The Hopeful Heretic E-Book

WJ Selert

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 355

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Why do "peace-loving" religions so often cause instability, conflict, and violence?

The Hopeful Heretic explores the history and evolution of western institutional religion, providing the context, language, and arguments free societies need to understand and inoculate themselves against resurgent religious fanaticism in the 21st Century.

Book I examines the invention of institutional religion as a social governance operating system built around the human need to understand our place in the Universe. From pre-historic nature-based religions to structured polytheism to the main western institutional monotheistic religions, Th Hopeful Heretic charts the history, innovations, key features, and inherent defects of those systems, demonstrating each is man-made, inherently divisive, and prone to chronic instability and conflict.

Book II surveys the immense body of scientific knowledge accumulated since the questionable mythologies of our ancestors became generationally entrenched. From Newtonian Physics to Quantum Mechanics, Deep Field Astronomy, and Emergent Intelligence, the Hopeful Heretic argues that spirituality and meaning can be found without the need for "blind faith" by appreciating the scientific fact that life is a pre-programmed feature of a sublimely beautiful Universal Operating System and that we may all be part of and contributing to a living Universal Being.

A fascinating tour through history, religion, politics and science.

Leseprobe

THE HOPEFUL HERETIC

How Institutional Religion Has YouLooking for GodIn All the Wrong Places

W.J. SELERT

Written by a Human for Humans

THE HOPEFUL HERETICHow Institutional Religion Has You Looking for GodIn All the Wrong Places

W.J. Selert

Mooncalf PublishingCopyright 2024

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed by email to [email protected].

ISBN: 979-8-9911141-0-3 (paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number:

Contents

Foreword

Book I: The Evolution of Western Institutional Monotheism as a Social Governance Operating System

Too Many Near Misses

Grappling with the Uber Question

What We Don’t Know Matters

The Marketplace of Ideas

Nature-Based Gods and the Birth of Proto Religions

From Volcano Worship to Structured Polytheism

The Evolution and Characteristics of Polytheistic Belief Systems

Ancient Egyptians

Sumerians

Zoroastrianism

Hellenism: Ancient Greek and Roman Polytheistic and Secular Operating Systems

Rome

Institutional Monotheism (IM): An Engineered Operating System for Social Governance

The Basic Case for Monotheism: One God to Rule Them All

IM 1.0: Judaism: Insularity, Dissonance, and Discord

IM 2.0: Christianity: Growth Through Open Architecture

IM 3.0: Islam: Unity Through Disambiguation

IM 4.0: Mormonism: Hotline to God

Western Institutional Monotheism: Man Made and Inherently Defective

The Dangers of Fanaticism and Radicalization

How Religious Fanaticism Infects Modern Politics

Zionism and Jewish Fundamentalism

The Rise of Palestinian Political Terrorism

The Rise of Anti-Western Sentiment and Radicalization in Shi’a Islam

The Rise of Anti-Western Sentiment and Radicalization in Sunni Islam

The Rise of Christian Fundamentalism Post 9/11

Is It Too Late to Defuse the Religious Time Bomb?

Book II: Universal Biology and the Moment of Infinite Possibility

But What About the Uber Question?

Taking Inventory

Know Your Universe

Who Counts the Seconds on God’s Stopwatch?

Emergent Intelligence and Superorganisms

The Unaccounted Energy of Life

Entropy, a Word Please?

The Moment of Infinite Possibility

Conclusion: Do Better or Die Trying

Endnotes

Foreword

I first outlined these ideas 22 years ago in an essay I shared with a small group of friends whose reactions were mostly muted. This topic, it seems, which objectively examines and unavoidably challenges the claimed bonafides of the religious institutions around which most deeply held spiritual beliefs are practiced, makes many people very uncomfortable. Religion is a powerful force at the individual, family, community, and national levels. It is at once the primary vehicle through which most people explore spirituality, set their moral compass, and commit to living and doing good whenever possible. Yet institutional religion is simultaneously fraught with troubling incongruities, not the least of which is a core “us/them” architecture that uses dogmatic litmus tests to identify and differentiate “true believers” from “non-believers.”

