Adieu to God E-Book

Mick Power

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 393

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Adieu to God examines atheism from a psychological perspective and reveals how religious phenomena and beliefs are psychological rather than supernatural in origin.

• Answers the psychological question of why, in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, do religions continue to prosper?
• Looks at atheism and religion using a fair and balanced approach based on the latest work in psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychiatry and medicine
• Acknowledges the many psychological benefits of religion while still questioning the validity of its supernatural belief systems and providing atheist alternatives to a fulfilling life

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1: A Short History of Religion

Introduction

The Gods of Thunder

The Rise of Monotheism

Theism and Deism

The Mammon of Science (or “Thank God for the Enlightenment”)

Psychology and Religion: First Thoughts

Chapter 2: The Psychology of Religion—The Varieties of Normal Experience

Introduction

Religious Experience

Conclusion

Chapter 3: The Psychology of Religion—The Varieties of Abnormal Experience

Introduction

Visions and Hallucinations

Meaning under Stress

Consciousness (Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, Fugue States and Glossolalia)

The “Holy Fool”

False Memories

Conversion

Miracles

Conclusion

Chapter 4: Social Structures and Religion

Introduction

How to Be a Social Success—A Case Example

The Dyad and Religion

Family Structure and Religion

Mega-Churches

Theocracies: “For God and Country”

Social Rituals

Religious Wars

Conclusion

Chapter 5: Religion, Power, and Control

Introduction

Misogyny

Charismatic Leaders

How to Start a New Religion

Prophecy

Sin and Celibacy

Secret Societies and Secret Knowledge

Conclusion

Chapter 6: Religion and Health

Introduction

The Evidence

The Power of Prayer

Religion and Stress

Miracles, Gurus, Relics, and Placebos

Pilgrimage and Purpose

Suicide and Religion

Meditation and the Psychotherapies

Summary and Conclusions

Chapter 7: How to Be a Healthy Atheist

Overview

Health, Religion, and Atheism

Conclusion

References

Author Index

Subject Index

This edition first published 2012 © 2012 Mick Power

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Power, Michael J. Adieu to God : why psychology leads to atheism / Mick Power. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-0-470-66993-8 (cloth) – ISBN 978-0-470-66994-5 (pbk.) 1. Psychology, Religious. 2. Psychology and religion. I. Title. BL53.P69 2012 200.1′9–dc22 2011015219

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781119950875; Wiley Online Library 9781119950868; ePub 9781119979951; eMobi 9781119979968

To Irina

Preface

The release of Stephen Hawking’s book The Grand Design in 2010 witnessed the expected reactions from the religious community. As the world’s greatest living scientist, and probably the only one to have been given a starring role in an episode of The Simpsons, Stephen Hawking had previously seemed to play dice with the public and with whether or not God was necessary. Hawking had finally declared, about the Big Bang at the beginning of the (current) Universe, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.” The United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, responded by stating that science is about explanation, but religion is about interpretation. This distinction between the magisterium of science and the magisterium of religion, as the great evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould referred to them, is of course nonsense. Absolute nonsense. To propose that science is about the how, but religion is about the why, is to misunderstand science completely. Psychology is a science, which we can define as follows: “The science of psychology is the how and why of mental life and behaviour.” Psychology and adjoining areas such as anthropology, philosophy, psychiatry, and sociology have much to say about the how and why of religion. These magisteria are not “non-overlapping” in any sense. From the Copernican revolution onwards, the Christian Church has been fighting a losing rearguard action against the major advances in science, enough to have led many major sociologists to predict its death. However, from a psychological perspective religions offer far more than science does, because the promise of eternity, paradise, and damnation for your enemies is guaranteed to win over a lot of people, especially on a bad day. As a psychologist, therefore, I believe it essential to understand why all cultures in all epochs have created religious systems and beliefs in the supernatural, in order to understand why in many parts of the world, including the United States, religion is gaining in strength and in followers, despite the advances in the physical and biological sciences. How can the majority of Americans believe in creationism and intelligent design instead of evolution?

Religions are social systems that have been developed by people. These systems are typically based on the reported religious experiences of charismatic leaders, and are therefore ultimately about universal psychological experiences that have become incorporated into the 30 000 or so known religions, plus the other 100 000 that have yet to be invented in response to the special experiences of future charismatic leaders. Each religious system will of course have you think that it is the one true religion and that you are to forget the tens of thousands of other religions as if they did not exist. But the existence of so many contradictory religious systems can only be explained by psychological and social explanations that offer interpretations as to why we, as a human species, are so vulnerable to giving reality to the spectres in our minds.

