Notes on The Law of Religion (Sapiens) – Comprehensive Study Notes

The Law of Religion

Religion identified as the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires. Large social orders gain superhuman legitimacy through religion, helping stabilize norms across vast and diverse populations.
Religion defined as a system of human norms and values founded on belief in a superhuman order. Two criteria:
1) It must be an entire system of norms and values, not a single practice (example: knocking on wood for luck or belief in reincarnation alone does not make a religion unless it guides behavior systematically).
2) It must claim to be based on superhuman laws rather than human decisions (example: professional soccer is rules-based and human-made; it is not a religion).
For religion to unite large, diverse polities, it must possess:
- a universal superhuman order that is true everywhere and always, and
- a missionary drive to spread that belief to everyone (universal + missionary).
The best-known universal missionary religions include Islam and Buddhism; most ancient religions were local and exclusive, focusing on deities and spirits of particular places.
Emergence of universal empires and universal money paralleled the rise of universal and missionary religions, contributing to humankind’s unification.

Religion at Crossroads: Observations from Major Hubs

Medieval Samarkand as a marketplace where the East–West, North–South exchanges brought together diverse peoples (Syrian merchants, Chinese silks, steppe tribes, western slaves, gold coins with exotic scripts).
In 1281, Kublai Khan’s invasion of Japan illustrated a similar unification: Mongol, Chinese, Korean, Central Asian, and European storytellers and engineers all in one imperial framework under a single ruler.
A Meccan pilgrimage around the year 1300 would place pilgrims from Mesopotamia, Mali, India, and spice islands in close proximity, underscoring the same principle of vast and varied human coexistence under shared religious and social structures.

What Is a Religion? The Two Core Criteria, Expanded

Religion is not merely belief; it is a normative system that prescribes conduct and is anchored in a superhuman order.
The universal and missionary qualities are essential for turning local beliefs into a globally unifying framework.
The idea that “religions” differ in scale and reach, with Islam and Buddhism as archetypes of universal, missionary faiths, whereas many ancient systems were parochial.

From Animism to Polytheism: How Beliefs Evolve with Economic Change

Animism (dominant in forager societies) integrated humans with spirits of animals, plants, and natural features; rules were locally tailored to places like the Ganges Valley or Indus Valley.
The Agricultural Revolution redefined humans’ relationship to nature: plants and animals became property, and thus the direct, reciprocal negotiation with nature gave way to mediation via gods.
- The gods emerged as mediators between humans and mute nature (fertility goddess, sky god, medicine god) to secure harvests and fecundity when humans could no longer negotiate with domesticated beings as equals.
- Early religious liturgy involved offerings (lambs, wine, cakes) to these deities in exchange for crop abundance and healthy flocks.
As trade networks and kingdoms expanded, more entities were imagined as having universal reach, leading to polytheism (many gods) with the following features:
- A pantheon of powerful gods (e.g., fertility, rain, war) who could be appeased via devotion and sacrifice.
- The persistence of animist spirits (demons, fairies, ghosts, holy rocks/springs/trees) alongside greater gods—local practices coexist with larger divine hierarchies.
The rise of polytheism elevated the status of humans in the cosmic view: prayers and offerings could influence the outcomes of weather, war, and health, tying human fate to divine favor.
Polytheism also facilitated tolerance: belief in a supreme, detached overarching order coexists with many partial, biased powers. This allowed coexistence of different cults within empires without demanding uniform worship.

