Rating: 
Summary: Not all that bad
Review: The book is rather a narrow examination of the philosophical conception of god. This is something which over time has altered with the change in the way that people think. The book is thus somewhat remote and rarified rather than being a history of religion or of the various churches. The book is not nearly as much fun for atheists as other works such as the Barbarian Conversion by Fletcher which describe the changing nuts and bolts of how the church works as a very human institution. The looking at doctrine tends to limit the mechanics of how a religion works in day to day life or how it affects people. I would also imagine that the book although clearly written by may seen as a bit academic for some.
Rating: 
Summary: Thorough and objective study of the history of God
Review: "A History of God" is an informative and complete account of the "idea" of God throughout the changing religions of today. Ms. Armstrong does a terrific job objectively and respectfully informing the readers about the history of God. It answers many questions we have about our image of God and how that came about.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant and fascinating
Review: This is one of the few audiobooks that stimulated me to buy the print version. Even abridged to four cassettes, Armstrong's treatment is a cornucopia of historical facts and theological concepts. This is the first book on religion I have ever read that was not contaminated by either sectarian presumption or turgid academisms.
Rating:
Summary: Erudite But Ultimately Flawed
Review: While Karen Armstrong certainly displays adeptly her familiarity with the philosophy of religion, if you will, this book is ultimately flawed for several reasons. First, the unstated assumption of an "evolution" in the "idea" of God flies in the face of the religious experience of each of these three faiths; this results from her method of approaching religion as an "idea" rather than as a living reality for the believers who espouse each of these faiths. This flaw in particular is humorously ironic, in light of her stated but cryptic preference for the mystical traditions in each of these faiths ... traditions which themselves completely eschew the notion that God can be treated as an "idea" in favor of a personal experience of God that cannot be reduced to an "idea". Second, Armstrong has an unmistakeable if yet unstated bias against what she considers to be 'organized' religion, in general, and Western organized religion in particular. This slants her analysis considerably in favor of mysticism, first, and more significantly, against Christianity in general, as it has been, for much of its history, considerably more 'organized' than Judaism and Islam. Third, Islam fares much better in this book, as it does in Armstrong's other books, than a realistic look at that faith reveals -- again, at the expense of Christianity in general and Western Christianity in particular. This book is well-researched and erudite -- but make no mistake: it is pure opinion, and is ultimately and principally a reflection of the author's own skepticism and lack of faith, and a yearning for the "religion withouty doctrines" or a "spirituality without religion", the great Holy Grail Myth of the contemporary popular "spirituality" of our times.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but I had problems
Review: Armstrong presents some interesting ideas but she's sloppy with her facts. I'm not qualified to judge on Christianity and Judaism, but she made several factual errors concerning Muslim beliefs. She also should have refrained from using Arabic terms because she spelled them wrong as often as she spelled them right. This made me doubt her credibility with the rest of the book.
Rating:
Summary: great book.
Review: This is a beautifully written book, a real pleasure to read. Try this sentence:' Unlike the pagan deities, Yahweh was not in any of the forces of nature but in a realm apart. He is experienced in the scarcely perceptible timbre of a tiny breeze in the paradox of a voiced silence.' I don't think the book shows the bias towards Islam that other readers have noted. In fact, I think she more or less gives equal time to the three religions, and to tracing the historical links between them. The only bias that Armstrong clearly reveals is a feminist one. She talks about the axial age when societies all over the world became more patriarchal, and claims that this was when Israel made the crucial shift to monotheism from goddess-oriented cults like that of Ishtar.
Rating:
Summary: Profoundly disappointing and biased.
