The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. 

4/5 rating.

Book #127 of 2019. Read November 12, 2019.

This fascinating book takes an anthropological view of religion’s history: tracing the path from hunter-gatherer shamanic religions to the three Abrahamic world religions of today.

It first discusses the importance of religion as an arbiter of morality during the change from familial-based, hunter-gatherer tribes to larger groups at the advent of agriculture. As these new groups necessitated a shift in cultural norms, religion was able to grant chiefs divinity and stronger moral-based laws for the populace.

During the move from polytheistic, nature-based religions to the first Abrahamic religion, Judaism, there was a large shift required. Mr. Wright traces this path: discussing the arduous fight involved. I had never known that this shift was not anywhere near as abrupt as stated in the Bible. What is even more interesting is that the Old Testament still has echoes of these struggles by early Jews and writers.

Next, Mr. Wright looks at Christianity and the impact of the creators’ circumstances on the writings of the New Testament. He discusses the differences between the “biblical” and “actual” preachings and beliefs of Jesus, as well as the impact of “entrepreneurs” such as Paul on spreading Jesus’s message. A message that led to Christianity melding into a much more peaceful and tolerant religion than Jesus’s original teachings.

The creation of Islam is discussed next. The key point how Muhammad’s lack of political power made his Meccan suras rather tolerant and much more focused on God’s retribution in the afterlife than on Muslim intercession against infidels; while his increased power in Medina caused Islam and the Koran to become much more combative.

This was one of the more interesting books I have read about religion. It explains so well how religions tend to be tolerant when they have little power, and move into intolerance and belligerence once they gain clout. If you are interested in anthropology, culture, or religion, go read this book! Just know, it is almost 500 pages, so it is not for the light-hearted… 

Quotes:

“Of course, hunter-gatherers aren’t the only people to have asked why bad things happen. The Christian tradition alone has generated roomfuls of treatises on this question. But hunter-gatherers do a better job of answering the question than many modern theologians; at least, the hunter-gatherers’ answers are less bedeviled by paradox. Theologians in the Abrahamic lineage – Jewish, Christian, or Islamic – are constrained from the outset by a stiff premise: that reality is governed by an all-knowing, all-powerful, and good God. And why such a god, capable of curing cancer tomorrow, would instead watch innocent people suffer is a conundrum. Just ask Job, who after years of piety was hit by disaster. Unlike most innocent victims, Job was allowed to interrogate God himself about the seeming injustice of it all, yet in the end was forced to settle for this answer: you wouldn’t understand.”

“In the nineteenth century, when European scholars started seriously studying ‘primitive’ religion, they remarked on this absence of a clear moral dimension – the dearth of references to stealing, cheating, adultery, and the like. Edward Tylor noted in 1874 that the religions of ‘savage’ societies were ‘almost devoid of that ethical element which to the educated modern mind is the very mainstream of practical religion.’ Tylor wasn’t saying that savages lack morality. He stressed that the moral standards of savages are generally ‘well-defined and praiseworthy.’ It’s just that ‘these ethical laws stand on their own ground of tradition and public opinion,’ rather than on a religious foundation.”

“As the anthropologist Elman Service observed in 1966, such values as love and generosity and honesty ‘are not preached nor buttressed by threat of religious reprisal’ in these societies, ‘because they do not need to be.’ When modern societies preach these values, they are worried ‘mostly about morality in the larger society, outside the sphere of kindred and close friends. Primitive people do not have these worries because they do not conceive of – do not have – the larger society to adjust to. The ethic does not extend to strangers; they are simply enemies, not even people.’”

“H. L. Mencken said of religion, ‘Its single function is to give man access to the powers which seem to control his destiny, and its single purpose is to induce those powers to be friendly to him… Nothing else is essential.’”

“Religion, having come from the brains of people, is bound to bear the marks of our species, for better and worse.”

“Meanwhile, it’s important to stress that, however ‘modern’ this ‘transcendent’ god may have been, the Yahweh of Elijah’s time still didn’t possess what many people would call a modern moral sensibility. For example, he wasn’t very tolerant of alternative theological perspectives. In that episode in First Kings, God uses his ‘still small voice’ to instruct Elijah on how to get every Baal worshipper in the vicinity killed. Then, a chapter later, after some Syrians express doubt about the Hebrew god’s power, Yahweh underscores their confusion producing 127,000 dead Syrians. This god may have spoken softly, but he carried a big stick.”