In writing a book about the psychology of religion, I think it important to declare that although I became an atheist when I was 16 I was in fact attending a Catholic grammar school at the time, Saint Phillip’s, in Birmingham. I was a disputatious student that the governing Catholic Oratorian Fathers must have tired of regularly. Some people would say that nothing has changed. However, I look back now with some gratitude that at least the Oratorians in these modern times allowed discussion and dispute, rather than handing me over to the Dominicans of the Middle Ages when I would have been put through the full Inquisition with torture followed by being burnt at the stake. Anyway, I always suspected that there were one or two latent atheists in their midst, not to mention those who had reached their own conclusions about Catholic vows of celibacy. However, I am not the “aggressive atheist” type that frightened off poor Cardinal Karl Jasper from joining Pope Benedict XVI on his recent visit to the United Kingdom. My mother is a devout Catholic, my wife believes in a spiritual world, and I have many friends, students, and clients who practice a wide range of different religions. In fact, when I read the “aggressive atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, sometimes I agree that they can sound too aggressive even to a fellow atheist. I have an empathy with most (though not all) religious belief and with most (though not all) religious believers. My intention in writing this book is to convey something of this empathy through an understanding of religious experience and belief but without ever sounding patronizing or sneering, even though my belief is that psychology (with help from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, physics, biology …) offers a far more powerful explanation than any religious system ever will.

Well, it is not just the Oratorians who ran Saint Phillip’s that I need to acknowledge and thank in the writing of this book, but also the many school friends who, both at that time and in the many years since, have been astute sparring partners. So thank you, Tony Manville, Paul Shobrook (and your brother Tony, now an Anglican monk), Mick Quille, Mick Drury, and Mick Garvey. From university days I would especially like to thank Charlie Sharp, Andy MacLeod, Lorna Champion, Tim Dalgleish, and Jonathan Cavanagh for their inspiring discussions. My son Liam, now studying philosophy at St Andrew’s University, is an able match for all of us. I would especially like to thank Charlie Sharp, Andy MacLeod and Kate Loewenthal who read and commented on an earlier draft of the book. I would also like to thank Andrew Peart, my editor at Wiley, who responded with unbelievable enthusiasm the same day I sent him the proposal for the book. We share an atheist’s love of Iona, so I discovered. Finally, my thanks to Irina, who also loves Iona, for being challenging from start to finish, who has thrown every argument for the existence of god and God at me regularly, and who, once she accepted that she had escaped Soviet atheism only to marry a Western atheist, has been totally supportive of this endeavour throughout.

Mick Power Christmas (or should I saySol Invictus and Saturnalia?), 2010

1

A Short History of Religion

Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors.

Stephen Pinker

Introduction

Karol Józef Wojtyła was a frail 84-year-old who could barely walk because of his osteoarthritis. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease, which left his speech slurred and his memory failing. His increasing deafness made it difficult for him to understand others. He had experienced a cardiac arrest and a near-fatal shooting, and had had a colostomy. He eventually suffered multiple organ failure and sepsis, and died on April 2, 2005. At the time of his death, Karol Józef, otherwise known as Pope John Paul II, was the leader of an estimated one billion Catholics worldwide (the world’s largest religion) and had spent nearly 27 years viewed by those Catholics as “God’s representative on Earth.” An estimated four million people attended his funeral, which included a record number of heads of state ever to attend such an event.

At the age of two years, Llamo Thondup’s family received a visit from a Buddhist delegation in their tiny village of Takster in Tibet. Llamo was the fifth of 16 children born to a farming and horse-trading family. On being shown items belonging to the Thirteenth Yellow Hat Dalai Lama the two-year-old evidently exclaimed “They are mine! They are mine!” at which point he was declared to be the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and, therefore, the reincarnation of the Buddhist god of compassion. At the age of four he was taken to the Potala Palace in Lhasa and began his studies of Buddhism, though a meeting at age 11 with an Austrian mountaineer (played by Brad Pitt in the Hollywood film, Seven Years in Tibet) clearly broadened the young boy’s knowledge of the outside world.

