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--- internal:inspiration:sapiens [2021/02/16 09:56]
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 The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious. All those involved accepted Christ's divinity and His gospel of compassion and love. However, they disagreed about the nature of this love. Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified,
 thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. Protestants refused to accept this, arguing that this quid pro quo belittles God's greatness and love. Whoever thinks that entry to heaven depends upon his or her own good deeds magnifies his own importance, and implies that Christ's suffering on the cross and God’s love for humankind are not enough.
+===== 4 =====
+The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect's first leaders, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle|Paul of Tarsus]], reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just Jews. It was thus necessary to spread the good word - the gospel - about Jesus throughout the world.
+[...]
+At the beginning of the first century AD, there were hardly any monotheists in the world. Around AD 500, one of the world's largest empires - the Roman Empire - was a Christian polity, and missionaries were busy spreading Christianity to other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. By the end of the first millennium AD, most people in Europe, West Asia and North Africa were monotheists, and empires from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalayas claimed to be ordained by the single great God. By the early sixteenth century, monotheism dominated most of Afro-Asia, with the exception of East Asia and the southern parts of Africa, and it began extending long tentacles towards South Africa, America and Oceania. Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another, and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations.
+(p. 251 - 253
+===== 5 =====
+Dualism is very attractive world view because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. "Why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?" Monotheists have to practice intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all—knowing,
+all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God's way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil and hence there would be no free will. This, however, is a non-intuitive answer that immediately raises a host of new questions. Freedom of will allows humans to choose evil. Many indeed choose evil and, according to the standard monotheist account, this choice must bring divine punishment in its wake. If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her?
+[...]
+For dualists, it’s easy to explain evil. Bad things happen even to good people because the world is not governed single-handedly by a good God. There is an independent evil power loose in the world. The evil power does bad things.
+Dualism has its own drawbacks. While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order. If the world was created by a single God, it’s clear why it is such an orderly place, where everything obeys the same laws. But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws of physics. A missile launched from Pakistan can hit targets in India because gravity works the same way in both countries. When Good and Evil fight, what common lws do they obey, and who decreed these laws?
+So, monotheism explains order, but is mystiﬁed by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe — and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
+(p. 254 - 255)
+===== 6 =====

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