That architecture is divisive by nature and design. The more devout members of any operating system often regard those outside their particular religious community on a sliding scale that ranges from mere pity on the low end (for those who haven’t heard their message) to outright fear and abject hatred of those who overtly reject that message and become perceived as a threat to that religious community for that reason. In this book I focus on the four major western institutional religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, because each is built on that same divisive core architecture and those religious communities each exhibit the same love/hate duality and shared propensity for both good and evil.

This morning my wife and I were discussing the fact that her next book club read, Exodus by Leon Uris, could likely touch on some of these difficult themes. She was concerned given the ongoing and escalating confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza1 that any discussion of Exodus, which is written from a distinctly pro-Zionist and Jewish religious perspective, could devolve, as many discussions involving religion do, to defensiveness, confrontation, judgment, and friendship wrecking animosity. When it comes to deeply held spiritual beliefs, ego often overrides objectivity and passion replaces logic and reason.

Our conversation about her concerns and how to articulate any criticism of that book or the events described in it without being labeled an antisemite2 led me back to my old essay and the thesis of this book. Maybe it was the way I remembered and explained it again, some 22 years later, or maybe it was the anxiety of current events and the looming book club; whatever the reason, she described my thesis as a relief, providing important historical context on the nature and origin of institutional religion, the dangers of religious fundamentalism, and the patent absurdity of religious conflict. She asked why I never published these thoughts in a book. She knew I had wanted to do that. I fumbled through my excuses, including three major career shifts, three significant relocations across the Country and the time and energy it took to re-establish myself and my family each time. But those are just excuses.

So it was with her strong blessing and encouragement that I trundled down to a local coffee shop inspired finally to put pen to paper on this short book, which examines and attempts to explain western monotheistic institutional religion as the product of a decidedly man-made iterative process that evolved from the combined natural curiosity of homo sapiens about our place in the Universe with their practical need for an effective social governance operating system. From the worship of natural phenomena, like volcanoes, to the deification and organization of those phenomena into polytheistic pantheons, to their further evolution into institutional monotheism, humans have continuously grappled with and modified their approach to dealing with those innate needs.

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how and why the major western monotheistic religious institutions, which are ostensibly designed around the notion of individual spirituality and doing good acts, are also so often and easily twisted to inculcate fear, hatred, sin and violence. In the first half of this book, I make a strictly factual and historical examination of the origin of those institutions to demonstrate that each is an evolved and man-made construct, not “divine,” engineered as a social governance operating system with identifiable innovations specifically designed to patch defects in earlier operating systems. Despite those innovations, each still has clearly identifiable and man-made flaws that must be acknowledged, both as a basis to understand why misguided religious fervor so often threatens peace and stability and to understand the importance of defusing those tendencies at the local, national, and global level where and while we still can.

It is not my intent to attack God. Rather, my criticism is specific to the man-made and fallible nature of the institutional religions purporting to worship God. In the second half of this book, Universal Biology and the Moment of Infinite Possibility, I review God, as a concept, from a strictly scientific perspective to provide a new framework to reconsider, discuss, and appreciate the possibility that we may all be part of a living, growing, Universal Being and system that we are only beginning to truly understand. There is every indication that may be true and, if so, people can explore and find spirituality on that basis, objectively, reasonably, and without the self-destructive tendencies inherent to the “us/them” architecture of the man-made institutional religions dominating our modern spiritual and political landscape. The flaws inherent to those institutions infect our societies and threaten to keep our species from ever reaching its full potential. That result, which should be antithetical to the hopes and plan of anyone’s notion of God, seems the most likely outcome absent a fundamental reconsideration of where and how those institutions got it wrong, and how we can engineer the most constructive course correction.

BOOK I

The Evolution of Western Institutional Monotheism as a Social Governance Operating System

CHAPTER 1

Too Many Near Misses

I was originally inspired to jot down and share these thoughts in 2002 because my Country’s government at that time was actively making the case to invade Iraq under the stated premise that Iraq and its leader at that time, Sadaam Hussein, were somehow working with the Al-Qaeda terrorists who had toppled the World Trade Center towers the year before.3 That horrific attack against the perceived heart of America was motivated by a virulent form of Islamic religious fundamentalism that had been percolating for years and was carried out by a small group of highly committed extremist religious fanatics willing to kill themselves to make a point. As a former army interrogator, Arabic linguist, and student of Near Eastern history and politics who had devoted a substantial amount of time and energy to studying, understanding, and formulating strategies to combat that type of terrorism, I knew the connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda was extremely tenuous if not completely contrived. Like many others, I was genuinely concerned that invading any oil producing Arab country under an arguably false premise at that critical moment in time would likely backfire, dramatically, simultaneously weakening our global moral authority when we needed it most while strengthening the radicalized Muslim fundamentalists who had attacked the U.S. on 9/11.

