12
The Law of Religion
IN THE MEDIEVAL MARKET IN SAMARKAND, a city built on a
Central Asian oasis, Syrian merchants ran their hands over fine Chinese silks,
fierce tribesmen from the steppes displayed the latest batch of straw-haired
slaves from the far west, and shopkeepers pocketed shiny gold coins imprinted
with exotic scripts and the profiles of unfamiliar kings. Here, at one of that era’s
major crossroads between east and west, north and south, the unification of
humankind was an everyday fact.
The same process could be observed at work
when Kublai Khan’s army mustered to invade Japan in 1281. Mongol
cavalrymen in skins and furs rubbed shoulders with Chinese foot soldiers in
bamboo hats, drunken Korean auxiliaries picked fights with tattooed sailors from
the South China Sea, engineers from Central Asia listened with dropping jaws to
the tall tales of European adventurers, and all obeyed the command of a single
emperor.
Meanwhile, around the holy Ka’aba in Mecca, human unification was
proceeding by other means. Had you been a pilgrim to Mecca, circling Islam’s
holiest shrine in the year 1300, you might have found yourself in the company of
a party from Mesopotamia, their robes floating in the wind, their eyes blazing
with ecstasy, and their mouths repeating one after the other the ninety-nine
names of God. Just ahead you might have seen a weather-beaten Turkish
patriarch from the Asian steppes, hobbling on a stick and stroking his beard
thoughtfully. To one side, gold jewellery shining against jet-black skin, might
have been a group of Muslims from the African kingdom of Mali. The aroma of
clove, turmeric, cardamom and sea salt would have signalled the presence of
brothers from India, or perhaps from the mysterious spice islands further east.
Today religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement
and disunion. Yet, in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind,
alongside money and empires. Since all social orders and hierarchies are
imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is.
The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to
these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human
caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place
at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social
stability.
Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is
founded on a belief in a superhuman order.
This involves two distinct criteria:
1. Religions hold that there is a superhuman order, which is not the product
of human whims or agreements. Professional football is not a religion, because
despite its many laws, rites and often bizarre rituals, everyone knows that human
beings invented football themselves, and FIFA may at any moment enlarge the
size of the goal or cancel the offside rule.
2. Based on this superhuman order, religion establishes norms and values
that it considers binding. Many Westerners today believe in ghosts, fairies and
reincarnation, but these beliefs are not a source of moral and behavioural
standards. As such, they do not constitute a religion.
Despite their ability to legitimise widespread social and political orders, not
all religions have actuated this potential. In order to unite under its aegis a large
expanse of territory inhabited by disparate groups of human beings, a religion
must possess two further qualities. First, it must espouse a universal superhuman
order that is true always and everywhere. Second, it must insist on spreading this
belief to everyone. In other words, it must be universal and missionary.
The best-known religions of history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are
universal and missionary. Consequently people tend to believe that all religions
are like them. In fact, the majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive.
Their followers believed in local deities and spirits, and had no interest in
converting the entire human race. As far as we know, universal and missionary
religions began to appear only in the first millennium BC. Their emergence was
one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to
the unification of humankind, much like the emergence of universal empires and
universal money.
Silencing the Lambs
When animism was the dominant belief system, human norms and values
had to take into consideration the outlook and interests of a multitude of other
beings, such as animals, plants, fairies and ghosts. For example, a forager band
in the Ganges Valley may have established a rule forbidding people to cut down
a particularly large fig tree, lest the fig-tree spirit become angry and take
revenge. Another forager band living in the Indus Valley may have forbidden
people from hunting white-tailed foxes, because a white-tailed fox once revealed
to a wise old woman where the band might find precious obsidian.
Such religions tended to be very local in outlook, and to emphasise the
unique features of specific locations, climates and phenomena. Most foragers
spent their entire lives within an area of no more than a thousand square
kilometres. In order to survive, the inhabitants of a particular valley needed to
understand the super-human order that regulated their valley, and to adjust their
behaviour accordingly. It was pointless to try to convince the inhabitants of
some distant valley to follow the same rules. The people of the Indus did not
bother to send missionaries to the Ganges to convince locals not to hunt whitetailed
foxes.
