Thanks to Florian Widder for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1218
and
http://indyblogs.typepad.com/openhouse/2007/11/musings-on-mono.html

It's when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical "God", but by human beings – usually for cynical reasons.

Look, for example, at the inventor of monotheism. The man who introduced to humanity the idea that there was One God was Pharaoh Akhenaten, some thirty-three centuries ago. (I've been thinking about him because you can see his likeness for the next few months in the gaudy exhibition at the Millennium Dome, excavated from the tomb of his son Tutenkhamun). Akhenaten declared that the sun-god Aten was the only true deity, and all other Gods must be discredited and denied. It was a crucial moment in human history, a radical break by a "heretic Pharaoh" with all preceding superstitions. At that moment, he first formed the idea that was later refined by Moses and Mohammed and Maimonidies (and that's just the 'M's) until it became humanity's most successful superstition.

But it was a lie – a political trick to maximise his power. Many Egyptologists now believe that Akhenaten only gave birth to monotheism because the priesthood of the rival god Amun was becoming too strong for the comfort of the royal house. At the very moment of its birth, monotheism was made up for the political convenience of man.

This shouldn't surprise us. (Especially not here in England, where our state religion is not Catholicism thanks to the fluke of a fat man wanting a divorce). At the birth of every religion, you can see this crude self-interested trickery. In Christopher Hitchens' brilliant new book 'God is Not Great', the traces the preposterous invention of Mormonism. My favourite example of a religion blatantly invented as a con is Scientology. Its bare-faced Messiah was a huckster called L. Ron Hubbard, a compulsive liar who declared in the 1950s, "If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion." And how – by 1982, he was raking in forty million dollars a year.

Hubbard's religious "discoveries" strangely shifted to suit his needs and whims. After psychiatrists condemned his theories as "nonsense", he announced that psychiatrists were the root of all evil, "not just on this planet but from time immemorial." He "discovered" that psychiatrists existed at the start of the universe, and they actually invented evil.

The same make-it-up-as-you-go-along can be seen in the works of Jesus and the 'Prophet' Mohammed. Look at the affair of the 'Satanic Verses', which many people wrongly assume was invented by Salman Rushdie. The tale of the Satanic Verses is in fact a historical event, extensively documented by the earliest scholars of Islam.

When Mohamnmed was starting out in Mecca, he was finding it difficult to keep all his diffuse followers on side and retain good relations with his Arab kinsmen. Some of them were particularly attached to a few of the old deities, so they resisted the new-fangled 'there is no God but God' spiel at the heart of Islam's message. So one day, Mohammed had a convenient 'revelation', delivered by the Archangel Gabriel. He announced that you could worship three of the old Gods after all! Everyone was a winner, and peace prevailed.

But a few of Mohammed's followers were puzzled. They remembered him saying the complete opposite only a few months before. How could God, through his messenger the Archangel Gabriel, contradict himself? Didn't you say he was all-perfect and all-knowing? Panicked, Mohammed suddenly announced that clearly Satan had impersonated the Archangel Gabriel and dictated false messages to him. The passages saying polytheism was okay after all were swiftly dubbed 'Satanic Verses' and scrubbed from the record.

At its very birth, montheism was a con. Until we start demanding basic rules of rationality in human belief – like asking 'Where is the evidence for your claims?' insistently – we will keep falling for the transparently absurd inventions of the Akhenatens and the Mohammeds and the Hubbards.


You can comment on this post, and read the comments of others, here:
http://indyblogs.typepad.com/openhouse/2007/11/musings-on-mono.html#comments

You can read my other articles opposing superstition here:
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/index.php?subject=againstReligion