Religion is an integral part of mankind and affects everybody, regardless of religious inclination or posturing. The reality of our contemporary world is that matters of religion will literally stare you in the face – it’s ineluctable. There exists a wide spectrum of dedication, disinclination and aversion to religion, and the potential extremism among all categories is existential. In certain instances, adopted positions sometimes manifest as an aversion to religion, and by extension God. Historically, great minds, thinkers, philosophers and scientists have tried to decipher the meaning of life, and the matter of religion played a recurring role. In understanding the complexities of religion, the matter should ideally be approached via holistic and historical analysis, with the aim of unravelling its primal objective. The propositions of this project are derived from various academic sources, including theological exegesis – primarily Biblical and Quranic. P.R.I.S.M considers every form of belief and non-belief: from the agnostic to the atheist, Christian to Hindu, Jew to Muslim, and traditionalist to Zoroastrian. Maybe the concept of religion has been misunderstood and misrepresented? P.R.I.S.M is a multidisciplinary and rational approach to the matter of God and religion, from a universal viewpoint. Potentially, a proper understanding of these issues may assist mankind in its quest for peaceful coexistence.

Religion is an integral part of mankind and affects everybody, regardless of religious inclination or posturing. The reality of our contemporary world is that matters of religion will literally stare you in the face – it’s ineluctable. There exists a wide spectrum of dedication, disinclination and aversion to religion, and the potential extremism among all categories is existential. In certain instances, adopted positions sometimes manifest as an aversion to religion, and by extension God. Historically, great minds, thinkers, philosophers and scientists have tried to decipher the meaning of life, and the matter of religion played a recurring role. In understanding the complexities of religion, the matter should ideally be approached via holistic and historical analysis, with the aim of unravelling its primal objective. The propositions of this project are derived from various academic sources, including theological exegesis – primarily Biblical and Quranic. P.R.I.S.M considers every form of belief and non-belief: from the agnostic to the atheist, Christian to Hindu, Jew to Muslim, and traditionalist to Zoroastrian. Maybe the concept of religion has been misunderstood and misrepresented? P.R.I.S.M is a multidisciplinary and rational approach to the matter of God and religion, from a universal viewpoint. Potentially, a proper understanding of these issues may assist mankind in its quest for peaceful coexistence.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great. But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man’s inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future. Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of “evolution”: the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard’s famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Spiritual Evolution is a life’s work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.