Emperor Hirohito of Japan was born with what many might consider to be a definite advantage in life. Because of his divine descent from the goddess Amaterasu Omikami, Hirohito was an absolute deity within the beliefs of the Shinto religion. His declaration of war against the USA was therefore viewed as the act of a god against a secular power, such that the Japanese could not envisage defeat. However, a few days after the dropping of the atomic bombs Little Boy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 15, 1945, the Americans forced Hirohito to make a radio announcement in which he had to reject the Shinto claim that he was an incarnate deity. Many Japanese did not believe the announcement and continued to believe that the Emperor was a deity until his death in 1989, even though supernatural power clearly lost out to atomic power on this occasion.

These three short case studies are presented to illustrate that even in the present age of reason and science there are those who believe that there are deities or near-deities who walk among us. Many people in the West, even those who are strongly religious, tend to think that beliefs in incarnate deities are quaint and archaic, like the medieval kings who presented themselves as gods to their peoples. Yet the Dalai Lama, who seems to have become a superstar in the West, regularly visits presidents and prime ministers and appears on television chat shows while believing that he is a deity. Charm and a very disarming smile do not, however, make the Dalai Lama a deity.

What we will examine in this book is how beliefs such as these arise in the first place and what allows the beliefs to be sustained in the face of possible disproof. If they were gods, a mere secular power would not be expected to be able to overcome them, yet both Emperor Hirohito at the hands of the Americans and the Dalai Lama at the hands of the Chinese have suffered major and unexpected defeats during their lifetimes to mere secular powers. Surely these defeats should have persuaded their followers that perhaps they are not deities after all?

Whatever protects their followers’ beliefs from evident disproof is a question that psychology must address. Moreover, the question of current and recent human deities gives us access to possible tests of religious beliefs in a manner that is not available for most religions, because many of these are based on long-past deities and prophets who now exist only in memory or, in some cases, only in fantasy. We might try to put to the test the Catholic religion’s belief that the Pope is God’s representative on Earth. The Pope, however, is unlikely to subject himself to such proof or disproof because of his belief that ultimately faith is stronger than reason. Furthermore, the apparent disproofs that do not fit with existing beliefs seem to be easily rejected. As psychologists such as George Kelly and philosophers such as Karl Popper have emphasized, we are all too good at collecting evidence for our beliefs, but extremely poor at seeking out evidence against our beliefs. We will examine these powerful confirmation biases in later chapters, but in the remainder of this chapter we will try to understand something of the history and cultural context for the different types of religious belief and examine why some religious systems have come to be predominant over others.

The overall structure of this book will first begin with a very brief skim over the history of religion from the earliest animistic religions to the polytheistic and then to the monotheistic. This summary will include brief points about the challenges presented to world religions by advances in the sciences. A reader who is familiar with or even an expert in this history may wish to jump straight to Chapter 2, where we begin an examination of everyday psychological experiences that often lead people towards religious explanations for such experiences. When these are added to the more unusual experiences of some religious mystics that we detail in Chapter 3, we have to conclude that there is a considerable body of common and uncommon experiences for which religions provide often very comforting explanations, especially when those experiences might be frightening or overwhelming. In Chapters 4 and 5 we will examine some of the social structures that are present both in religious institutions and in beliefs about the gods. As William James did in 1902, we will consider some of the more negative features of religious institutions, but we will not forget the many positive benefits that membership of such institutions can also provide. These positive benefits for health and well-being come more to the fore in Chapter 6, when we examine exactly what the evidence shows for such health and longevity benefits from religion. The conclusion of the review is that religion is the ultimate curate’s egg. There can be many benefits, such that the poor honest atheist may well be disadvantaged by comparison, but there can be many disadvantages too. In the final chapter, Chapter 7, we therefore attempt to summarize the key benefits of religion and spirituality, and consider what the atheist might do in order to achieve benefits of a similar nature. In the remainder of the present chapter we provide a very brief summary of the history of religions to set the appropriate context for subsequent discussion for those readers who may not be familiar with all aspects of this history.

The Gods of Thunder

All cultures at all times in recorded history have developed complex belief systems that involve one or more supernatural powers that need to be worshipped through religious rituals. Freud (1927) famously referred to these developments as the universal obsessional neurosis in his essay The Future of an Illusion. Freud’s analysis will be considered in more detail later, and, as we will see, although it may have some applicability to the role of the father in the monotheistic religions, it has much less relevance to the polytheistic and animistic religions. The Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor was a strong proponent of animism as the origin of religious beliefs. He interpreted primitive religion as being based on the belief that everything in the Paleolithic period possessed a soul. The sociologist Emile Durkheim had considered totemism (a word derived from an Ojibwa Algonquin tribal word ototeman, which indicates a blood relationship) as the likely origin, in which the totem animal is considered to be the ancestor of the group. Later anthropologists, however, such as Edward Evans-Pritchard and Claude Levi-Strauss, strongly disputed totemism as an explanation of the development of religion. Levi-Strauss’s classic work The Savage Mind (first published in French in 1962) emphasized the continuity between the “primitive” mind and the “modern” mind. We will emphasize this continuity throughout the book as we consider historical, cross-cultural, and developmental clues to religious belief.

