This book was an enjoyable read, but in the end Onfray did not prove his thesis. After the preface, which fished me in, the first third of the book was a bit of a slog. I have to admit after he used the word ontological three times in the first few pages, I had to get my dictionary to look it up.The preface describes a trip to the middle east where he visited with desert nomads – ignorant people whose way of life, and thinking, had not changed in thousands of years. These people were the very model of the founders of monotheism. And, why would their insights into the world have any relevance to today. The short answer … it wouldn’t.
The second half of the book makes a damning case against the big three monotheisms. They are big fat targets that are incredibly easy to ridicule. But I don’t think he has made a convincing case for atheism. More on that later.
He spends a great number of pages lamenting the fact that atheism is a negative term “a” - “theism” ie. against or not theistic. The theisms all have positive names: the big three names in the subtitle, plus an endless list of nouns and proper nouns: deist, pantheist, monotheist, polytheist, animists, Catholics, Protestants, Lutherans, Calvinists, Shiite, Sunni, etc. He claims that language lacks a noun that describes our beliefs with a positive construction. He doesn’t deal with what I think are positive and suitable descriptors: realist, humanist, scientist, observationalist. But I will grant him that we do not commonly label people such as myself with a name other than “atheist".
The origin of religious thinking is pretty well laid out. Basically man cannot face the prospect that his life is finite. He will die, as everyone before him has, and that will be his end. This being too bitter a pill to swallow, he constructs the fantasy of the after-life. He believes it, despite a total lack of evidence of the truth of it. Nobody has ever seen it, been there, come back or sent back a message.
That actually makes sense. Heaven is perfect .. the opposite of the here and now. No suffering, no death, no want. Believing in an alternate reality is definitely preferable to believing that this is all there is.
Unfortunately, for a made up construct, not everybody goes to heaven. There is also hell, a place, hard to believe, that is actually worse than here. And to ensure that one gets to go to one rather than the other, you need people to help you … priests. Heaven is run by god, who unfortunately never makes a physical appearance here, so these priests must speak for him, and interpret what we must do and how we must act to get to go to heaven instead of hell. And, wouldn’t you know it, giving considerations to the priest will ensure your proper passage over the river Styx. Then to complete the circle, the ruler, who wants to get to heaven as much as the rest of the population, finds that he can use the levers of power (military and property) to control the priests, who organize everybody hierarchically under them.
The priests tell everybody to obey the ruler, because that is how they will get to heaven. Don’t mind all of the injustice here - slavery, poverty, want, cruelty - the next life will be better, do as you’re told.
Phew! In summary, the priests tell the king what to think, the king tells the military how to act, and everybody else keeps their head down waiting for their final reward.
His indictment of the big three is quite entertaining. Each professes that they are the one true religion because they were chosen by god. God has given them a book, which is the true and infallible word of god, written by his very hand. Of course, each book is riddled with contradiction. Best example: “Thou shalt not kill” (Deuteronomy 5:17) “But you shall utterly destroy them, the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite …, as the LORD your God has commanded you"(Deuteronomy 20:17) [That last quote is abridged, as it is apparently a whole chapter on how to get back at the enemies of the Torah.]
All three books tell completely how to live, and bar all other books. So each book - Bible, Torah, Talmud - contain everything and its opposite. This allows the religious to cherry-pick the verse that supports their desired course of action. Oh, and for most of recorded history, the common people were forbidden to read the books (assuming they could) without the presence of a priest to tell them what to think.
The very story of Adam and Eve is a parable that tells us not to think. Eat from the tree of knowledge, and be cast out of the garden. And it is all Eve’s fault for disobeying this direct order, and so 6 millennium of misogyny is justified by the faithful.
The history of the big 3 religions is a rippin’ yarn. Death, war, genocide, torture, slavery, oppression. And first and foremost, the suppression of real knowledge. Original thought (= Original sin), scientific observation, philosophy were all viewed as dissent and disobedience to the church. Books were burned, inquisitors were employed. The best line in this book: “The church was on the wrong side of scientific discovery for every major development in the last 10 centuries". Imagine where we would be if instead of suppressing for hundreds of years each new development in astronomy, physics, medicine, chemistry, biology, etc. they instead allowed the constructive thinking to progress. They could have used their not inconsiderable resources to actually help it along. We could have had colonies on the moon by the 15th century.
Anyway, that was all fun. But I don’t think his “religion is the root of all evil” approach actually proves that atheism is much better. It is, of course. But then, we have plenty of examples of nonreligious societies corrupting absolute power to oppress the majority in favour of the an elite ruling class. Communist China, Stalinist Russia, most of Africa. I do believe that religion has kept us backward and barbaric for all of recorded history. But nonreligious societies have also spun out of control into tyranny. Perhaps man is just not capable of self-organization into an altruistic society.
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