God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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The judges of the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize look for books that explain high quality science in an engaging and accessible way. She talks movingly too about her partner, who served as a marine in Afghanistan, and how difficult it is to adjust to life after the army. There is a “Babylonian Job” story from way back, but it doesn’t have the equivalent of a Satan in it at all; no other SW Asian myth parallels Job. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. For instance, one Jewish scholar reasoned that being in “the image of God” only entails a variety of abstract (non-physical) qualities: “all those faculties and gifts of character that distinguish man from the beast,” such as “intellect, free will, self-awareness, consciousness of the existence of others, conscience, responsibility, and self-control.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV. In contrast to an archaic, religious sacralising of the perfect, glowing, muscular, dominant body, there is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human – and divine – significance. Women in Western Political Thought by Professor Susan Moller Okin explores the view of women in the works of philosophers including Plato, Aristotle and Mill, which many students study at A Level. So when Yahweh places his bow in the sky after the Flood recedes, Stavrakopoulou notes, it is not just his bow that hangs there. For an earlier treatment of this topic, which is more philosophical/theological rather than historical-critical, see E.Above all, it is worth reading this book for the light it shines on the function of statues today, as well as yesterday, and the book does seek to discuss the contemporary debate and the rewriting of the past by the present. Chebonnier later discussed the biblical view of an anthropomorphic (human-like) God in light of Latter-day Saint teachings on this subject. The book is useful for exploring how language about God should be understood (via analogy, symbols, the via negativa or something else).

The God we worship is a glorified Being in whom all power and perfection dwell, and he has created man in his own image and likeness (Gen.It is an imposition on the Biblical texts by a later theological tradition, not a reflection of the religious understanding of the Biblical authors themselves. In Babylonian myth, the warrior god Marduk defeats the shape-shifting goddess Tiamat by shooting an arrow into her throat.