One of our great evolutionary advances is the human capacity to seek to understand and find meaning and repeating patterns in the world around us. But this capacity can sometimes lead us to be easily fooled into finding patterns and associations where none in fact exists. The development of superstitious behaviors is a classic example: most people have superstitious beliefs which may be more evident under times of stress. If, when a child hears thunder, she repeats the words, “Mother save me, Mother save me,” to herself and then she survives the storm, she may come to believe that the words have a magical and protective power and that she must repeat these words whenever she hears the sound of thunder. These superstitious learned associations are very common in childhood, and developmental psychology demonstrates to us that children have many such magical and animistic beliefs. Harry Potter is not popular because he is a fictional character, but rather because children identify with him and wish to have his powers in order to defeat the evil around them. The earliest animistic belief systems seem to share much with the beliefs of children in that they hold that supernatural forces exist in any animate or inanimate object and that beliefs in these forces help people to understand and ultimately to control and protect themselves against them.

In her excellent overview of early belief systems, Karen Armstrong (2005) in A Short History of Myth organizes myths into three periods: the Paleolithic period (20 000 to 8000 BCE) when myths were focused on hunting, the Neolithic period (8000 to 4000 BCE) in which myths related to farming, and the Early Civilizations (4000 to 800 BCE) when the large state religions came into being. Archeological excavations have shown that the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers made animal sacrifices; the cave paintings in Lascaux and in Altamira highlight the significance of the hunt in the Paleolithic period with depictions not only of the hunted animals but also of their hunters wearing animal head-dresses. The hunt was an especially dangerous time, and the emergence of individuals with special powers, the priest-shamans, seems to have occurred partly as a result of the desire to bring good fortune to the hunters and to protect them from danger. The myths of this period also focus on difficult-to-understand natural forces, among them the cycles of regeneration for plant life, the “regeneration” of the heavenly bodies such as the sun and the moon, also on regular cycles, and the experience of powerful natural phenomena such as lightning, thunder, volcanoes, and hot springs. All of these external natural phenomena required explanation. The sky was a source of particular fascination and incomprehension, and most of these early groups seem to have developed myths about one or more sky gods.

In addition to the puzzlement with the external, Karen Armstrong also points to the importance of the internal even for these early Paleolithic groups. Anthropologists point to societies such as the Australian aborigines, who still live as hunter-gatherers and who have not developed agriculture, as providing possible insights into the belief systems of earlier Paleolithic groups. Australian aborigines believe that, in addition to the day-to-day reality in which we live, there is a parallel reality or “Dreamtime” in which the ancestors live and out of which all cycles of creation emerge. Some living individuals are believed to have special powers to communicate between the two, though all people experience both realities through dreaming. Interestingly, it is believed that the child’s eternal spirit enters the fetus around the fifth month of pregnancy when the pregnant woman first experiences the child’s movements in the womb. We will of course consider the importance of internal experience in religious belief in much more detail in later chapters.

These early Paleolithic animistic belief systems already present us with a repeating structure and an attempt to explain a combination of phenomena external to the individual and a set of phenomena internal to the individual. The external phenomena include repeating cycles such as the daily movement of the sun, the monthly changes in the moon, and the seasonal changes in plant and animal life. In addition to these cycles of creation, of birth, death, and re-birth, there are also one-off and unpredictable external events such as storms, droughts, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Predictable cycles also occur in the internal psychological experiences such as in waking, sleeping, and dreaming, but internal experiences also include one-off and unpredictable events that can cause pain and that warrant explanation. These unpredictable experiences include injuries, diseases, and the deaths of loved ones. The pain of grief at the loss of a loved one, especially the loss of one’s child, can be overwhelming for the individual, so it would be normal to seek solace and explanation from someone with special powers in the group, such as a priest-shaman, who can offer a system of explanation and even a continuing connection to the lost significant other.