I argued then (and attempt to prove in this book) that religious fundamentalism, regardless of the particular underlying religion, is among the most dangerous threats to domestic and global peace and stability because religious fundamentalists are, quite literally, capable of anything, including committing patently horrific crimes in the name of God. The Al-Qaeda terrorists had clearly proved that point. The challenge I faced at that time was rooted in Newtonian physics and ego. The attack by Islamic religious fundamentalists, purposefully or not, caused an equal and opposite reaction4 among other religious fundamentalist groups, particularly within the conservative Christian and Jewish communities in the United States and Israel.5 Many within both of those groups insisted that all Muslims were “terrorists” who should be regarded and categorically dealt with as “enemies.” That myopic point of view was firmly grounded in the deeply held religious beliefs and self-interests of those two religious groups and the dubious proposition that the United States, above and beyond being a freedom based Constitutional Democracy, is a Judeo/Christian religious nation6 pitted against Islam in a global struggle for religious power, influence, and dominance.

In the direct aftermath of 9/11, many Americans harbored the understandable fear that Islamic terrorists could strike again at any moment and carry out additional attacks on the scale of 9/11 with impunity. The fact that 9/11 had occurred at all was the only proof they needed to believe the same thing could happen again. The administration of President George W. Bush could (and arguably should) have easily, quickly, and systematically tried to quell that fear, first by admitting and promising to fix the institutional failure to analyze, escalate, and timely react to the credible intelligence reports predicting that attack;7 second by clearly and objectively explaining Al-Qaeda’s very limited operational reach and ability to inflict significant harm again on U.S. soil; and third by assuring the American public that its government understood and was fully committed to eradicating extremist religious fundamentalist threats, like Al-Qaeda, which should have been narrowly defined and carefully explained as a phenomenon separate and distinct from Islam, the religion, or the vast majority of Muslims. The moment called for clarity of thought and leadership. That moment passed without either.

As the Bush Administration ramped up its argument to immediately invade Iraq, it downplayed its own mistakes and purposefully conflated the nature of the terrorist threat with Islam, in general, actively courting, inflaming, and amplifying the highly vocal anti-Muslim Christian and Jewish fundamentalist rhetoric to generate wider public and political support for a purposefully and unnecessarily accelerated invasion timetable.8 Specifically, that administration and its captive news networks repeatedly argued that an immediate invasion of Iraq was necessary because Iraq and Al-Qaeda were not only “in cahoots,” but posed an “imminent threat” of a dirty bomb attack in the United States when neither of those assertions was true.9 Domestically, Americans who argued to slow down and carefully consider the potentially serious negative impacts that invading Iraq at that critical juncture would have on the overall war against extremist religious terrorist groups were squelched hard. Our public discourse was being purposefully clouded and our strategic objectives unnecessarily distorted by rhetoric pitting one religion against another when, in fact, it was religion, itself, that was at the heart of the problem and radical religious fundamentalism that was the true and greater threat.

The main problem I faced then (and one we all face now) was that defeating Islamic religious fundamentalism required an objective examination and condemnation of religious fundamentalism, per se, in all its forms and regardless of denomination. As I hope to persuasively demonstrate here, every western monotheistic religion, by nature, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism, is prone to religious fundamentalism for the same reasons. And because that is true, each shares the same potential for dangerous radicalization, including terrorism in the name of God. History is simply too rife with examples to deny the fact that radicalized religious fanatics of any denomination are capable of anything. Clearly explaining the threat at that level, however, could not be accomplished by focusing on Islam, alone, and would necessarily require scrutiny of the dangers and contributions to global instability of fundamentalism in other institutional religions, including the Christian and Jewish fundamentalists on whose anger and political support the Bush Administration was heavily relying to drive its political narrative and argument to immediately invade Iraq.