“And in you go back to the poems that most scholars consider the oldest pieces of the Bible, there’s no mention of God creating anything. He seems more interested in destroying; he is in large part a warrior god.”

“[The Bible] talks more than once about a ‘divine council’ in which God takes a seat; and the other seats don’t seem to be occupied by angels. Psalm 82 says: ‘God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.’ And God himself, addressing the other council members a few verses later, says, ‘You are gods.’”

“In light of the past few decades of biblical scholarship, skeptics can go further. The Hebrew Bible – read carefully, and in light of ancient Canaanite writings – doesn’t really tell the story the faithful have said it tells to begin with; at least, it doesn’t tell that story in ultimately credible form. Alongside its monotheistic plotline lies diverse evidence casting that plotline into doubt. The story is undermined not just by the facts in the ground, but by the text itself.”

“Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text’s literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.”

“Odd – the one sent from heaven to spread the divine word purposely encodes the word so that most people won’t get it! The oddness is only mildly diluted by the fact that this has Hebrew Bible precedence (in the story of the prophet Isaiah, to which Jesus here alludes). In all likelihood, this was an early attempt to explain why Jesus, who ostensibly came to enlighten people, had enlightened so few by the time he died – an explanation so needed that the story is preserved in Matthew and Luke.”

“When Jesus heals a blind man, he says, ‘I am the light of the world.’ A fairly immodest claim – but John’s Jesus is not a modest man. In no previous gospel does Jesus equate himself with God. But in John he says, ‘The Father and I are one.’ Christian legend and theology have by this point had sixty or seventy years to evolve, and they are less obedient than ever to memories of the real, human Jesus.”

“In short, if we are to judge by Mark, the earliest and most reliable of the four gospels, the Jesus we know today isn’t the Jesus who really existed. The real Jesus believes you should love your neighbors, but that isn’t to be confused with loving all humankind. He believes you should love God, but there’s no mention of God loving you. In fact, if you don’t repent for your sins and heed Jesus’s message, you will be denied entry into the kingdom of God. (What about the Jesus who said, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’? That verse not only comes from the last gospel, John, but apparently was added centuries after John was written.) In Mark there is no Sermon on the Mount, no beatitudes. Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Blessed are the meek’ or ‘Turn the other cheek’ or ‘Love your enemy.’”

“Whereas Jesus utters the word ‘love’ only twice in the entire Gospel of Mark, Paul uses it more than ten times in a single epistle, his letter to the Romans.”

“It didn’t take Christians long to start annoying people.”

“Though the verb form of jihad – jahada – appears often in the Koran, jihad per se – the noun – appears only four times, typically in the phrase ‘striving in the way of God.’ And depending on which of those four verses you pick, you could make the case that jihad is either about an internal struggle toward spiritual discipline or about war; there is no ‘doctrine’ of jihad in the Koran.”

“the tone of scripture is set by the circumstance of its creation”

“So if you ask which book is ‘worse’ in terms of belligerence, you might say that qualitatively the Hebrew Bible (and hence the Christian Bible) takes the trophy – thanks to that unrivaled embrace of genocide in Deuteronomy – but that quantitatively the winner is the Koran, at least in terms of the frequency of belligerent passages, if not in absolute numbers.”

“The expansion and contraction of the moral imagination lies behind the pattern that has pervaded the history of religion: when a religious group senses an auspicious non-zero-sum relationship with another group, it is more likely to create tolerant scriptures or to find tolerance in existing scriptures; and when it senses no prospect of a win-win outcome, it is more likely to summon intolerance and belligerence.”

“The American psychologist William James, in his 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, captured the basic idea without referring to evolution: ‘There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations.’”

“Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term ‘syndrome’ may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be ‘designed’ by natural selection to be brainwashed.”

“Such loopholes are found in modern religions, too. If you pray for someone to recover from illness, and they don’t, then prayer would seem to have lost credibility. But religions usually have ways of explaining such failure. Maybe you or the sick person had done something horribly wrong, and this is God’s punishment. Or maybe God just works in mysterious ways.”

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