The priest-shaman has clearly played an important role through all religions, even in the earliest animistic ones. Although the term “shaman” arises from a word used by a nomadic Siberian group, the term is now generally used to describe a whole range of witch-doctors, medicine men, sorcerers, and so on. They are people with special powers and experiences, which can include trance states, drug-induced hallucinations, and dream-like phenomena that are used as evidence that they can communicate from everyday reality to a supernatural reality such as in the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime. Shamans became the holders of oral knowledge and tradition, such that in some societies the special knowledge would be passed from father to son. In whatever form the knowledge is retained and passed on from generation to generation, these oral traditions were the beginnings of our modern religious institutions and the claims of prophets and preachers that they have insight into the eternal and supernatural truths.

The Neolithic Period (c. 8000 to 4000 BCE)

The first agricultural communities were faced with different problems and demands than were the early hunter-gatherers, such that religious beliefs and practices began to change. About 10 000 years ago the first farming communities developed and began to replace the smaller nomadic hunter-gatherer groups with larger communities in settled locations. Awareness developed of the cyclical nature of farming, and a belief arose that there was a spiritual power that was locked in seeds and fruits that allowed them to burst into life, a process typically accompanied by appropriate spiritual and practical rituals. The generative power of the earth was recognized and therefore its power was replenished both with fertility rituals and, in some societies, with human sacrifice. For example, ritual fertility orgies could accompany the planting of seeds in springtime, in which the earth (which in many cultures came to be seen as mother earth and subsequently begat mother-goddesses) was considered to be implanted with the sacred seeds or semen and the same process of generation and birth occurred for both. As Karen Armstrong (2005) notes, interestingly the Bible presents evidence of these early fertility orgies in ancient Israel because the prophets implore their people to stop practicing them:

Then shall ye know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill … and under every green tree, and under every thick oak, the place where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols. (Ezekiel 6:13)

Thou hast moreover multiplied thy fornication in the land of Canaan unto Chaldea; and yet thou wast not satisfied herewith. (Ezekiel 16:29)

Thus I will cause lewdness to cease out of the land, that all women may be taught not to do after your lewdness. (Ezekiel 23:48)

You just have to read the whole of the book of Ezekiel to learn how the early Israelites seem to have combined adulterous fornication with the extensive worship of false idols and from this to get a sense of the pre-Abrahamic fertility cults and practices that the monotheistic religions have gone to great lengths to eliminate.

The early creation myths see humans as originating from the earth in the same manner as plants and trees, which, given modern evolutionary theory, is a view not as wide of the mark as the monotheistic religions might originally have had us believe. Farming was therefore a spiritual activity in which earth and sky (in particular through rain and sun from the sky) combine to create all forms of life. This marriage of earth and sky can be seen in the Assyrian earth-mother goddess Asherah (the Hebrew name for Athirat) who was the wife of El, the High Almighty sky god, who himself seems to have been the key predecessor of the Jewish Yahweh and whose name was even incorporated into the name Isra-el. The god Baal, who was worshipped by many early Israelites and by the Canaanites, was a fertility god also called the god of rain. From these we can see the practical nature of many of the early polytheistic religions, with their crucial links to cycles of farming and survival and the constant battles against death and the gods of destruction.

In terms of social structures, these early agrarian societies typically came to be organized as “chiefdoms.” Widespread examples of such social organization have been studied by anthropologists in agrarian societies in Polynesia, Africa, and the Americas. Explorations of the Pacific Islands during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were illustrated by numerous accounts of the power of the chiefs in such chiefdoms, who in many cases held a near god-like status among their citizens (see, for example, Wright, 2009). These chiefs were imbued with special mana, a supernatural-type power that gave them rights and ownership and allowed them to set the tabus (the origin of the word taboo) for the groups that they ruled. In many cases, the chiefs were both the religious and political leaders of the group and thereby developed the power of the shaman into that of political and social power also. However, in groups where the chief was not the leading shaman, the two worked closely together to invest power in each other.