At the same time that I was trying to explain how and why religious fanaticism would only become a bigger problem if we did not address it directly, openly, objectively, and from a distinctly secular point of view, my country passed The Patriot Act, a fear-based piece of reactionary legislation that opened the door to lawfully eroding cherished Constitutional freedoms like the rights to privacy and free speech. Bush administration supporters began heatedly accusing anyone questioning the merits of their invasion plan of “supporting the terrorists” and “hating America” when, in fact, our motives (certainly mine) were exactly the opposite.10 That same jingoistic rhetoric started filtering into and out of many churches and synagogues, which began actively mixing politics with religious services. Motivated primarily by fear and religion, many Americans began adopting a “holy war” mentality against Islam in general, which again caused an equal and opposite reaction throughout the Muslim world.11 The U.S. government, having helped stoke that mentality, began creating “terrorist watch lists” that included dissident U.S. citizens who, in most cases, had engaged in nothing more than objective and reasonable criticism of administration policy.12 At that same time, newly emboldened Christian Nationalists openly attacked foundational Constitutional concepts like the separation of church and state, apparently intent on institutionalizing some unspecified flavor of American Christianity as the primary operating system for social governance without any appreciation for the fact that by doing so they were starting down precisely the same path of religious fundamentalism the Taliban and Al-Qaeda had marched down with Islam just a few decades earlier.

I originally wrote my essay to warn about the dangers of deploying Christian fundamentalism to fight Islamic fundamentalism because, ultimately, the “war on terror” was (and should always have remained) nothing more than a war of ideas and one cannot win any idea war without having the better idea. Using Christian fundamentalism to combat Islamic fundamentalism was like playing with matches in a dynamite factory because Christian fundamentalism is ultimately just as capable of fanaticism and indiscriminate murder as Islam13 or Judaism14 despite what the members of those religions might prefer to believe. The great and dangerous irony is that most members of those religions are utterly unaware of that history or blithely believe those egregious past acts were somehow righteous and justifiable as the will of God when they most clearly were not.

Ultimately, the Bush Administration did not see religious fundamentalism, per se, as the real exigent threat, and used 9/11 to pursue the decade old unfinished business of deposing Saddam Hussein. By conflating those very different issues we were guaranteed to succeed in neither.15 In 2002 I tried to raise public awareness through blogging, which was a new outlet for public discourse in and of itself, but I never tried to publish the full extent of these arguments until now. By 2006 I felt that global and domestic forces had been set in motion that had to run their course and there was little I or anyone else could do to change that fact. I also naively thought that time was on the side of sanity and reason, and that the problem of religious fanaticism might resolve itself. I was wrong. Twenty-two years after I first tried to warn about the dangers of virulent religious fundamentalism, both the type that motivated the attacks on 9/11 and the type that contributed to our own religiously motivated overreaction, those same forces have only grown more powerful and entrenched themselves more deeply in the Middle East, Israel, Europe, and the United States. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their hate baby, Isis, are stronger and much more active throughout the Middle East today than they were before we invaded Iraq, despite a 20-year military campaign. The Republican party, which purposefully harnessed the angry voices of Christian fundamentalists to support that war in 2002, has by 2024 been largely assimilated by Christian Nationalists who freely and regularly demonize the press, higher education, progress, science, law, and all political opposition, as “anti-American,” calling even more loudly and consistently to replace established secular law with biblical law, just like their Muslim fanatic counterparts.

The growth and intensity of religious fundamentalism still poses a very real threat to domestic and global security, stability, and peace because religious fundamentalists “fundamentally” view anyone and everyone with a non-conforming alternative point of view not as neighbors with reasonable and respectable differences of opinion, but heretics and enemies of God that need to be converted or eradicated. That perspective and the unavoidable conflict and destruction it brings with it, however, has nothing to do with God at all and is, in every respect, a side effect of the inherently fallible and man-made nature of the religious institutions that create that type of fanaticism. In this book I hope to explain and prove that point, not with the intent to attack anyone’s God or individual spirituality, but rather to expose the religious institutions and fanatics that tacitly and overtly condone violence in the name of God. Viewed objectively, factually, and in full historical context, each of the major western religions is an engineered and evolved institutional construct, designed by man as an operating system for social governance using man-made techniques and innovations to patch defects in earlier operating systems to facilitate and enhance growth, management, and control. Because all those institutions are man-made, each is inherently fallible and demonstrably not “divine.” Consequently, none are suitable as a social governance operating system, none are worth anyone’s blind faith or allegiance, and none are worth hating, fighting, or killing anyone.