The Agricultural Revolution seems to have been accompanied by a religious
revolution. Hunter-gatherers picked and pursued wild plants and animals, which
could be seen as equal in status to Homo sapiens. The fact that man hunted sheep
did not make sheep inferior to man, just as the fact that tigers hunted man did not
make man inferior to tigers. Beings communicated with one another directly and
negotiated the rules governing their shared habitat. In contrast, farmers owned
and manipulated plants and animals, and could hardly degrade themselves by
negotiating with their possessions. Hence the first religious effect of the
Agricultural Revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a
spiritual round table into property.
This, however, created a big problem. Farmers may have desired absolute
control of their sheep, but they knew perfectly well that their control was
limited.
They could lock the sheep in pens, castrate rams and selectively breed
ewes, yet they could not ensure that the ewes conceived and gave birth to
healthy lambs, nor could they prevent the eruption of deadly epidemics. How
then to safeguard the fecundity of the flocks?
A leading theory about the origin of the gods argues that gods gained
importance because they offered a solution to this problem. Gods such as the
fertility goddess, the sky god and the god of medicine took centre stage when
plants and animals lost their ability to speak, and the gods’ main role was to
mediate between humans and the mute plants and animals. Much of ancient
mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting
devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals – the first
chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example. For thousands of years
after the Agricultural Revolution, religious liturgy consisted mainly of humans
sacrificing lambs, wine and cakes to divine powers, who in exchange promised
abundant harvests and fecund flocks.
The Agricultural Revolution initially had a far smaller impact on the status of
other members of the animist system, such as rocks, springs, ghosts and demons.
However, these too gradually lost status in favour of the new gods. As long as
people lived their entire lives within limited territories of a few hundred square
kilometres, most of their needs could be met by local spirits. But once kingdoms
and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and
authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.
The attempt to answer these needs led to the appearance of polytheistic
religions (from the Greek: poly = many, theos = god). These religions
understood the world to be controlled by a group of powerful gods, such as the
fertility goddess, the rain god and the war god. Humans could appeal to these
gods and the gods might, if they received devotions and sacrifices, deign to bring
rain, victory and health.
Animism did not entirely disappear at the advent of polytheism. Demons,
fairies, ghosts, holy rocks, holy springs and holy trees remained an integral part
of almost all polytheist religions. These spirits were far less important than the
great gods, but for the mundane needs of many ordinary people, they were good
enough. While the king in his capital city sacrificed dozens of fat rams to the
great war god, praying for victory over the barbarians, the peasant in his hut lit a
candle to the fig-tree fairy, praying that she help cure his sick son.
Yet the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons,
but upon the status of Homo sapiens. Animists thought that humans were just
one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand,
increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and
humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the
fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants,
grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid
Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of
the gods, but also that of humankind. Less fortunate members of the old animist
system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great
drama of man’s relationship with the gods.
The Benefits of Idolatry
Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most
Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. This is an unjust
stereotype. In order to understand the inner logic of polytheism, it is necessary to
grasp the central idea buttressing the belief in many gods.
Polytheism does not necessarily dispute the existence of a single power or
law governing the entire universe. In fact, most polytheist and even animist
religions recognised such a supreme power that stands behind all the different
gods, demons and holy rocks. In classical Greek polytheism, Zeus, Hera, Apollo
and their colleagues were subject to an omnipotent and all-encompassing power
– Fate (Moira, Ananke).
Nordic gods, too, were in thrall to fate, which doomed
them to perish in the cataclysm of Ragnarök (the Twilight of the Gods). In the
polytheistic religion of the Yoruba of West Africa, all gods were born of the
supreme god Olodumare, and remained subject to him. In Hindu polytheism, a
single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and
the biological and physical world. Atman is the eternal essence or soul of the
entire universe, as well as of every individual and every phenomenon.
The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from
monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of
interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires,
cares and worries of humans. It’s pointless to ask this power for victory in war,
for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes
no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular
city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies. The
Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to
Atman.
