God: A Human History

As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. I root my moral choices neither in fear of eternal punishment nor in hope of eternal reward. I recognize the divinity of the world and every being in it and respond to everyone and everything as though they were God—because they are. And I understand that the only way I can truly know God is by relying on the only thing I can truly know: myself.

Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you.

That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love and compassion in one believer, hatred and violence in another; why two people can approach the same scripture at the same time and come away with two radically opposing interpretations of it. Indeed, most of the religious conflicts that continue to roil our world arise from our innate, unconscious desire to make ourselves the apotheosis of what God is and what God wants, whom God loves and whom God hates.

There is a term for this phenomenon—politicomorphism, or “the divinization of earthly politics”—and it is, to this day, one of the central features of nearly every religious system in the world.

They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.

Perhaps rather than concerning ourselves with trying to form a relationship with God, we should instead become fully aware of the relationship that already exists.

Religion engenders both inclusion and exclusion. It spawns as much conflict in society as it does cohesion.

Cognitive theorists have a term for what Eve just experienced. They call it her Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. This is a biological process that arose deep in our evolutionary past, all the way back in the days when hominids were still stooped and hairy. In its simplest terms, HADD leads us to detect human agency, and hence a human cause, behind any unexplained event: a distant sound in the woods, a flash of light in the sky, a tendril of fog slithering along the ground.

It could be known only through six divine “evocations” that it brought forth into the world from its own being: wisdom, truth, power, love, unity, and immortality. These are not so much Ahura Mazda’s attributes as they are the six substances that make up its essence.

Every impulse—every impulse without exception—is generated by complex electrochemical reactions in the brain. Why would the religious impulse be any different? Knowing the neural mechanics of the religious impulse does not undermine the legitimacy of religious belief any more than knowing the chemical process of romantic attraction makes the feeling any less real or the object of our affection any less worthy.

The cognitive science of religion begins with a simple premise: Religion is first and foremost a neurological phenomenon.