Table of Contents
Polytheism
Polytheism is open-minded, it rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels.’ Even when polytheists conquered large empires, they did not try to convert anyone.
The Romans refused to tolerate the monotheistic god of the Christians, however. They did not require the Christians to give their beliefs up, but they did expect them to respect the empire’s gods. The Christians vehemently refused and rejected all compromises. The Romans then persecuted them, but 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. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand 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.
Monotheism
Catholics and Protestants went to war in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. Both accepted Christ’s gospel of compassion and love but disagreed about the nature of this love. Protestants believed that it was unconditional, that God allowed himself to be tortured to redeem our original sin, and open the gates of heaven for us once again.
But Catholics rejected this idea, they believed that participation in church rituals and doing good deeds, in addition to faith, was necessary to enter heaven. The Protestants thought that this was self-aggrandizement, and a form of arrogance – that an almighty Creator’s love would be so contingent. These arguments turned so violent that hundreds of thousands of Catholics and Protestants were killed as a result.
Monotheists tend to be more extreme than polytheists in their beliefs. But polytheism did not only give birth to monotheist religions, but dualistic ones too.
Dualism holds that there are two opposing powers in the world: good and evil. Dualists believe that evil is an independent power, it was not created by a good god, or subordinate to it. They also believe that everything that happens in the universe is a part of the struggle between good and evil.
Dualism
Dualism is attractive because it offers a short and simple answer to the Problem of Evil. Why is there evil and suffering in the world? And why do bad things happen to good people? Bad forces.
Monotheists had to try harder to come up with a good explanation, one of which is that of free will. If not for evil, humans could not choose to be good, and thus no free will would exist. But this is problematic. Many people do choose evil, and it is hard to understand why a good God, who presumably knew the fates of all people, would create evil people.
But Dualism has its problems. It must contend with the Problem of Order. If the world was created by one God, it’s clear why it is an orderly place. But when the fight between Good and Evil takes place, who defines the rules, and why are there any rules at all? Who decided that the laws of physics be the way they are? Why aren’t they constantly changing?
Monotheism explains order but not evil. Dualism explains evil but not 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.
Dualistic religions survived for over a thousand years. Between 1500 BC and 1000 BC, a prophet named Zoroaster (Zarathustra) existed in Central Asia. His ideas were passed down through generations until they became the most important dualistic religion – Zoroastrianism.
Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good god in this battle. Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC) and later became the official religion of the Sassanid Persian Empire (AD 224–651).
The rise of monotheism did not wipe out Dualism, but incorporated it. Many Christians, Jews, and Muslims believe in a powerful evil force (Satan) – who acts independently and fights against God. But how can a monotheist hold a dualistic belief? It is logically incompatible, but humans have the profound ability of believing in contradictions.
So far, the religions discussed share a belief in gods and supernatural entities, but in the first millennium BC, a different religion began to spread through Afro-Asia. Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean – these all lacked a belief in gods.
Buddhism
Buddhist’s central figure was not a god but a human, Siddhartha Guatama. The Buddhists believe that he was a heir to a small kingdom around 500 BC and was disturbed by the suffering he saw around him.
He saw those around him suffer, not just from war and plague, but from anxiety, frustration, and discontent. It seemed that this was part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, they acquire knowledge and possessions, they create families and build houses and palaces, but no matter what, they are never content. Those in poverty dream of being rich, while those that are rich dream of being richer. Life is a pointless rat race, Guatama wanted to know how to escape it. When he was 29, he left his palace in the middle of the night. He traveled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, looking for the answer.
He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
His insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it reacts with a craving, and this will always involve dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful, it wants to get rid of it, and when it experiences pleasure, it wants to amplify it. We are never content. We dream of love, but once we find it, we become anxious about our relationship ending, or that we have settled cheaply.
No matter who we are, and how much luck we have had, we can never change our basic mental patterns. But he saw a way out of this vicious circle.
If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understands things as they are, then there is no suffering. If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.
To accept things as they are, without craving, requires us to accept sadness as sadness and joy as joy. Gautama developed meditation techniques to train the mind to experience reality in this way.
These practices train the mind to focus all its attention on the question, ‘What am I experiencing now?’ rather than on ‘What would I rather be experiencing?’ It is difficult to achieve this state of mind, but not impossible.
To stand a chance of reaching this state, Gautama paired these techniques with ethical rules (avoid cravings and fantasies). Do not kill, have promiscuous sex, or steal. These things stoke the fire of craving. When these flames are extinguished completely, craving is replaced by a state of perfect contentment and serenity – also known as nirvana.
The literal meaning of nirvana is ‘extinguishing the fire.’ Those who have attained this state are fully liberated from all suffering, they experience the world clearly, without fantasies and delusions. Of course, they will feel pain, but these experiences will not make them miserable. If you do not crave, then you cannot suffer.
According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama himself attained nirvana and was fully liberated from suffering. Henceforth he was known as ‘Buddha’, which means ‘The Enlightened One’. Buddha spent the rest of his life explaining his discoveries to others so that everyone could be freed from suffering. He encapsulated his teachings in a single law: suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.
Humanism
The last 300 years are often know as the age of growing secularism – a time wen religions have lost their importance. This may be true of theistic religions but not of natural-law religions. Modernity is still filled with religions such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism.
These creeds do not like to be called religions, and refer to themselves as ideologies. But this is just a semantic exercise. If a religion is a system of human norms and values that is founded on belief in a superhuman order, then Soviet Communism was no less a religion than Islam.
All humanists worship humanity, but humanism is split into three rival sects. The liberals believe that liberty is sacrosanct. The thing that must be protected is that sacred inner voice, and anything that intrudes should be abolished, because this inner core of individuals is what gives meaning to the world and is the source of all ethical and political authority. What do we call these commandments? ‘Human rights.’
Read Sapiens
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.