The Early Civilizations (c. 4000–800 BCE)

There are few ancient civilizations that retain the fascination of the Ancient Egyptians. The pyramids at Giza are one of the most highly visited tourist sites on Earth with an estimated three million visitors each year. Rosalie David’s book The Ancient Egyptians (1998) provides one among many overviews of the growth of religious beliefs in Ancient Egypt through its Predynastic, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom phases. The Predynastic period begins around 5000 BCE with Neolithic farming communities beginning to settle along the banks of the Nile. The river’s annual cycle of inundation and retreat provided a rich source of fertile land along its banks in a country that otherwise had too low a rainfall to sustain such farming communities. This dependence on the cycle of the river Nile therefore became central to Egyptian myth and religious belief. These Neolithic communities seem to have been organized in the form of the chiefdoms typical of agricultural communities until around 3100 BCE following a possible new group of arrivals, the so-called “Dynastic Race,” into Egypt, probably from Mesopotamia. From this period on there is a flourishing of art, architecture, and writing within Egypt. The Upper (Southern) and Lower (Northern) areas eventually came to be unified initially under the Upper Egyptian king, Scorpion, and were completed by his successor, Narmer (also known as King Menes). The first dynasty of the Old Kingdom therefore begins with Narmer. As part of the unification, Narmer moved his capital from the city of This in Upper Egypt to Memphis in Lower Egypt, though the city of This continued as an important religious centre.

The Predynastic and Early Dynastic Egyptian burial practices provide most information about the religious beliefs of this period. The fact that the dead were carefully buried with a variety of personal possessions and food points to a belief in life after death. The inclusion of amulets for magical protection with the bodies became increasingly common. These were shaped as animals such as the crocodile, the snake, and the falcon. The body was buried with the head to the south and looking to the west. Initially, chieftains were given similar graves to their subjects, but with the appearance of the Dynastic Race more elaborate tombs came to be built for the ruling classes. The style that emerged for the noble burials in the early period continued the burial below ground, but increasingly elaborate buildings were built above ground in which the initial funerary practices were carried out. The careful burial of certain animals such as cows and jackals also indicates the development of animal cults in these early communities.

Like many Neolithic farming communities, mother earth and the mother goddess came to be worshipped, the early Egyptian goddess taking the form of a cow and early painted pottery depicting her with a human head and cow’s horns. Some of the graves indicate that the leaders were considered to be possessed of magical powers because special implements were included that were used in ritual magical fertility practices. By the time of Scorpion and Narmer’s unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, the god of fertility, Min, was one of the key gods. He was typically represented as black (the colour of the fertile mud of the Nile) and ithyphallic (having an erect and uncovered penis), such that early Christian explorers often defaced his monuments and, with the introduction of photography, he would only be photographed from the waist upwards. Worship of the sun god, Ra, also seems to have started in the Predynastic period. His form and importance continued to develop throughout Egyptian history, and Ra (or, in the later form, Aton) became the major god in the Egyptian pantheon. His main cult centre was Heliopolis (originally “Iunu”), close to modern Cairo. Other well-known gods from the Old Kingdom period include Osiris, Seth, Isis, and Horus, who are linked together in a death and regeneration myth that reflected the annual inundation and retreat of the Nile and the growth of crops. In this myth, Osiris was originally a human king who was murdered by his brother Seth and his body was scattered throughout Egypt. Isis, who was both Osiris’s wife and his sister, collected the pieces of his body together and restored them by magic, with which she conceived their son Horus. Eventually, Osiris became the king of the Underworld, with Horus identified with the living king of Egypt, and Seth came to represent all that is evil in the world.

The Old Kingdom (dynasties III to VI, from 2686 to 2181 BCE) sees the king become a near-divine being who is the son of a god but born to a human royal mother (here one already sees echoes of the “virgin birth” in the Christian mythology of Jesus as the son of a human mother and a divine archangel). This unique birth gave the king the central role as the intermediary between the gods and humans. However, in order to maintain the succession, the eldest daughter of the ruling king and queen normally became the wife of the next heir, which was usually her brother or half-brother. The king, as a divine being, owned all the land and the people of Egypt, and the successful passage of the dead to the afterlife came to be seen as dependent on the good will of the king. The Old Kingdom also saw the building of the pyramids, with the first step pyramid at Saqqara being designed by Imhotep, vizier to King Djoser. Imhotep was also known as a great healer. Under his Greek name, Asclepius, he became the god of medicine, and he is the likely origin of the “Great Architect of the Universe,” which is the name given to the god of the Freemasons. He became the only non-royal to be elevated to divine status in later Egyptian history. The famous step pyramid at Saqqara was the first of the great pyramids; it stands 62 metres high, it is oriented east–west, and it consists of six giant steps, which are believed to permit the ascension of the king to join the sun god Ra in the celestial barque as he makes his daily journey across the sky. Although the later pyramids at Giza did not have the step structure, the builder of the Great Pyramid, King Cheops, covered his pyramid in white limestone which was believed to focus a ray of sunshine along which the king could travel back and forth between the heavens and his burial place. The original Egyptian name for pyramid (“pyramid” is the later Greek name now in common parlance) was “Mer,” which has been translated as a “place of ascension” (again one can note resonances with the ascension of Jesus into heaven from the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem). While on the subject of the etymology of well-known Egyptian words, subsequent kings of Egypt came to be known as pharaohs because the royal residence in Memphis or “Great House” was called the “Per Wer” in Egyptian, a name that was eventually applied to the king himself.