From the earliest nature-based religions to the polytheistic pantheons of those gods to the four later evolved forms of institutional western monotheism that I examine in this book, people have always conceptualized some kind of higher power to understand their place in the Universe. Institutional religion provides answers and a sense of community and security in the form of collective belief and reassurance. But the institutional nature of that system also leaves members highly susceptible to manipulation and, in some cases, radicalization. In any other context blind faith adherence to any system that is inherently divisive and destructive would and should be viewed as objectively irrational. But institutional religion engineers its own free pass by cloaking itself with claimed divinity and overtly discouraging objective examination of that claim. Yet if any of those systems was truly divine, it would have been perfect from the start. None of them were because none of them are. The fact that institutional monotheism is an evolved man-made process is the first proof of that fact. The identifiable defects inherent to each are the second.

I make no claim or argument that it is impossible to derive individual spiritualism from any of those religions or that they have no redeeming value. People all around the world in each of those religious communities manage that feat. It is not my intent to argue that those religions lack any connection to a higher universal power, nor do I purport to argue that there is no such power. Personally, I think there is, and I dedicate the second half of this book to the scientific exploration and proof of that concept. Rather, my point is simply that majority conceptions of that power and the institutions built around those beliefs are man-made, archaic, and increasingly destructive and out of place. If each gets some part of the answer right, each also gets it magnificently wrong in the details. Even if institutional religious beliefs remain useful to facilitate a principled code of personal or community conduct, those systems are unsuitable as the basis for any broad scale social governance system because of their inherently divisive nature and tendency to cause significant discord and violence with other groups.

In this book I focus primarily on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism because each clearly represents an identifiable evolutionary step in institutional monotheism as an operating system for social governance. Also, each fundamentally insists that its system is correct, and all others are not. Because of that core divisive architecture, the more devout members of each, even those who seem to be good people on most days, are nonetheless susceptible to manipulation, fanaticism, and radicalization, conditions that directly contribute to and cause global discord and instability. Even as I write, those forces are at work causing precisely that type of instability, which is threatening to explode into wide scale conflict unless we make a concerted effort to defuse the ticking time bomb of institutional religion immediately, once and for all. That is the purpose of this book. I hope somehow there is value in the following words and that I find the ability to articulate some useful thoughts to help people find the peace of mind necessary to power down those deeply held beliefs and back away from any inclination to pick up the sword. Perhaps by collectively admitting and finally accepting that none of those institutions has it right, we can leverage our collective uncertainty as the basis to begin to build new and better bridges of understanding, tolerance, and acceptance. Maybe then we can start to replace the walls of division, defensiveness, and hate built upon false certainty in those generationally entrenched and inherently defective institutional belief systems. If we are ever to reach our potential as a species, that destructive inertia must be overcome.

CHAPTER 2

Grappling with the Uber Question

What is the origin and meaning of life? Is there a God? Did humans invent God or did God invent humans? Those kinds of questions, which I call the Uber Questions,16 have nagged humans since the beginning. Why do those questions matter? Why does anyone care? Uber Questions matter because people are naturally consumed with them. From well before the earliest recorded history of any human civilization and continuing to the present, very smart people have asked and tried to answer those questions and, as I’ll explain, those answers have evolved over time to become the major institutional religions dominating western culture today. The Uber Questions matter simply because virtually everyone anywhere on this planet, regardless of religious conviction or lack thereof, is directly or indirectly impacted by diverse organized groups professing to know the answers to those questions and demanding conformity by overt or passive threats ranging from social rejection to physical violence. That dynamic exists between different religions but also within communities of the same religion. The simple reality is that a deeply held personal belief in the truth of any answer to the Uber Question is typically not personal at all, but part of a much larger group belief dynamic that became established and geographically entrenched hundreds of years ago together with inherent defects that periodically resurface to threaten peace and stability.

