Abraham’s Curse: The Roots of Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, by Bruce Chilton, Doubleday.

The biblical account of the Aqedah is familiar. Abraham is about to sacrifice his son Isaac when at the last moment, an angel stops him, telling Abraham that he has passed his test of faith and doesn’t need to actually slit the boy’s throat.

In all three of the Abrahamic religions, the moral of the story is that God rejects human sacrifice. However, the author of this disturbing book, a professor of religion and the rector of an Anglican church, attempts to show how all three religions have managed, at one time or another, to twist or ignore the story and to interpret it, not as a condemnation of martyrdom, but as a glorification of it.

History and the daily headlines show that militant religion and violence seem to go together, from Islamic suicide bombings and graphic glorifications of the crucifixions of Jesus to the indefensible actions of Israeli extremists.

Chilton shows the terrible “blood harvest” that leads from the Crusaders to pogroms against Jews to the European wars between Catholics and Protestants, right down to our own time. He concludes that the “impulse to praise martyrdom and therefore to encourage adolescents to become martyrs is embedded in the cultural DNA of the West.”

However, after his depiction of the evils that flow from religious fanaticism, the author, in the final portion of his book, castigates the recent exponents of atheism. He advises his readers that the “more closely the three religions relate to one another in their mutual challenge to realize the blessing of Abraham, the more quickly that interpretive and ethical key will turn in the lock of Abraham’s curse.

Verdict: A scholarly, often tedious mélange of theology and history around a dubious theory.

Living Without God, by Ronald Aronson, Counterpoint Publishing.

The author of this humanist approach to reality is the grandson of Jewish immigrants and a professor of the history of ideas at Wayne Sate University in Detroit.

A longtime socialist, he takes as his starting point Immanuel Kant’s three questions – “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?” Above all, Aronson is eager to make us think. He writes, “Instead of lending our power to a being above us and then asking for it to be lent back to us, we may be able to feel our power as drawn from and connected to, all that we depend on.”

This interconnectedness makes it imperative that we assume responsibility for the nature of our society. For example, he writes that the coming to power of Hitler and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust “required the active or passive consent of tens of millions. Many of the accomplices may have done very little or even nothing. Some only averted their eyes. But each did “exactly what was needed” for the triumph of evil.

Aronson asks and strives to answer questions such as these: “Without God, how do we experience gratitude for life’s gifts? How do we confront aging and death? How do we make sense of an often insane and inexplicable society?”

It is refreshing that he is less interested in attacking religion than in offering an alternative to those “who manage to live fundamentally secular lives and who search for meaning and truth.”

For the most part, his approach is humane, modest and irrepressibly hopeful. He points out that the most unequal and insecure of advanced societies, the United States, is also the one that has the greatest presence and intensity of belief in heaven above and in a transcendent force managing human lives.

Verdict: A well-meaning, readable humanist approach to the modern situation that offers few answers to the old, baffling questions that religion poses.