RELIGION, POWER, & ILLUSION

Religion is an illusion created by power-hungry priests, according to Hurley’s treatise.

The author, a University of San Diego philosophy professor emeritus, takes uncompromising aim at religion, which he defines as a belief in gods that self-appointed priests invent and pretend to bargain with on behalf of their followers. Hurley writes that this arrangement goes back to Neolithic practices of priests who claimed to communicate with weather and crop spirits to procure good harvests. Ancient Egyptian priests, he contends, created more than 1,000 gods to ensure there would be plenty of temples to staff and food offerings to eat; when the Pharaoh Akhenaten instituted monotheism, thus eliminating temples and jobs, the priestly class retaliated by erasing every trace of his existence after he died. Hurley argues that Moses was an Egyptian priest who rebooted Akhenaten’s monotheistic god as Yahweh and led a band of Levite priests to Canaan, where they suppressed pagan rivals. He depicts Jesus as a charismatic but mortal Jewish preacher with a mistaken Messiah complex, whose followers recounted “mutant memories” of things they wanted to believe after his death, but never actually saw. St. Paul, he asserts, then invented Christian theology, and Church leaders elaborated on it to buttress their control. In later chapters, Hurley discusses ideas of power and religion in the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, and probes the antiscientific obscurantism, persecution, “murder and mayhem” that he says religion fosters. Over the course of this book, the author takes deep, illuminating dives into history, archaeology, biblical criticism, and social psychology to debunk major faiths’ claims, and he does so in lucid, highly skeptical prose: “A doctrine is orthodox if it increases priestly power, and it is heretical if it undermines priestly power.” He spotlights profound aspects of the religious mindset—his discussion of the Egyptian resistance to abstract thought in everything from writing to mathematics is fascinating—and vividly conveys its reality. Even as he attacks religions’ alleged illusions, Hurley also gives readers a clear sense of why they’ve proven so captivating.

A sharply provocative, often engrossing challenge to faith-based pieties.