21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

As for the future, physics tells us that planet Earth will be absorbed by an expanding sun about 7.5 billion years from now and that our universe will continue t...

The ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, and Greeks hedged their bets when it came to sacrifices. They had many gods, and if one failed, they hoped that another would still come through.

So they sacrificed to the sun god in the morning, to the earth goddess at noon, and to a mixed lot of fairies and demons in the evening.

This became patently clear in 1945. You might have thought that after twelve years of Nazi brainwashing many Germans would be utterly incapable of making sense of their postwar lives. They had put all their faith in one great story; what to do when that story exploded? Yet most Germans recovered with amazing speed. Somewhere in their minds they maintained other stories about the world, and no sooner had Hitler shot a bullet through his brain than people in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich adopted new identities and found new meaning in their lives.

but why does one person aspire to be more religious, while another is perfectly happy to remain an atheist? This may result from any number of cultural and genetic dispositions, but it is never the result of “free will.”