Excerpt #45 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
We’ve worshipped everything from the sun to the moon, to Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors.
Then we created mythological gods in our own image.
Through our history, we’ve worshipped the many gods of countless polytheistic religions, meaning religions with multiple gods.
About four thousand years ago, in the Middle East, someone came up with the idea that there is just one god.
Keep in mind that this was just someone’s idea. Someone like you or me.
This idea marked the beginning of the western concept of monotheism (one god).
The first significant religion to practice monotheism was Judaism with their god, Yahweh (misspelled Jehovah in the King James Version of the Bible).
About fourteen hundred years later (twenty-six hundred years ago), Buddhism (in India), Confucianism, and Taoism (both in China), major belief systems with no gods, emerged as powerful religious movements in the East.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. – George Bernard Shaw