The Great Transition: Monotheism and Its Strategic Consequences

Some polytheistic followers eventually believed in a single supreme power with biased interests, yet continued to engage with other divine figures (saints, localized cults, etc.). This produced syncretic blends across religions.
The first clearly identifiable monotheism appeared with Akhenaten in Egypt (c. 1350 BCE), who proclaimed Aten as the sole god; the reform failed after his death.
Judaism represented a local form of monotheism with a distinct emphasis on a God with particular interests in the Jewish nation, not a universal missionary project.
Christianity, which began as an esoteric Jewish sect, developed universal missionary aims under Paul of Tarsus—arguing that the gospel should reach all nations, not only Jews.
Islam followed in the seventh century CE, expanding rapidly from the Arabian Peninsula to an enormous empire—illustrating the power of monotheism to drive vast political and cultural transforms.
Monotheistic systems tend to be more missionary and sometimes more dogmatic, arguing that adherents possess the complete truth and should discredit competing faiths.
Yet there has always been a gap between theory and practice: monotheists often retain a broader pantheon (saints, local cults, and even the inclusion of non-Islamic or non-Christian deities) within their broader religious frameworks.
In practice, empires tended to tolerate subject peoples’ gods while demanding loyalty to the empire’s core religious order; conversion was not universally imposed (e.g., Romans tolerated Christians while requiring reverence to emperor worship and protector gods).
The Battle of Good and Evil: polytheism and monotheism each offered different answers to the Problem of Evil; dualistic systems separated good and evil as independent powers, while monotheism inherited a more complex relationship with evil and order.

Dualism and the Problem of Evil

Dualistic religions frame the world as a battleground between two powers: a good god and an evil power (e.g., Zoroastrianism’s Ahura Mazda vs Angra Mainyu).
- This dualism offers a straightforward solution to the Problem of Evil: evil originates from an independent power with its own agency.
- Drawbacks include a potential difficulty in explaining order and coherence under competing powers governed by shared natural laws.
Theodicies in monotheism have to account for evil within an omnipotent, benevolent framework; dualism handles evil but struggles with universal order.
Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Gnosticism contributed influential dualist ideas that persisted through late antiquity and influenced later religious thought.
Gnosticism and Manichaean dualisms also proposed a sharp body–soul dichotomy, positing a good spiritual realm opposed to an evil material realm.
In monotheist history, these dualisms persisted in some form, even as monotheistic traditions asserted a single, willful God; meanwhile, syncretism allowed worship of a mix of gods and spiritual forces across cultures.
The synthesis of monotheist, polytheist, and animist ideas produced syncretism, which Harari suggests might be the “single great world religion” in practice.

The Law of Nature: Natural-Law Religions (Ethics Without a God)

In the first millennium BCE, several new religious currents stressed natural laws over divine commands: Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Hellenistic schools (Stoicism, Cynicism, Epicureanism).
These natural-law traditions posited that the superhuman order arises from natural laws rather than divine will, but they did not necessarily deny gods outright.
Buddhism is the principal example of a natural-law religion, with Siddhartha Gautama as its central figure. Core ideas:
- Suffering is caused by craving and the mind’s attachment to experiences. Nirvana is the extinguishing of craving and the end of suffering.
- Dharma (or dhamma) is the universal law of nature; it is discovered, not imposed by a deity. For Buddhists, the first principle is: “Suffering exists. How do I escape it?” rather than “God exists. What does He want from me?”
- The Eightfold Path (as part of Buddhist practice) is a practical ethical framework to reduce craving and detach from suffering. The path includes ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom.
Gods in Buddhism are not central to the law of suffering; they may help with worldly issues (rain, victory, protection) but do not govern the natural law that governs suffering.
However, Buddhism does not completely reject gods; it acknowledges their power yet emphasizes that they cannot alter the law of suffering due to craving. Over time, many Buddhist sects developed pantheons of Buddhas and bodhisattvas who assist with both spiritual and mundane concerns.
The broader family of natural-law religions later fed into modern ideologies (described in the next section) and showed that a belief in a natural order can underpin systems that are not theistic.

