“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The Bible is often cited as the most-read book in the world (at 5 billion estimated printed copies), but I suspect a significantly lower number have read chapter and verse in its entirety. Once you get past Genesis, it gets a little dry until the smiting, pillaging, and slave-taking ramp up, and Revelation is a bit like a Salvador Dali painting come to life. But there are passages like Ecclesiastes that are sheer joy, especially the adapted version set to music by Pete Seeger and made famous by The Byrds.

Yet, I believe people often claim to have read the Bible as a sign of their piety without actually reading it. All they are fooling is themselves.

But out of curiosity, I Googled the question, “What is the most-read book in the world?”

The top 6  are (with estimated copies in parenthesis)

1. The Bible (5 billion)
2. The Quoran (3 Billion)
3. Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung aka: The Little Red Book (800 million)
4. Harry Potter Series (500 million)
5. Lord of the Rings (150 million)
6. The Alchemist (150 million)

Now, one might argue the first three have such large numbers because they were forced on people, perhaps after the church got over the shock and heresy of the Bible being translated and distributed into the vernacular, but I digress. And why Mao forced the book on millions and then killed them is a mystery.

So why has religion held sway over humanity for so long? From where did the concept of a deity arise?

Long before the advent of written language, humans shared stories around the fire by telling them to each other. The stories traveled only as far as legs could carry the storytellers and they changed with each telling. But where did the inspiration come from for these tales?

They looked up into the night sky and saw things they could not understand let alone explain. Their experience taught them everything came from something else, so the night sky, filled with inexplicable wandering points of light, vast stretches of color, and balls of fire slashing across the sky had to arise from somewhere. Thus they needed an omnipotent being.

Thunder, lightning, flaring objects we now know as comets, nova, and supernova were the angry reaction to displeasing actions by humans.  

They created the gods, and kept creating them to fill the holes in their understanding, more than 4000 so far.

With man’s communication sophistication increasing, with the advent of written language, with the expansion of territory, distance and frequency of travel, the stories, in all their variety and subtle variations, went with them.

New gods arose to explain new experiences. Battles between factions proved the superiority of the victors’s god over the defeated worshipers of a different deity.

God filled the gap of things we could not explain or control.

And then, as is inevitable, some humans discovered they could dominate others by having a connection to these gods not available to others. The priests and religious leaders were a natural result of the daily interaction with gods.

Humans needed to understand what their god(s) wanted, prophets arose to interpret and proselytize the message.

Those who worshiped other gods were heathens and the enemy of the one true god.

Like the most popular books in the world, there was a whole spectrum of religious doctrines gaining various levels of popularity.

Christianity became successful because the technology of communication underwent an exponential increase. The success of the Roman Empire built the foundation for it’s own demise and the rise of Christanity.

But where Rome did not tread, a different approach to the Abrahamic religions arose. Judaism survived on the periphery of Rome, Islam came into dominance in the area where Eastern Christianity, after the schism with Rome, failed to exert full dominance.

Why does this matter?

Because we face a tidal wave of religious fundamentalism striving to exert itself over the increasing secular world.

We are facing a revival of religion-driven policies trying to regain their once dominant positon within government and over secular life because we are somehow disinclined to question the origin and validity of any faith.

We support a person’s right to practice any faith they choose (except human sacrifice, we reserve that practice for the governments of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.)

But why does our acceptance of this right necessarily imply any acceptance of the validity or factual basis for the existence of these deities?

If one wants to argue in favor or against a policy based on the teachings of a religious doctrine inspired or handed down by an omnipotent being, shouldn’t the first step be to establish this being actually exists?

Once one comes to terms with the uncertainty and murkiness of religious origins, one recognizes the danger in blindly accepting any argument based on such faith.

We don’t need any religion to be moral.

We don’t need to pick and choose our policies based on esoteric writings of uncertain veracity.

Religion can, perhaps, offer us a path to understanding our place in the universe, but it fails miserably in explaining how we got here. I would submit that religious differences are the single most deadly cause of strife in the world since the first Neanderthals (who had ceremonies and burial rites) or Homo Sapiens disagreed over the proper way to appease their gods.

So look up in the sky and be inspired by the beauty of nature,

Keep your faith in any manner you choose.

Embrace the universal rule of “Do unto others…” (first espoused long before the concept of Judaism or Christianity in “The Eloquent Peasant,” dating back to the Middle Kingdom (c. 2040-1650 BCE)

And we need remember that dominance or holding a majority over others does not confer validity to one’s belief nor prove the other inferior.