Mr. Book just finished Playing God: An Evolutionary History Of World Religion, Vol. 2: Judaism And Christianity, 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. I had already given Volume 1 an A+ and now it’s time to move on to Volume 2.

The first eight chapters of Volume 2 was about Judaism before the final four were on Christianity.

The author starts by asking whether “any of the other top ten religions have founder figures with problematic back stories [in addition to Jesus, Buddha and Muhammed]” and answers “Only Every. Single. One.” In his list of 12 traits that all of the founders had in common, he finished with “Followers of religions really, really hate it when you look into their founder’s back story.”

The book cites archeologist Israel Finkelstein. When he started his studies in 1970, “There was a world war going on over whether Abraham was historical. Then there was a big debate over the conquest of Canaan. Today, there isn’t. We know these things didn’t happen.”

The chapters of Judaism relied heavily on archeology and literally criticism methods. While that part of the book was very strong, I didn’t find it as interesting as Volume 1 and thought that this book was more likely to be in an A, rather than another A+.

But, then the chapters on Christianity were enough to raise this book to another A+. The two strongest chapters of the book were on Jesus and then the one on Paul.

One of the best lines of the book came when the author was citing New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan, who said, that it “is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

I give this book an A+ and inducted this 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.