God Quotes

“It is the broadly Platonic notion of the otherness and unlikeness of the divine to anything in or beyond the universe that has shaped the more formal theological constructions of God in the Western religious imagination. And yet these constructions are built on a conceptual framework very much at odds with the Bible itself, for in these ancient texts, God is presented in startlingly anthropomorphic ways. This is a deity with a body.”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“How could I not be distracted? Here was a deity just like those I’d visited in museums as a child—a god of ancient myths, fantastic stories and long-lost rituals; a god from the distant past, from a society utterly unlike our own. Those were the terms on which I wanted to encounter him; not as a distant and abstract being, but as the product of a particular culture, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then; a god shaped by their own physical circumstances, their own view of the world—and their own imaginations. Sitting in that lecture hall, it seemed to me that this potent figure had somehow been theorized away and replaced by the abstract being with whom we are more familiar today (…).”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“But male circumcision is the means by which this covenantal blessing is to be brought about, miraculously gifting Abraham and Sarah not only with a son of their own, Isaac, but with generations of Abrahamic descendants, tracked in Jewish tradition via the newborn Isaac, rather than Ishmael, the patriarch’s thirteen-year-old son born by the slave-girl Hagar, who in the Bible is quickly rejected by his father after Isaac’s birth.”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“Pork, of course, was off the menu – not because it harboured potentially deadly bacteria, as is often supposed, but because the pig tended to be regarded as a dangerously liminal animal. With the feet of a cud-eater, the diet of a scavenger, the habits of a dirt-dweller and the cunning of a human, it exhibited an unsettling combination of characteristics, rendering it culturally inedible for some (but not all) southern Levantine peoples, for whom pigs were often associated with the underworld or malevolent supernatural powers.”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy