Resumo de Where God Was Born

WHERE GOD WAS BORN?Where God Was Born? is a journey by land to the roots of religion by Bruce Feiler. A person of Jewish faith, Mr. Feiler traversed the fertile crescent from Jerusalem to Babylon and Persia with the Old Testament in hand partly to better understand his personal faith relationship with God and partly to add depth and perspective to the story of creation as told in the Bible.The etymology of words like semitic, messiah and the word religion itself gave me a deeper understanding of man?s journey to monotheism. Semitic was coined by a German scholar, August Ludwig Scholzer in 1781 and referred to the ancestors of today?s Muslims, Christians and Jews and is derived from Abraham?s son, Shem.Messiah derives from the Hebrew word, mashiah meaning the anointed one and indicates the applying of oil to an object or person. The word religion finds its roots in the Latin, religare, ?to bind?, and religion sets out to fuse people to one another and to God through rituals, narratives, symbols and ceremonies.As I joined the author?s journey from man?s earliest recognition of higher powers to monotheism through today I got a deeper understanding of how people have lived their religious beliefs and what we may expect in the future.Feiler tells us what he is about on page 22 when he says ?I would try to penetrate Iraq, the birthplace of the Bible and the scene of the most traumatic and least understood revolution in the history of religion, the Babylonian Exile.? In 586 BCE Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and brought the Judean population to southern Mesopotamia. The Israelites believed that God resided in a room in the temple in Jerusalem which could be entered only by the chief priest once a year for a ritual sacrifice. In Babylon they began to ask where God was now. Was He still back in the temple in Jerusalem? Ezekiel provided the answer - God is everywhere. He relates their experience in exile to their experience in Exodus. ?Just as God showed dominion over Israel no matter where they were including Egypt, so God shows dominion in Babylon. ?As I entered into judgment with your fathers in the wilderness in the land of Egypt, so I will enter into judgment with you?.The author says, ?The importance of this message to the future of religion cannot be overstated.? ?With no access to sacred sites, sacred text became Israel?s lifeline to the past. They began to edit the myriad of oral and written traditions of Israelite history and combined them into a unified canon. The Bible may not have been BORN in Babylon, but it certainly came of age here.?Feiler visited a Russian Orthodox compound of St. Mary Magdelene in the Garden of Gethsemene built by the Czar Alexander II in 1888. A painting depicts Mary Magdalene standing before the Emperor Tiberius in Rome. In the painting she is holding a red egg. In accordance with tradition, she is announcing that Christ has risen. ?How could anyone rise from the dead?? he said. ?It is as impossible as that egg turning red!?. As he spoke, the egg turned crimson, a symbol of Jesus? blood. Some believe the custom of dyeing eggs on Easter came from this story.While the history is as revealing as it is fascinating, it is the author?s conclusions that inspire.He says, ?Religion is broader than nationalism. It addresses the dignity of all human beings, not just those in one geographical area. It is universal. Politicians have power, he quotes Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain, but religions have something stronger: They have influence. Politics moves the pieces on the chessboard. Religion changes lives. Religion also breeds overconfidence and one challenge for today?s believers is to rediscover in the fire of faith the sources of warmth that can overpower the flames of destruction. This change can be achieved only by fellow believers, I think. The first conviction I took from my journey is that the only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation. Religioncan be saved only by religion. And in that battle, one of the greatest weapons of all may be the Bible.??Religion began as a complex interdependent web, in which people took ideas from other cultures, rituals from rivals faiths and even notions about their deities from competing gods. If religion is to be preserved as a moral force in the multifarious world of today, I believe, we must rediscover the legacy of interaction and accommodation. The great religions were not born in isolation from one another: they cannot survive in isolation from one another?.The fly leaf summarizes the thrust of this work - ?At a time when America debates its values and the world braces for religious war, Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers, Walking the Bible and Abraham travels ten thousand miles through the heart of the Middle East - Israel, Iraq and Iran - and examines the question: Is religion tearing us apart ? or can it bring us together??Where God Was Born? is 386 pages of easy reading prose that flows with the reader?s eye and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of religion.

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