The Egyptian Middle Kingdom and the preceding “First Intermediate Period” ran from about 2181 BCE to 1786 BCE and covered dynasties VII to XII. The decline of the power of the pharaohs at the end of the Old Kingdom changed religious beliefs and practices in that successful passage to the afterlife was no longer considered to be dependent on the gift of the pharaoh but instead came to be considered as based on the actions of individuals themselves such as in the observation of appropriate rituals and worship of the gods. Because of the significance of Osiris, in that he was murdered but then resurrected, his cult became of increasing importance in the Middle Kingdom period. Abydos, near to This in Upper Egypt, became a pilgrimage centre for the Osiris cult because Osiris’ body was believed to have been buried there and therefore his resurrection would increase the likelihood of the resurrection of the pilgrims to his cult centre. An annual cycle of mystery plays that presented the birth, death, and resurrection of Osiris were enacted at Abydos by the priests. The eternal paradise, which now became the dream of all, was known as the “Field of Reeds,” in which there was permanent springtime with lush and abundant harvests that never failed. It is remarkable how the conceptualization of paradise simply represented an easier version of life on Earth. As someone who hates gardening (presumably in common with many later theologians of the afterlife), the idea of having to grow and harvest crops for the rest of time would, I have to confess, come closer to hell than to heaven for me.

The Egyptian New Kingdom and its preceding “Second Intermediate Period” ran from about 1786 BCE to 1085 BCE and included dynasties XIII to XX. Thebes in Upper Egypt became an important centre of power, and the local god Amun had been worshipped there since at least Dynasty XII. In fact, Amun incorporated the older sun god Ra and thereby acquired the sun god’s powers. The priests at Thebes further developed the power and the cult of Amun, who was now presented as the “king of gods” in that he ruled all other gods. Thebes therefore became Egypt’s most important city in this period, and the associated temple complex at Karnak still stands as one of the greatest engineering achievements of all time. The development of the priesthood at Thebes and Karnak saw the increasing power of the priests in comparison with that of the pharaohs. This led to growing conflict in the reign of the pharaoh Amenhotep III in the eighteenth dynasty, the climax of this conflict occurring in the reign of his son Amenhotep IV. In fact, the religious crisis that occurred during the reign of Amenhotep IV could lay claim to being one of the most significant events in the history and development of religion.

Amenhotep IV suffered the ignominy of being struck out of the Egyptian chronology by his successors, hence little was known about him until the discovery in the nineteenth century of his new city of Amarna, excavated by Flinders Petrie. Amenhotep’s chief wife, Nefertiti, was famed for her beauty. Recent DNA testing has confirmed that he was the father of one of the most famous of the pharaohs in modern times, Tutankhamun (who was named Tutankhaten at birth but, with the subsequent rejection of his father’s Aten-based religion, changed his name to Tutankhamun to indicate his endorsement of the older Amun-based religion). Within a few years of becoming pharaoh, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten, he developed a monotheistic religion that rejected Amun and other Egyptian gods, and he replaced these with the Aten (his new name Akhenaten means “Servant of the Aten”), who was a single sun god and who also incorporated the older sun god Ra. Historians and anthropologists have referred to Akhenaten as the “first individual in history” because of the range of reforms that he brought about not only in religion but also in the arts. We will return to the importance of Akhenaten in the development of the monotheistic religions in the next section. For Egypt, subsequent notable events include the Greek conquest of Egypt under Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, with the establishment of the Greek Ptolemaic pharaohs. Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, following the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE.

