Fundamentalism

In the first chapter of her book "A HISTORY OF GOD..." Karen Armstrong asserts that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. Certainly the historical record of the human species shows that images and statues of supreme beings have existed from even before the advent of writing. The need to externalize a force or being responsible, somehow, for the world in which mankind exists, is apparent in all ages and in all peoples throughout the world. This is particularly so when the realities of the sight of the earth's planetary neighbors and star, the sun, are taken into account. It would seem that there is an innate, fundamental characteristic of the human race to invent gods to account for these phenomenon. Whether this is an attribute of the human gene, as some writers have maintained, or, as Armstrong notes, "human beings cannot endure emptiness and...