The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to
renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good – to embrace even
defeat, poverty, sickness and death. Thus some Hindus, known as Sadhus or
Sannyasis, devote their lives to uniting with Atman, thereby achieving
enlightenment. They strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this
fundamental principle, to realise that from its eternal perspective all mundane
desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena.
Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus. They are sunk deep in the morass of
mundane concerns, where Atman is not much help. For assistance in such
matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because
their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha,
Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make
deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and
recuperate from illness. There are necessarily many of these smaller powers,
since once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme
principle, you’ll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality
of gods.
The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance.
Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely
disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers,
there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and
efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely
persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.
Even when polytheists conquered huge empires, they did not try to convert
their subjects. The Egyptians, the Romans and the Aztecs did not send
missionaries to foreign lands to spread the worship of Osiris, Jupiter or
Huitzilopochtli (the chief Aztec god), and they certainly didn’t dispatch armies
for that purpose.
Subject peoples throughout the empire were expected to respect
the empire’s gods and rituals, since these gods and rituals protected and
legitimised the empire. Yet they were not required to give up their local gods
and rituals. In the Aztec Empire, subject peoples were obliged to build temples
for Huitzilopochtli, but these temples were built alongside those of local gods,
rather than in their stead. In many cases the imperial elite itself adopted the gods
and rituals of subject people. The Romans happily added the Asian goddess
Cybele and the Egyptian goddess Isis to their pantheon.
The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic
and evangelising god of the Christians. The Roman Empire did not require the
Christians to give up their beliefs and rituals, but it did expect them to pay
respect to the empire’s protector gods and to the divinity of the emperor. This
was seen as a declaration of political loyalty. When the Christians vehemently
refused to do so, and went on to reject all attempts at compromise, the Romans
reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive
faction. And even this was done half-heartedly. In the 300 years from the
crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic
Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians.
Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their
own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that
in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few
thousand Christians.1 In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years,
Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different
interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
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 all those who professed 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.
These theological disputes turned so violent that during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the
hundreds of thousands. On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the
importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who
highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day
Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than
twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was
so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion
and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican’s rooms with a
fresco of the massacre (the room is currently off-limits to visitors).2 More
Christians were killed by fellow Christians in those twenty-four hours than by
the polytheistic Roman Empire throughout its entire existence.
God is One
With time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their
particular patron that they drifted away from the basic polytheist insight. They
began to believe that their god was the only god, and that He was in fact the
supreme power of the universe.
Yet at the same time they continued to view Him
as possessing interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with
Him. Thus were born monotheist religions, whose followers beseech the
supreme power of the universe to help them recover from illness, win the lottery
and gain victory in war.
The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.350 BC,
when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian
pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe.
Akhenaten institutionalised the worship of Aten as the state religion and tried to
check the worship of all other gods. His religious revolution, however, was
unsuccessful. After his death, the worship of Aten was abandoned in favour of
the old pantheon.
Polytheism continued to give birth here and there to other monotheist
religions, but they remained marginal, not least because they failed to digest
their own universal message. Judaism, for example, argued that the supreme
power of the universe has interests and biases, yet His chief interest is in the tiny
Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel. Judaism had little to offer other
nations, and throughout most of its existence it has not been a missionary
religion. This stage can be called the stage of ‘local monotheism’.
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 longawaited
messiah. However, one of the sect’s first leaders, 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.
Paul’s arguments fell on fertile ground. Christians began organising
widespread missionary activities aimed at all humans. In one of history’s
strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.
Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion that
appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century – Islam. Like
Christianity, Islam, too, began as a small sect in a remote corner of the world,
but in an even stranger and swifter historical surprise it managed to break out of
the deserts of Arabia and conquer an immense empire stretching from the
Atlantic Ocean to India. Henceforth, the monotheist idea played a central role in
world history.
Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than
polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies
either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received
from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually
believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only
God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two
millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently
exterminating all competition.
It worked. 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.
Yet just as animism continued to survive within polytheism, so polytheism
continued to survive within monotheism. In theory, once a person believes that
the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, what’s the point in
worshipping partial powers? Who would want to approach a lowly bureaucrat
when the president’s office is open to you? Indeed, monotheist theology tends to
deny the existence of all gods except the supreme God, and to pour hellfire and
brimstone over anyone who dares worship them.