The focus in this section has been placed on the Ancient Egyptians, but of course there were many other significant religions that developed in the period of the early civilizations. One such key religion that, unlike the Egyptian religion, still exists today is Zoroastrianism, which has an estimated 200 000 followers, the majority of whom live in India and are known as Parsis (“the people of Persia”). The founding leader, Zoroaster (the Latin version of Zarathrustra in the original language), is believed to have lived at about 1400 to 1200 BCE (see, for example, Mary Boyce’s 2001 book Zoroastrians) and he may have lived near the Caspian Sea in North Western Kazakhstan. One warning for would-be modern-day gurus though is that, apart from his wife and children who clearly had little choice, Zoroaster is said to have converted only one person in his own village to his new religion, and that was his cousin—hence the saying, “You are never a prophet in your own town” (though we must note that Jesus of Nazareth had a similar problem in failing to convert people in his home town of Nazareth, and that Muhammad did not convert the people of his hometown Mecca until he returned from Medina with an army that forced the Meccans to listen to him). Fortunately for the spread of Zoroastrianism, Zoroaster eventually began to travel and Zoroastrianism became the main religion of Iran and surrounding areas until the later spread of Islam almost led to the extinction of the religion.

Zoroastrianism provides an interesting intermediate religion between early animism plus polytheism and the later development of the monotheistic religions. Following a divine revelation at the age of 30, Zoroaster composed a set of holy songs, the “Gathas,” which are the earliest surviving scriptures, though later scriptures have been collected into the “Avesta.” The main god is “Ahura Mazda” (“The God of Wisdom”), whom Zoroaster saw or heard the voice of many times in divine revelation. Ahura Mazda declared himself to be the divine creator of all that is good and of the other good deities. There is, however, an equally powerful leader of the bad deities, Angra Mainyu, who presides over hell. It is the purpose of all humans to choose between these two equally powerful forces of good and evil. This split between good and evil is an important one psychologically, and is a theme that recurs in Judaism, Christianity and the dualistic Manichaeism of the followers of the religious leader Mani in the third century CE. The links in Zoroastrianism to earlier animistic beliefs are represented in the importance of fire, sun, and water for the religion, to the extent that Zoroastrians are sometimes referred to as “fire worshippers.” The Zoroastrian temples came to have sacred fires that were kept permanently burning in them; these fires are attended to by the priests and it is estimated that some of the oldest extant fires have been kept burning continually for many hundreds of years. The religion also has important beliefs about purity, such that dead bodies cannot be buried in the earth for fear of contamination and are typically left exposed in funerary towers, nor is washing allowed in rivers or lakes because it would contaminate the sacred water. Any flow of blood was also seen as impure, therefore women were segregated and not allowed to engage in daily activities during their menstrual blood flow.

The Rise of Monotheism

Origins

The development of monotheism under the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who reigned from about 1353 to 1336 BCE, provides one of the key turning points in the development of religious belief. Akhenaten abandoned the previous Egyptian gods such as the powerful Amun-Ra and destroyed their temples. He moved his capital city from Thebes, where the priests of Amun-Ra were extremely powerful, and founded a new capital city at Amarna (Akhetaten) on the east bank of the Nile (in contrast to the preferred use of the west bank for most earlier Egyptian cities). The Aten had originally been considered as a minor god who had represented one aspect of the sun god Amun-Ra, that is, of the sun disk itself, but now Aten was elevated to being the sole creative force. Akhenaten wrote, in his Great Hymn to the Aten, “O sole God beside whom there is none,” which many scholars have seen as the origin of Psalm 104 in the Bible (“Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain: … who maketh the clouds his chariot: … who maketh his ministers a flaming fire” Psalms 104:2–4). Of course, there were certain personal advantages to Akhenaten’s declaration that the Aten was the one and only god: not only did he eliminate the powerful priesthood of Amun-Ra in Thebes, but he reasserted his own divinity in that he was the sole intermediary between the Aten and mankind.

The significance of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the rise of monotheism seems to have been underplayed by many commentators on the history of religion. However, commentators with a Judaeo-Christian background can perhaps be understood to have taken the view from the Book of Exodus in The Bible that the Egyptians were the bad guys and that nothing good could have come from them. The prophet Moses is seen as the good guy who led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to the “promised land,” who gave them their new monotheistic religion after conversations with Yahweh on Mount Sinai, but who died before he made it to the promised land himself. As an aside, there is an interesting link here to animism and polytheism, with Yahweh originating as a volcano god, and the translation as “Jove” in the Roman pantheon of gods, who, among other things, was the Roman god of thunder.

The problem with the biblical account of the Exodus from Egypt is that there is little or no historical or archeological evidence to support the idea that Moses led 600 000 men plus women and children out of Egypt into Sinai where they wandered for 40 years. Sigmund Freud in his book Moses and Monotheism