Everyone is a loss prevention practitioner, and loss aversion guides each's daily actions. This contention is true on the ground that humans are motivated only by pursuit of happiness or avoidance of disguit. Fear of loss and uncertainty is one example of the later. But our understanding of risk conquers the fear of unknown and leads us to accept uncertainty of life and probability in daily decision making. Such tolerance and scientific measurement of risk allow human to predict and live lives with a sense of security, which then makes religion obsolete in certain spiritual and psychological aspects. Science replacing religion to deal with fear of uncertainty is what the title "Against the gods" implies.
What do You think about God Against The Gods: The History Of The War Between Monotheism And Polytheism (2005)?
God Against the Gods depicts the emergence and eventual triumph of monotheism over polytheism in the West. It begins with Pharoah Akhenaton, who attempted (and failed) to transform Egypt from a polytheistic society to one that worshipped only the sun god, spends substantial time on the history of Judaism, and then focuses, for most of the book, on the ascendancy of Christianity during the fourth century.What I found most interesting was the story of Emperor Julian, whom later Christian historians dubbed Julian the Apostate. Julian was a nephew of Constantine the Great, and he became emperor of the Roman Empire following the death of his cousin, Constantius. Julian had been raised as a Christian, but he despised this religion as his Christian cousins murdered his father, brother, and other cousins. Upon becoming emperor, Julian tried to reverse the Christian tide begun by Constantine and Constantius.Unlike Constantius, who was rather intolerant of the polytheistic traditions that were still widespread throughout the Greco-Roman world, Julian was an affable, tolerant pagan who allowed the Christians to continue to practice their religion. Julian restored the pagan rituals and traditions back to their place of former prominence and ended persecution of non-Christians. He also extended Roman toleration to the Jews and intiated a project to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.Sadly, Julian died at age 32 in battle with the Persian Empire, and his efforts came to naught as he was succeeded by a Christian; soon thereafter Christianity was made the official religion of the empire with the polytheistic traditions all outlawed, and then the Dark Ages began.One cannot help but wonder how different Western civilization would have been had Julian not died so young and had been able to continue his effort to restore the polytheistic traditions of the pre-Constantine era. It seems highly unlikely that the Christian Church would have achieved such great power and influence had Julian lived and been able to choose a successor who would carry on his legacy.
—Vegantrav
Very readable. I was hoping for more of a polemic against polytheism. But no, polytheism is really the hero vs. the autocratic excesses of adherents of monotheism. Kirsch makes a good case and I'll concede. But we're talking Theology here, not social science. It doesn't really matter. Religion without love is religion without love whether you worship Jehovah or wood sprites. But, as religious histories go, this was very easy going. Not much written about the early centuries of Christianity is this approachable. It made it worth the trouble even if it was off-topic for me.
—Mobill76
Although a serviceable account of the struggle between polytheism and monotheism in the Mediterranean region, principally from the time of Josiah to the death of Julian, the books cover promises more than the text delivers. This reader was disappointed that Kirsch did not address directly the question as to why Christianity, a minority religion, triumphed over paganism so quickly after the death of Julian. The author mentions, almost in passing, that Roman emperors had totalitarian powers as if that was an obvious and inarguable explanation for the phenomenon without demonstrating that it was true or why it inevitably led to the effective end of monotheism.
—Mmyoung
