Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Hence the first religious effect of the Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property.

Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals – the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example.

As long as people lived their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square miles, most of their needs could be met by local spirits. But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.

Yet the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons, but upon the status of Homo sapiens. Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.

Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.

Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry.

Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or law governing the entire universe.

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.

The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good – to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death.

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.

The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelising god of the Christians.

When the Christians vehemently refused to do so, and went on to reject all attempts at compromise, the Romans reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive faction. And even this was done half-heartedly. In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians.

In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.

The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious.

Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to all those who professed faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. Protestants refused to accept this, arguing that this quid pro quo belittles God’s greatness and love.

Whoever thinks that entry to heaven depends upon his or her own good deeds magnifies his own importance, and implies that Christ’s suffering on the cross and God’s love for humankind are not enough.

With time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular patron that they drifted away from the basic polytheist insight.

The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe.

Judaism, for example, argued that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, yet His chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel.

The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah.

Paul’s arguments fell on fertile ground. Christians began organising widespread missionary activities aimed at all humans. In one of history’s strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists.

Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions.

Around AD 500, one of the world’s largest empires – the Roman Empire – was a Christian polity, and missionaries were busy spreading Christianity to other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another, and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations.

They have continued to divide the world into ‘we’ and ‘they’, and to see the supreme power of the universe as too distant and alien for their mundane needs.

Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil.

Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle.

Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world.

One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil, and hence there would be no free will.

There is an independent evil power loose in the world. The evil power does bad things.

While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order.

But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war?

When Good and Evil fight, what common laws do they obey, and who decreed these laws?

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 hi...

Nevertheless, the rising tide of monotheism did not really wipe out dualism. Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous dualist beliefs and practices, and some of the most basic ideas of what we call ‘monotheism’ are, in fact, dualist in origin and spirit.

Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions. So it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil.

Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews have gone so far as to imagine that the good God even needs our help in its struggle against the Devil, which inspired among other things the call for jihads and crusades.

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella.

The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts.

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

In fact, however, the religious history of the world does not boil down to the history of gods. During the first millennium BC, religions of an altogether new kind began to spread through Afro-Asia.

The newcomers, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterised by their disregard of gods.

These creeds maintained that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather ...

Gods had their niche in the ecosystem, just as elephants and porcupines had theirs, but could no more change the laws of nature than elephants can.

A prime example is Buddhism, the most important of the ancient natural law religions, which remains one of the major faiths.

The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being,...

Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches.

Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it?