Reza Aslan - God: A Human History Of Religion (Corgi, 2018) **

Reza Aslan is an Iranian writer, best know for his books on the life of Jezus, Islam, and fundamentalism. In "God", he gives an overview from early religions to today, obviously not in great detail, but with a grand sweep through history.

Aslan himself is a believer, switching from the Islam of his parents to the Christianity of his friends in the United States where he grew up, then abandoning official religion to currently believe in a 'dehumanized' god, a kind of spiritual presence, a pantheistic god.

You get the full history, from the depiction of gods in early caves dating back to 18,000 BCE, over the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks, to our more 'modern' religions such as Islam and Christianity.

Aslan is not a historian, and also not a scholar, even if he presents himself as such. He makes a lot of claims in this book that are unsubstantiated and unreferenced.

For instance, I would be interested to know how many "villages (existed) with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, and sharing our technologies (with other villages), before it occurred to us to grow our food". This quote, without reference, should reinforce his claim that the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey was no exception but rather the rule. But who says that? Where is it written?

He also claims that people that "the ancients simply accepted the idea that the world of the dead is just a continuation of the world of the living". The "ancients"? As if they are all the same. Again, who wrote this, who demonstrated this, and where is it published? Having read a lot of the "invention of heaven", this is clearly not correct. Another example: "When we organized ourselves in small, wandering packs of hunter-gatherers united by blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the Lord of Beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease". What? Really? Says who? Claims such as this one - and there are many examples - are ok in fiction, but not in a book with a claim to scientific (even if popular) evidence.

On the positive side, there are some interesting and factual stories.

If you're interested in the history of religion, I recommend you to find more reliable and scientific sources.