History is so rife with bloody conflict in the name of religion that it has almost become an accepted and even expected feature of our modern status quo. Both our present and future seem primed for more of the same. From before recorded history we know Jews fought with their neighbors. Christians later fought with Jews and Muslims. Muslims fought with Christians and Jews. Those factions continue to fight to this day. We also know that within each of those religious communities, the members themselves historically fought and still fight with and among each other. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions all contain numerous sects and subsects with long histories of resolving their internal and external disagreements through violence. The nature of those religions is that even when it is not warring with another religion, it foments its own often violent internal conflicts. There are many underlying causes, but typically the struggle for power, influence, and economic advantage are central. The banners under which men destructively pursue those worldly goals are often flamboyantly religious in nature, as if God somehow has a vested interest in the outcome of any human conflict or favors one mortal group’s economic position and political interests over those of another. So certain is each group in the correctness of its position that it casually and easily justifies violence as both God’s will and the duty of every member of that group. As I will attempt to demonstrate, the reality is that institutional religion is, first and foremost, a social governance operating system created and operated by men who manipulate, focus, and direct the religious fervor of that group’s believers to pursue worldly objectives under the cover of manufactured righteousness. Without the cover and disguise of religion, those worldly power struggles are substantially less emotional, less compelling and, I submit, much easier to describe, analyze, and solve at scale using secular law and fundamental notions of fairness and justice.

How did we get here? Are we doomed forever to a “wash, rinse, repeat” cycle of periodic religious violence when the nature of religious conflict is, itself, ultimately based on nothing more than our collective inability to agree on one answer to the Uber Question? Given the extent to which religion has played such a destructive role in history and the increasing prominence of angry religious voices infecting our modern politics, the answer would seem to be yes. But that answer is unacceptable. Not only is it morally indefensible to war in the name of God, but it is increasingly irrational given the sheer amount of information and proof that the religions fomenting those conflicts are man-made institutions with man-made and archaic mythologies and doctrines absurdly at odds with a growing body of information and evidence about the true nature of the Universe and our place in it. The nature of institutional religion and human ego combine to make meaningful change difficult. The solution to defusing the religious ticking time bomb requires us to master both.

First, we must recognize that our institutional religions are not divine, they are man-made. Because they are man-made, they are susceptible to human error. Armed with that realization, we must then face that part of our ego that resists admitting the possibility of making a mistake or, more accurately, the possibility that we could be duped or misled into placing blind faith in an error prone and man-made institutional control system. Only through that realization and awareness can one begin to free oneself from the inculcated fear and indoctrinated guilt of questioning the institutional religion in which they were raised. The loud and angry institutional religious voices that foment division, fear, hatred, and conflict should be recognized for their belligerency and arrogance and relegated to the background where that kind of noise belongs. Free from such concentrated social pressure, people can and should reconsider the Uber Question afresh, objectively, dispassionately, and above all, personally. Even if that journey ultimately leads to the unsatisfactory realization and collective understanding that the real answer is and may always remain unknown, we can and should leverage that uncertainty as the primary reason for peace and tolerance of different belief systems instead of war. The truth is that nobody knows for sure. Allowing institutionalized religious groups to pretend otherwise is dangerous. To have a meaningful dialogue to reach that conclusion, we need to examine and understand the origin, nature, and evolution of these different institutional religions.

Statistically, any individual or community’s prevailing answer to the Uber Question is more likely a matter of geographic coincidence than any objective, principled study of the question itself.17 Someone born in a community that has been dominated by a particular sect of a particular religion for any significant period of time is almost certain to adopt the entrenched beliefs of that community because that is the community norm, standard, tradition, and expectation. People, by nature, generally seek to fit in and conform to community norms because to do otherwise is to invite the physical and emotional pain of social rejection and ostracization. People who are already members of a religious group tend to demand conformity from others because to do otherwise is to open the door to their own doubts in the system in which they were raised. This was particularly true until the mid-20th century because prior to that point in time people and information traveled much more slowly and change was relatively glacial. Because cultural interaction was so limited, prevailing religious norms could persist for centuries virtually unchallenged and people born into those communities would marinate in those established beliefs until they seemed as permanent and natural as the sky.

