In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In God, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. With layered prose and thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as one long and remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. As Aslan writes, "whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we are believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves." But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, and our penchant for violence. All of these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more peaceful, universal spirituality. God is an impassioned call to clear the decks, to rid God of the human frailties we've layered on him over the ages and allow ourselves to hope for a more expansive divinity.