'An Atheist's History of Belief' unfaithful to its title
Though Matthew Kneale highlights interesting material, a book that presents itself as an investigation of belief instead delivers a straightforward history of religion.
By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic
January 31, 2014, 1:30 p.m.
"As the son of a Manx Methodist atheist and a refugee German Jewish atheist," Matthew Kneale tells us in the first sentence of "An Atheist's History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention," "I have never been much of a believer." It's a great way to begin a book on faith, by staking out the territory of skepticism.
"What," he continues, "… had really happened? What had caused people to come up with such strange-seeming notions as paradise, or sin?" What, indeed? We have a tendency to take faith for granted, to imagine that it is part of our evolutionary toolbox, that we are hard-wired for God. Science is, um, agnostic on this, suggesting that, while the brain does not have a specific "God spot," there are neuropsychological factors to spirituality. And yet, Kneale argues, faith (or religion) is more broadly social, a matter of movements as opposed to meaning, of culture rather than soul.
"From the earliest times," he reflects, "every religion has given people comfort by offering ways — so their followers believe — of keeping their worst nightmares at bay.… As people's lifestyles have altered, so have the things they most fear. It is the changes in our fears, I would argue, that have caused our religious ideas to change."
Kneale is a novelist — his "English Passengers" (2000) won the Whitbread Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize — so it makes sense that he would frame faith as an evolving story we tell ourselves. Beginning 33,000 years ago, with the development of animal spirits and trance worship, he works his way up to contemporary movements such as Scientology and Al Qaeda, for which spirituality masks a more secular set of ends.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-matthew-kneale-20140202,0,5201547.story#axzz2s0ysV3xf