Previewing The Story of God with Morgan Freemaan

God bless Morgan Freeman, the guy may be well past retirement age but still has four movies slated for release this year not to mention his growing number of narrator jobs. For the past six years he has been the voice and face of Through the Wormhole and now he is adding another hosting job to his resume in another otherworldly subject matter, The Story of God, premiering tonight on the National Geographic Channel.

This time around, Freeman is actually going across the globe to see how people celebrated God throught the years, whatever they called the entity. Each episode of The Story of Godwill center on one big question about the divine, from the mystery of creation, to the true power of miracles, to the promise of resurrection. The first episode deals with the view of the afterlife which takes Freeman from the pyramids of Egypt, to Jerusalem, currently the crossroads of three religions, where Jesus is believed to die in a time when everyone was Jewish. He also travels from Mexico to view the Day of the Dead, combining Aztec and Catholicism beliefs, to India where the locals believe in reincarnation. The episode ends in what may be the future of the afterlife: implanting our memories into artificial intelligence so we can live forever.

Future episodes of The Story of God focus on Creation – Are there similarities among the religious creation stories from around the world? How do they compare with the scientific theory of the creation of the cosmos and the dawn of civilization?. Who Is God? – How has the perception of God evolved over human history? Is God just an idea, and if so, can we find evidence of a divine presence in our brains? Evil – What is the root of evil and how has our idea of it evolved over the millennia? Is the devil real? The birth of religion may be inextricably tied to the need to control evil. Miracles – Are miracles real? For many believers, miracles are the foundation of their faith. Others regard miracles as merely unlikely events on which our brains impose divine meaning. Belief in miracles, however we define them, could be what gives us hope and drives us to turn possibility into reality. And the End of Days – Violent upheaval and fiery judgment fill popular imagination, but was the lore of apocalypse born out of the strife that plagued the Middle East two millennia ago? The true religious meaning of the apocalypse may not be a global war, but an inner revelation.

The Story of God with Morgan Freeman airs Sundays at 9:00 on the National Geographic Channel.