Don't Swallow the Camel!: The Why and How of Religion

This book starts with two premises, which are: 1. The primary urge of all the higher forms of life is to ensure the survival of their genes. 2. The unknown is always potentially very dangerous! The first premise above is covered in Section 1. In that section we go into numerous examples that are easily understood, then we go into our natural instincts and some mysteries of the mind which we don't yet understand. The second premise is covered in Section 2 through 6 which show that religion leaders have used fear of God (potentially the most dangerous of all unknowns) to ensure the survival of their families' genes. The second premise above deals primarily with the laws that Jehovah, the Israelite tribal God, gave to Moses. Or perhaps it was the other way around; Moses invented Jehovah and wrote the laws for him. Having been educated in the courts of Egypt, it is likely that Moses was the first of his shepherd people to read and write in any language. Throughout the first seven sections there are quotations from the Holy Qur'an to give the Muslim point of view. In the fifth Section we try to figure out why David was such a hero that today the Israeli Emblem is the Star of David. The sixth Section is about Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. It is my opinion that the whole Jesus bit was a Roman attempt to break the power of the priesthood and eventually make the Jews into law-abiding Roman citizens. The plot didn't work. Christianity was contagious, and within three centuries the Christians took over the Roman Empire. Since all three of our greatest current religions can be traced back to Abraham, I must warn those with deep religious convictions that the contents of this book are heretical.