The trouble is that, in fact, there are many, many other communities all around the world that have very different belief systems and community norms that are just as deeply held and firmly established. The magnitude of those differences is directly proportional to the distance one travels from the land of their birth. The next closest town might have a slightly different take on a small and relatively unimportant tenet of the same shared faith, but the next country over might have an entirely different faith and belief system altogether. How is it that so many people in so many different parts of the world developed such disparate and diverse answers to the Uber Question? And more to the purpose and point of this book, how did each distinct group become so certain that its particular answer was so correct that it became willing (or easily manipulated) to mistrust, hate, fight, and kill those with equally strong but different convictions to prove that point?

As a species, humans are scientifically classified as homo sapiens, a Latin term that loosely translates to “wise man” or “knowledgeable man.” Generally accepted scientific consensus currently holds that homo sapiens have roamed this Earth for more than 50,000 years,18 a conclusion derived from careful examination of archeological sites and carbon dated fossil records. The farther back in time we look, the more basic and primitive our ancestors appear, both physically and behaviorally. Physical differences aside, the modern human is distinguished from earlier hominid ancestors like homo habilis and homo erectus by an increasingly developed capacity for logic, reason, and abstract problem solving.19 It is apparent from the archaeological record that at some point, well before homo sapiens arrived on the scene, our hominid ancestors found value in grouping together, whether for society, comfort, or self-preservation through collective hunting, gathering, or defense against external threats.20Homo sapiens recognized the value of those practices, adopting and advancing them to suit their own needs. Early primitive homo sapien groupings were distinctively localized and predominantly tribal. The group members, themselves, had naturally limited interest or capacity for travel except to the extent necessary to survive, for example to find more reliable sources of food or to seek safety from hostile neighbors or environmental threats.

Over tens of thousands of years, those people slowly moved out and about and those groupings morphed from small families into small tribes.21 Some of those tribes would firmly establish themselves in a given area, joining with other tribes to form clans in which they could intermingle and sustainably procreate. Over a long enough period, those tribal communities and clans would expand more broadly still, eventually evolving into small societies of people with distinct characteristics and traditions. Adjacent, less established, or weaker clans would naturally and inexorably move farther away to whatever distance they felt necessary and safe to establish their own stable community without undue competition or threat from stronger tribes and clans. Homo sapien humans slowly spread in this fashion to virtually every corner of the globe. Well before recorded history, numerous societies had evolved and established themselves with distinct and disparate ways of doing the same types of things like building shelter, sourcing food, making clothing, and building tools.22 Each society would also eventually and inevitably attempt to establish norms, rules, and systems for tribal and social governance. Those systems were by no means standardized.

The capacity to appreciate the importance and necessity of establishing acceptable rules of social governance is apparently inherent to homo sapiens as a species, because no matter where one looks across the globe, every clan, tribe, village, community, and civilization appears to have developed some version of a basic operating system for that purpose. The need for a basic operating system for social governance probably suggested itself to the cognitively advanced homo sapien based on personal experience and oral traditions describing the chaos, insecurity, and injustice that results when no such systems or rules are in place. As each human collective struggled to establish acceptable governance rules for their societies, they also began grappling with the logical rationale to support and explain the need for that operating system to current and new members of their community. The need to justify the operating system for social governance naturally led to questions of what is right? What is wrong? What is fair? What is unjust? What should be permissible? What is impermissible, and why? Along with those considerations, homo sapiens, because of their inherent cognitive capacity and natural inquisitiveness began asking and exploring closely related questions that ultimately led to the Uber Questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What’s the purpose?23

It seems unlikely that any other animal species concerns itself with the reason for its own existence or what happens when its life ends. Rather, other animals seem only to know that they live and have a biological imperative to eat and reproduce. Beyond that there is little to worry about other than avoiding predators. Animals have been observed to engage in entertainment, wrestling, and playfully chasing one another (like baby bear cubs or lion kittens) and even exhibit sentimentality, care, and love for one another, the way that some birds mate for life or the way that monkeys preen one another or the way that herds of elephants, dolphins, and whales protect and nurse one another and mourn the death of a loved one. Even lizards and snakes appear to relax and leisurely nap in the sun from time to time. But there is little evidence that any of those animal species spends hours obsessing about where they came from or where they go when they die. Humans do that and, most likely, have done that from the start. While homo sapien humans with advanced cognition and endless capacity to obsess over the Uber Question have clearly existed for tens of thousands of years, the earliest written records of those musings date back only to around 3,200 b.c.e, when the Egyptians and Sumerians first began chiseling their thoughts on those matters on stone tablets and the walls of their temples, tombs, and shrines. Before that, we can only speculate from cave drawings and shards of pottery. But we do know that well before the Egyptians and Sumerians began physically recording their religious thoughts, homo sapien humans had already developed sophisticated and widely varied answers to the Uber Question.

