In the twenty-first century, Christianity and Islam—upstart religions of the past 2,000 years—exercise effective monopolies over the spiritual lives of more than half the world’s population. Their simple formula of one creator god (male, of course), and of a heavenly paradise for His faithful paired with a hellish place of punishment for disbelievers and evildoers, brilliantly removes the need for serious thought. All that’s required to join the elect is to tick the right boxes and maintain a state of rigid, abiding, unquestioning BELIEF in the authority of the sacred texts and the utterances
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