Mr. Book just finished Playing God: An Evolutionary History Of World Religion, Vol. 1: The Evolution Of God & The Gods Of Monotheism, by David Fitzgerald.

I am a big fan of David Fitzgerald’s books, so when I saw Seth Andrews, The Thinking Atheist, send an email saying that he had a new three volume set of books, I knew I had to get copies of them and review them here.

Volume 1 starts by looking at the evolution of gods. Yes, I meant it plural. The first portion of the book looked at the polytheistic era before moving on to the evolution of monotheism. Both of these discussions were excellent.

Among the many highlights of this volume was an account of Passover written hundreds of years before the story had thought to originate, but lacked any mention of Moses, the Jewish bible, or the fictional story of an exodus from Egypt.

Fitzgerald does an excellent job showing how the early Jews were not monotheists, as the evidence is sitting right there in the Jewish bible for anyone to see. He also quotes a couple of scholar who said “The Hebrew Bible does not contain a single, unified, non-contradictory set of teaching about God” and their Torah tells “the story of a god in evolution, a god whose character changes radically from beginning to end.”

There are 13 chapters in this book and they were all great. I am definitely looking forward to reading the new two books of the series. I’m glad all three volumes were published at once.

I give this book an A+, which also means it is inducted into the Hall of Fame. Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A+ equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.

Mr. Book finished reading this on August 26, 2024.