Guns, Germs, and Steel - by Jared Diamond
Offline .... a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years.
I've just finished reading this book and I have to say I thought it was absolutely fantastic. A vast amount of information condensed down to around 400 pages or so, and for me it really explained a lot.
Though the book didn't specifically talk very much about religion, I think it could certainly be argued that the ultimate reasons for why we got stuck with the Abrahamic religions rather than something else are more or less the same as why Eurasia conquered the rest of the world rather than vice versa.
Pretty much every human population had their own creation myths. Those people who lived in the "fertile crescent" (near east/southwestern asia/) were, due to several other factors mostly directly related to the environment, one of the few people who independently invented writing and were most likely the first, with Sumerian Cuneiform (Chapter 12 "Blueprints and Borrowed Leters"
. Naturally, their religion is one thing they wrote about a lot, and this gave the religions formed in the near east an advantage of being able to create written accounts of such things and create a history for themselves.
The above people combined with the easy diffusion of their particular domesticated plant and animals probably brought their religion along for the ride, thus spreading it far and wide and displacing various other hunter-gatherer societies along the way. This ensured that it was their religion that was spreading rather than their religion that was being destroyed. Much like the languages that conquering tribes/states/empires spread, this wasn't due to any inherent truth/efficiency or strength of the religion/language involved, it just happened to belong to the people with the guns, germs and steel.
Anybody else read the book and consider this?
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I haven't read this particular book, but I must say, I no longer like Jared Diamond's work. I read Collapse and thought it was fantastic... and then about a year ago, when I brought-up the book and it's arguments in a discussion with an academic acquaintance, discovered that more or less the entire premise of the book and most of it's content was fabricated nonsense (the premise was the the Easter Island natives destroyed their civilization by constructing Moai at such a fierce pace that they emptied their island's quarries and cut down every tree in short order, perishing thereafter due to the desolation of their environment. This is not an accurate account, as logbooks from a variety of european visitors to the island attest. In reality, the Easter Islanders succumbed mainly to the predations of slave-raiding and colonialism).
In fact, lately, I find myself largely disinterested in reading non-fiction pop-culture 'science' books at all. I'm coming to the realization that most academics go this route in order to trumpet their opinion without the 'nuisance' of peer-review and criticism.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
My brother bought this book for me a year ago and i still havent gotten around to reading it, been really busy>_>... He keeps telling me to read it and that its a good read. I may pick it up here over the holiday season here and read it...