Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1)

by Kim Stanley Robinson

John said, “You must know that the gospels were written decades after the event, by people who never met Christ. And that there are other gospels which reveal a different Christ, gospels that were excluded from the Bible by a political process in the third century. So he’s a kind of literary figure really, a political construct. We don’t know anything about the man himself.” Phyllis shook her head. “That’s not true.” “But it is,” John objected. This caused Sax and Arkady to look up from the next table. “Look, there’s a history to all this stuff. Monotheism is a belief system that you see appearing in early herding societies. The greater their dependence on sheep herding, the more likely their belief in a shepherd god. It’s an exact correlation, you can chart it and see. And the god is always male, because those societies were patriarchal. There’s a kind of archeology, an anthropology—a sociology of religion, that makes all of this perfectly clear—how it came about, what needs it fulfilled.”