Some years ago I bought Rodney Stark's Discovery of God. Last year I was hoping to add it to the LOCKDOWN List, but I'd misplaced it. And I got into maths and Kepler last month so, no time to read. I am picking it up again to start over.
Razib Khan deems Stark as an apologist and, from the mid 2000s, not as an honest one. Stark plays footsie with intelligent-design in this book. But then... so does Benjamin Wiker, and that one's Politicizing the Bible was actually valuable.
Stark threads this needle, for his readers: religions come under the rule of survival-of-the-fittest, and moral monotheism is more fit than paganism.
Stark has a Tapscott in him, prone to #cancel his predecessors as - well, he won't say "racist". An earlier generation taught that the African or Australian tribal mind wasn't up for a Classical conception of the Divine. Stark can't have that. We do know what religions have proven most fit in Haïti and in Africa. We who are not in these worlds question the orthodoxy of voudoun. We cannot question that many people believe in it.
Another factor influencing the drift of religion to law-abiding monotheism must be Empire. Stark has an excellent chapter on Near Eastern temple-cults, on how the (putative, naïve) henotheisms of Neolithic villagers "devolved" into Sumerian and Egyptian polytheism. It stops too short, say I. It doesn't differentiate between Isin / Larsa / Babylon, and Nineveh.
Assyria insisted on the cult of "Anshar". Before them, Hammurabi made clear Who was the capital-G God; after them, the Persians became Mazdaist. The Aztecs and Incas both asserted a Sun God. We are pretty sure these days that Empire comes first. Before Darius, Cyrus; before 'Abd al-Malik, 'Umar and 'Uthman. The Empire conquers, and must move to centralisation as centrifugal forces arise. That's when it needs to convince its subjects that the move is just. Technology shortens distances, shifts the battlefields, and changes strategic choke-points. Religion wasn't a cause; it was an effect.
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