Sapiens 10 -- The Law of Religion

See also these transcripts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 10 - part 1 --What is religion?  Polytheistic tolerance.

• Definition of religion:  “a system of human laws and values, which is founded on a belief in a super human order."
• Criteria 1:  religion must believe in a super human order, which is not the product of human whims, or human agreements (unlike the laws of soccer)
• Criteria 2:  establishes norms and values derived from the super human order and which are binding for people (unlike the Theory of Relativity)
• Religion played a very crucial role in the unification of humankind. Some religions argued that there is a set of norms and values which all people must follow, which are true everywhere, any time, for everybody.  (Not all religions, though, like animism.)
• Polytheism:  Many polytheists do believe in a single main power that governs the entire universe, including all the gods (like Fate in Greece, or atman in Hinduism).  But, unlike in monotheism, this single power is devoid of interests, disinterested in human concerns.  There's no point making sacrifices or building temples to Fate or atman.
• "This then is the fundamental insight of polytheistic religions like Hinduism: The supreme power of the universe has absolutely no interests and no biases. If we want help with our mundane problems and ambitions, we must approach the partial and biased powers" -- like the lesser gods.
• Thus, polytheists are tolerant, accepting of many gods, rarely persecute infidels or heretics.  When Romans or Aztecs conquered people, they didn't force conversions but rather could just expand their pantheons.  (It was only that Christians refused to worship the emperor that got them in trouble.)
• "If we combine all the victims of all these persecutions of Christians by the polytheistic Romans, it turns out that in 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 in the millions...."

Lesson 10 - part 2 -- How fanatical monotheists came to dominate most of the world; monotheism is really a mish-mash of both polytheism and dualism

"With time followers of certain polytheistic gods, became so fond their particular god, that they drifted away from this basic insight. They began to believe that their particular god, was not just one among many, but was the only god and that he was identical to the supreme power of the universe. At the same time they continued to view their god as having interests and biases. They continued to believe that their god, even though the supreme power of the universe, still cared about the mundane affairs of humans. They could still make deals with this god, like making a sacrifice in exchange for getting victory in a war. This is how monotheistic religions were born."

• 1st monotheistic religion:  ancient Egypt (1350 BC) when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the previously minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was in fact the supreme power.  But it didn't stick after the pharaoh died.
• Judaism is monotheistic, too, but doesn't have widespread appeal.  The supreme being is only interested in the affairs of the small Jewish nation.  
• Christianity is the big breakthrough:  the supreme being is interested in everyone, and everyone should know about it.  The model for Islam, as well.
• Monotheists usually believed that their message was the one and only truth; compelled to discredit all other religions, waging violence, persecutions, and holy wars.
• The idea of one god who cares about everyone is hard to accept, even for monotheists, because on a primal level, Sapiens like to divide the world us/them.  
• Polytheism continued to survive, as Christians developed saints for various people and problems.
• For monotheists, the problem of evil, is extremely difficult.  The work-around is dualism, which can explain why there is evil (Satan), but leaves a big gap to the answer of order -- who/what governs the struggle between good/evil?
• Monotheistic mish-mash:  Monotheistic religions absorbed dualistic beliefs:  For example, the dualist belief in the existence of an evil god that fights against the good god  is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament.  The idea of holy war makes no logical sense in monotheism -- God is omnipotent, he doesn't need us to fight for him! -- but is baggage inherited from dualism.  Also heaven/hell.

Lesson 10 - part 3 -- Non-god religions spread throughout Afro-Asia in the first millennium BCE; the dominance of non-god religions in the modern age

• Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Stoicism, Epicureanism
• the super human order governing the world is the product of natural laws
• Focus on Buddhism:  how to end suffering, craving with meditation
• Even though, in theory, these religions gave little importance to gods, in practice, the worship of different gods continued to be of considerable importance.
• New natural law religions in the modern age:  liberalism, communism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism. "If a religion is a system of human norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order then communism is no less a religion than Islam."

Lesson 10 - part 4 -- The most important and widespread modern religions = humanist religions that worship Sapiens.

Humanism definition:  the belief that Homo Sapiens has a unique and sacred nature which is fundamentally different from the nature of all the other animals and phenomena in the universe.... Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo Sapiens is the most important thing in the world and it is this that determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo Sapiens, the rest of the world and all other beings exist solely for the benefit of this one species.

3 sects that disagree about who is "humanity"

• Liberal Humanism (liberalism) -- humanity is a quality of individual humans, the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every individual Homo sapiens. Therefore, the supreme value of the world is the liberty of individuals; "a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free and eternal individual souls"
• Socialist Humanism:  Socialists hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but the species Homo sapiens as a whole. Whereas Liberal Humanism, seeks as much liberty as possible for individual humans, Socialist Humanism seeks equality between all humans.  Also descended from monotheism's idea of all souls being equal before God.
• Evolutionary Humanism: The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect human kind from extinction and encourage its evolutionary progression into super men; "survival of the fittest" vs. the other 2 humanisms, which merely fostered the weak