Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.

Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.