Review: Ms. Armstrong has brought together a great deal of historical and philisophical material. Her presentation is very reader friendly. Her open bias against, and even outright hostility to, Western Christianity runs as a thread through the book. I had hoped to find an even-handed account of the development of monotheism. Instead I discovered a book in which the thoughts of St. Paul in the development of Christianity are dismissed in a few short paragraphs. St. Thomas Aquinas is spared hardly a mention. She spends pages on minor figures, even as judged by Muslim scholars, in the development in Islam. She would have us believe that Islam would have developed as a pacifist, gentle and tolerant religion if it hadn't been for the interference of those nasty Western Christians. This position takes no account of Islamic imperialism and wars of aggression from the seventh through the eleventh centuries. It fails to deal with the Islamic introduction of the sub-Saharan slave trade. She ignores the anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish polemic contained in the Koran. Armstrong derides Western rationalism and Western Christianity's reaction to and incorporation of it. She points to the mystic traditions of Islam, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity as preferable. In doing so, however, she fails to even mention the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century. Again Armstrong spends considerable time with minor Muslim mystics while St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Avila, St. Francis of Assisi, are either not considered at all or quickly passed over. It would be easy for one not schooled in Western Christianity to arrive at the conclusion, after reading this book, that there has not been, and is not now, a Western mystical tradition. Armstrong rightly argues that the rationalism of Western Christian thought has failed many in the West, and is in decline. She attempts no explanation of how it is that only in places where Western Christianity has been the dominant religious force political structures have arisen that ascribe worth to the individual and incorporated same in constitutional liberties. It may be that Western Christianity in a sense has poured out its vitality so that others may live in relative peace, order and freedom. This notion of self giving even unto death is not a concept unknown to Christians.
Rating:
Summary: The autobiography is better.
Review: A century ago, a man named Grant Allen wrote a book called "The evolution of the idea of God." G.K.Chesterton reviewed it by noting, "It would have been more interesting if God had written about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen." Armstrong's book is fascinating at times, but she was hindered in her story by three encumbrances: first, she did not appear to be looking for God, but running from Him. Second, what she wrote was a history of purely human ideas and ideologies, from a Christian perspective, a history of idolatry. Her book is like looking at the moon under the assumption that the light itself is native to the moon. Third and most damningly, Armstrong has ignored all the actual evidence that God is not merely an idea, but a person who acts in history. (Such as the universe itself, the prophets, and miracles.) One aspect of that evidence which most people are unaware of, and that relates to the theme of this book, is the fact that monotheism is not solely a "western" concept. This is, perhaps, the great cover-up of comparative religion. One finds an awareness of the Creator even in countries where all the institutional and pedagogical institutions have been hostile to Him for hundreds of years, and the native religions appear to have no use for him, such as here in Japan. This is just as the Bible predicts: as Paul said, in our hearts, we know God is and that we are not Him, though we suppress that knowledge. The history of organized religion, east and west, is largely a history of men and women running from God. Armstrong's book is in a sense a kind of well-written and gosippy history of that flight, which is why it earned an extra star from me. I would like to suggest four books which give an aspect of the "history of God" Armstrong and her fellows routinely ignore: how the God of the Bible reveals Himself to non-Christian cultures. The first is Chesterton's Everlasting Man. The second is Eternity in Their Hearts, by Don Richardson, which in my opinion may be the most eye-opening book on religion published this century. The third is a book I wrote after reading Richardson's theories, and finding out that, in China at least, they rang true: True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture. I would also recommend that book God wrote on the evolution of the idea of Karen Armstrong, especially the first half of Romans.
Rating:
Summary: Majestic, brilliant -- a Mahler symphony of a history
Review: Karen Armstrong has drawn together an immense, sometimes overwhelming, amount of information about the streams that make up the great river of monotheism. Like the wisdom in "The Varieties of Religious Experience," the conclusions she and the reader reach are hard-won, like an exhausting journey with no possible shortcuts, but priceless. They won't occur to -- or appeal to -- people with a blind allegiance to their own spiritual stories. But intelligent readers who are seeking deep understanding of their own religious backgrounds in one of the world's great "religions of God" will never be the same. Her work opens up new worlds.
Rating:
Summary: Informative, Non-Judgemental, But Not A School
Review: ------------------------------------------------- Armstrong, in this book, has struck a popular western inquisitive feeling about the nature and meaning of God. With a masterful narrative style, she works the central idea of a pragmatic mono-theistic concept that may have been necessary for building modern civilizations. Although, the author does not extend the breadth of her analysis to cover Mesopotamian roots in the evolution of our concept of Deity, such as Manism of Ur, she does illustrate the point that the concept itself has evolved in history. Her point of a superior Islamic religion, follows naturally from that evolutionary treatement - Islam being the last of middle-eastern-rooted religions. Although, the author stops just short of expliciting any conclusions, one clearly feels the powerful message she is implying. As a matter of fact, delving into historic accounts, there is a well known account of Mohammed, Prophet of Islam, advising Ali, his intended successor, not to use violence in a certain situation because "you will ruin everything I've accomplished". It wasn't about God, but about building a socially just civilization unified by a single Deity. -------------------------------------------------
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