finished reading
The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Mostly excellent, thought provoking and careful examination of how our concept of "God" has changed from our earliest existence to today. At times he gets a bit repetitive and makes a few jumps in logic I wasn't comfortable making, but for the most part is careful to allow the reader to form their own opinions.
I especially appreciated his taking apart the Bible and Koran and showing when and how passages were added and what purpose was served. His examination of the middle East history is quite eye opening, for me at least.
A sample from the book:
So, all told, was religion in the age of the shaman more a force for good or for ill? There are two main schools of thought on this question. The “functionalists” see religion as serving the interests of the society as a whole. Thus the seminal French sociologist Emile Durkheim could find virtue in religion under even the most challenging conditions. Some observers, for example, have been hard pressed to explain what social good is being done by the Australian aborigines’ violent mourning rituals, during which women used digging sticks to slash their heads and men with stone knives cut the muscles of their thighs so deeply that they fell down, immobilized. 70 For Durkheim this was not a problem. In Elementary Forms of Religious Life he wrote that weeping together not only helped the people withstand the trauma of recent death, but actually made them collectively stronger. For “every communion of mind, in whatever form it may be made, raises the social vitality. The exceptional violence of the manifestations by which the common pain is necessarily and obligatorily expressed even testifies to the fact that at this moment, the society is more alive and active than ever.” 71 Opposed to the functionalists is a group you might call the cynics, or perhaps the “Marxists”—not because they’re communists, but because, like Marx, they think that social structures, including shared beliefs, tend to serve the powerful. The anthropologist Paul Radin, in his 1937 book Primitive Religion, depicted Eskimo shamanism as serving a single interest group: Eskimo shamans. Their “complex religious theory” and “spectacular shamanistic technique” are “designed to do two things: to keep the contact with the supernatural exclusively in the hands of the angakok [shaman], and to manipulate and exploit the sense of fear of the ordinary man.” 72 These two positions dominate discussion of the virtues of modern as well as primitive religion. There are people who think religion serves society broadly, providing reassurance and hope in the face of pain and uncertainty, overcoming our natural selfishness with communal cohesion. And there are people who think religion is a tool of social control, wielded by the powerful for self-aggrandizement—a tool that numbs people to their exploitation (“opiate of the masses”) when it’s not scaring them to death. In one view gods are good things, and in one view gods are bad things. But isn’t it possible that both sides are wrong to view the question so generically? Isn’t it possible that the social function and political import of religion have changed as cultural evolution has marched on?