Map 5. The Spread of Christianity and Islam.
Yet there has always been a chasm between theological theories and
historical realities. Most people have found it difficult to digest the monotheist
idea fully. They have continued to divide the world into ‘we’ and ‘they’, and to
see the supreme power of the universe as too distant and alien for their mundane
needs. The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a
lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity,
for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little
from those of the polytheistic gods.
Just as the god Jupiter defended Rome and Huitzilopochtli protected the
Aztec Empire, so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped
it overcome difficulties and win wars. England was protected by St George,
Scotland by St Andrew, Hungary by St Stephen, and France had St Martin.
Cities and towns, professions, and even diseases – each had their own saint. The
city of Milan had St Ambrose, while St Mark watched over Venice. St Florian
protected chimney cleaners, whereas St Mathew lent a hand to tax collectors in
distress. If you suffered from headaches you had to pray to St Agathius, but if
from toothaches, then St Apollonia was a much better audience.
The Christian saints did not merely resemble the old polytheistic gods. Often
they were these very same gods in disguise. For example, the chief goddess of
Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was
Christianised, Brigid too was baptised. She became St Brigit, who to this day is
the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland.
The Battle of Good and Evil
Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to
dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers:
good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent
power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains
that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that
everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle.
Dualism is a 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 practise 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? Theologians have
written countless books to answer such questions. Some find the answers
convincing. Some don’t. What’s undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time
dealing with the Problem of Evil.
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
governing this cosmic war? Two rival states can fight one another because both
obey the same 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 laws 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.
Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. Sometime
between 1500 BC and 1000 BC a prophet named Zoroaster (Zarathustra) was
active somewhere in Central Asia. His creed passed from generation to
generation until it became the most important of dualistic religions –
Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good
god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good
god in this battle. Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the
Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC) and later became the official religion
of the Sassanid Persian Empire (AD 224–651). It exerted a major influence on
almost all subsequent Middle Eastern and Central Asian religions, and it inspired
a number of other dualist religions, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeanism.
During the third and fourth centuries AD, the Manichaean creed spread from
China to North Africa, and for a moment it appeared that it would beat
Christianity to achieve dominance in the Roman Empire. Yet the Manichaeans
lost the soul of Rome to the Christians, the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire was
overrun by the monotheistic Muslims, and the dualist wave subsided. Today
only a handful of dualist communities survive in India and the Middle East.
Nevertheless, the rising tide of monotheism did not really wipe out dualism.
Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous dualist beliefs
and practices, and some of the most basic ideas of what we call ‘monotheism’
are, in fact, dualist in origin and spirit. Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews
believe in a powerful evil force – like the one Christians call the Devil or Satan –
who can act independently, fight against the good God, and wreak havoc without
God’s permission.
How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is
nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? Logically, it is impossible. Either
you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers,
neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to
believe in contradictions. So it should not come as a surprise that millions of
pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time
in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil. Countless Christians, Muslims
and Jews have gone so far as to imagine that the good God even needs our help
in its struggle against the Devil, which inspired among other things the call for
jihads and crusades.
Another key dualistic concept, particularly in Gnosticism and
Manichaeanism, was the sharp distinction between body and soul, between
matter and spirit.
Gnostics and Manichaeans argued that the good god created
the spirit and the soul, whereas matter and bodies are the creation of the evil god.
Man, according to this view, serves as a battleground between the good soul and
the evil body. From a monotheistic perspective, this is nonsense – why
distinguish so sharply between body and soul, or matter and spirit? And why
argue that body and matter are evil? After all, everything was created by the
same good God. But monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist
dichotomies, precisely because they helped them address the problem of evil. So
such oppositions eventually became cornerstones of Christian and Muslim
thought. Belief in heaven (the realm of the good god) and hell (the realm of the
evil god) was also dualist in origin. There is no trace of this belief in the Old
Testament, which also never claims that the souls of people continue to live after
the death of the body.
In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of
monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a
single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God,
but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars
of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even
contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from
different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single
great world religion.
