An impressive and vivid story about the main sacred texts of world religions and the largest spiritual traditions of the past from a world-famous specialist in religious studies, the author of 25 books published in 45 countries. The modern attitude towards the sacred scriptures is dictated by a relatively recent erroneous understanding of their purpose. They are seen as collections of laws and rules of morality, unshakable eternal truths, a literal expression of the will of God, and even useless archaic literary monuments. As Karen Armstrong shows, for much of their history, the world's religious traditions viewed their sacred texts not as we are accustomed to thinking, but as powerful tools that allowed individuals to connect with the divine, experience another level of consciousness, and help them interact with the world more consciously and sympathetically.