Chapter 3

What We Don’t Know Matters

When presented with any question or problem, cognitively competent homo sapiens naturally begin the process of solving that problem by gathering and analyzing all known information relevant to the origin, cause, and nature of that problem. The more complete the relevant factual data, the more tools the problem solver has to correctly understand the problem and find an accurate and reliable solution. The converse is true. When there are virtually no known or knowable facts related to the problem at hand, speculation and conjecture replace logic and reason. GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. That concept accurately describes the inherent unreliability of conclusions based on speculation and conjecture instead of fact and logic. In other words, if we only feed garbage into the problem-solving machine that is our brain, there is a very high likelihood our brain will spit out a garbage solution. In science and law, we employ carefully designed and rigorous analytical methodologies to identify and dump garbage where it belongs.24 Not so with religion.

Answering the Uber Question presents unique challenges. As with other types of problems we form our beliefs and answers to those questions from the evidence available to us. That information was scant at best for early humans. For most of us, what we know and think about the Uber Question depends primarily on where we were born. The greater the extent to which any birth location is dominated by a single religion, the more likely people living in that community already adhere to that religion and the more likely anyone born to that community will do the same because that is the norm and expectation within that community and among that individual’s family and friends. Where there is scant competing information, the Uber Question is typically presented together with the answer fully resolved.25 Community members, new and old, are expected to simply accept as an article of faith and personal commitment that the communal consensus in that answer is correct.

As we moved through the 20th century and into the information age, there has been a noticeable change in the percentage of people claiming to be members of any synagogue, church, or mosque. That is to say that while the actual number of self-identified believers has increased as a function of the total increase in global population (from 3.5 to 7.9 billion in my lifetime) the percentage of church going believers relative to that population as a whole has declined.26 Whether that decline is due to the availability of new information or disenchantment with the often hypocritical and obviously fallible nature of institutional religion, itself, is difficult to say. What is clear though, is the correlation between access to information and the decline in church membership as a percentage of the general population. That decline noticeably lags in areas of the world with restricted access to information or strong autocratic or theocratic governments that discourage dissent and resist change. But even in the information age, where intercultural exchanges are much more common and information on any topic, including religion, ethics, science, and philosophy is just a click away, prevailing religious beliefs tend to remain geographically concentrated and largely a function of tradition. One reason is that the religion, more so than secular law, tends to serve as a kind of social glue for the individual, the family unit, and the community at large. Religion creates a sense of belonging and special identity and provides basic rules and regulations that define acceptable and unacceptable conduct within that community. While those same principles are often codified in secular rules and regulations, religion is often perceived, right or wrong, as the moral power behind those laws. This is true in countries professing separation of church and state and substantially more so in those observing no such separation.

Religion, however, has some troubling side effects. Fundamentally, religion is a tool to differentiate good from bad. But after establishing codes of acceptable and unacceptable personal conduct and behavior, that same tool is inevitably used to distinguish the believer from the non-believer using dogma to create a fundamental “us vs. them” architecture that purposefully conflates the difference between right beliefs and wrongful conduct. Those tools ultimately serve as litmus tests to define membership, differentiate the degree of membership within that religious community, and to identify and mark outsiders. Utter the magic words to prove you are a believer. If you refuse you are out. Show up to scheduled services to prove you are sufficiently devout. If you do not, fellow members openly doubt your conviction and, therefore, the authenticity of your beliefs, commitment to and membership in the religious community. Show up to every service, pay your tithe, sing to the top of your lungs, parrot the required words to satisfy every conceivable litmus test, ask no troubling questions and you may go in peace with full acceptance and support. Every religious institution employs one form or another of these tools and operates on the fundamental perception of an “Us” (good people who believe like we do) and a “Them” (people who are bad because they do not).