God the ultimate biography
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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 uppenbart 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 krigare 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 djävul, making it almost impossible for human beings to be faithful, requiring God to find another way to rädda 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,
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From Publishers Weekly
The "author" of this irreverent, good-natured romp is identified as "God, The Author of All Creation, with Jeremy Pascall, holy ghost." Covering mainly the high points of the Old Testament, the Author tells us that Adam and Eve were created primarily to take care of Eden, "a little piece of Heaven on Earth" and "the first ever Garden Center." The begetting part got a bit out of hand occasionally, He admits, larking His way through chapters on Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, He thinks the procreative act "too complicated . . . uncomfortable . . . and extremely undignified. . . . Personally, I prefer a nice cup of tea." And He confesses that He turns malcontents into cacti, which is how He transformed his holy ghost writer (see Footnote 61). British novelist Pascall obviously did not intend this sunny little book for fundamentalists or those of any faith who take their religion seriously. Illustrated with 40 rather uninspiring cartoons, the book also cont
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God: A Biography
This review first appeared in the Christian Research Journal , volume 19, number 2 (Fall ).
A Review of
Jack Miles
God: A Biography
(Knopf, )
To call God: A Biography a misnomer is an understatement. This recent book by Jack Miles is neither about God nor a biography. The source of Miles’s revisionist work is the Hebrew Scriptures or what Christians usually call the Old Testament, yet his interpretation of these books is not only unorthodox but idiosyncratic.
A literary critic for the Los Angeles Times and formerly a Jesuit, Miles claims he is not interested in matters of objective truth, whether theological or historical. Rather, he wants to treat the God of the Hebrew Scriptures as a literary character, to interpret God through these varied texts as a Shakespearean scholar would interpret various leading characters such as Hamlet, MacBeth, or Lear. In this case, his work is not a biography, but literary criticism. Because the idea of the Hebrew