The Worship of Man: Modern Humanist Religions

The last 300 years have often been viewed as an age of secularism; however, in terms of natural-law religions, modernity represents an era of intense religious fervor and missionary zeal expressed through ideologies.
Liberal humanism, socialist humanism, evolutionary humanism, capitalism, nationalism, liberal democracy, and Nazism are presented as modern “religions” or faith-like systems that sanctify aspects of humanity or humanity’s order.
A useful framework: humanism sanctifies Homo sapiens itself, though it differs on what “humanity” exactly entails; liberal humanism emphasizes individual rights and the inner voice; socialist humanism emphasizes equality and the protection of the species; evolutionary humanism emphasizes the potential for humans to evolve into higher forms or degenerate into subhumans.
Liberal humanism posits that the supreme good is the good of humanity and that the inner voice (human rights) should guide ethical and political decisions. Liberals extend moral concern to the sanctity of individual life, opposing torture and the death penalty as violations of human dignity.
Liberal humanism is rooted in a monotheist heritage (free and eternal souls as a basis for human rights), but its secular forms dispense with the need for a Creator while retaining human sanctity as essential to ethical authority.
Socialist humanism treats humanity as a collective, stressing equality and the prevention of systemic inequality; the supreme commandment is to protect equality within Homo sapiens.
Evolutionary humanism rejects the notion of an immutable human essence; it views humanity as a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. It is closely associated with Nazi ideology’s rhetoric around “Aryan” superiority, but note that modern scholarship has debunked racial hierarchies; the Nazi example is used to illustrate how religious-like devotion to an ideal of humanity can lead to genocide.
The Nazis combined pseudo-scientific racism with a belief in human improvement through selective breeding and the creation of “superhumans.” They argued for Aryan superiority and the extermination or quarantine of “degenerate” groups (Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally ill) to protect humanity’s future. This included claims about ancient populations (e.g., Neanderthals) and the supposed evolutionary paths of Homo sapiens.
The Nazi program drew on contemporary pseudo-science to justify racial hierarchy, but the broader moral and political consequences were catastrophic and widely discredited post-World War II. Yet its impact lingered in some Western polities (e.g., White Australia policy until 1966) and in ongoing debates about race, science, and policy.
The Nazi era did not simply reject humanity; it redefined it according to a perverted evolutionary anthropology. It used the rhetoric of science to legitimize extreme violence against those deemed inferior. This history shows how humanist vocabulary can be exploited to justify inhumane policies.
A key tension remains: Life sciences increasingly challenge liberal humanist assumptions (e.g., the idea of a fixed, sacred inner humanity) by highlighting biological determinants of behavior. This creates a gap between liberal political-legal systems and the life sciences, a tension that modern societies must navigate.
The final question raised is whether liberal humanism can maintain its separation from biology, or whether it must integrate or reinterpret its ethical foundations in light of contemporary science.

Humanist Religions: A Quick Reference Table

Liberal humanism: Sanctifies the inner liberty and dignity of each individual Homo sapiens; the supreme good is the good of humanity; the sacred right to freedom and rights-based ethics, including protections against torture and the death penalty.
Socialist humanism: Sanctifies the species as a collective; equality within the species; the supreme commandment is to protect equal status and opportunities for all humans.
Evolutionary humanism: Sanctifies humanity as a mutable, evolving species; emphasizes the potential to evolve into superior states (superhumans) or degenerate into subhumans; the supreme mandate is to safeguard humanity from degeneration and promote its evolution.
A note on the boundary between religion and ideology: If a creed is defined as a system of norms and values under a superhuman order, then liberalism, socialism, capitalism, nationalism, and Nazism can be viewed as religions or ideologies depending on terminology and emphasis. Buddhism and Islam are traditional religions; Communism and liberal capitalism are modern ideologies that function as religions in their own right for many adherents.
The synthesis in many individuals today often blends elements from multiple traditions (e.g., a person may be nationalistic, capitalist, and liberal humanist at once), illustrating syncretism in the modern religious landscape.

Reflections on the Modern Condition and the Nature of Belief

The text emphasizes that the trajectory of religion is not simply a matter of belief in supernatural beings; it concerns how humans imagine and organize meaning, authority, and collective action.
The arc from animism to polytheism to monotheism to natural-law traditions and modern humanist ideologies shows how humans continually seek a universal order that gives legitimacy to social rules and institutions.
The central challenge for contemporary societies is reconciling scientific understandings of human nature with ethical and political frameworks that preserve human dignity and social order. This entails scrutiny of claims about free will, biology, and the sources of moral authority, while maintaining humane principles and pluralistic tolerance.

E=mc^{2}

A closing reminder that even in a world of diverse religious and ideological systems, some durable physical truths (like energy-matter equivalence) challenge or inform our moral and political interpretations of human nature and the future of humanity.