Sacred Texts of the World

"Yes – this is a collection of extracts from sacred texts. It talks about the role of the dead and the myths of Judaism , Christianity , Islam , Hinduism, Buddhism , Jainism, Confucianism, Sikhism and so on. In fact, it includes all of the major religions , as well as small-scale traditional religions. So it is kind of a Cook’s tour of written beliefs, about cosmology and ethics. Smart and Hecht are going back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and looking at the death industry that grew up around the Pharaoh and the pyramids. No other civilisation has so industrialised the concept of death as Egypt did. The fact that people have struggled with serious ideas without comprehension, and have resorted to all sorts of trickery and poetry – I suppose you could say to disguise their ignorance – shows it to be a truly pressing problem for them. Ancient civilisations all groped for answers to big questions, and came up with all sorts of fantasies – but the fact they groped with these questions is important, because it means that the relevant issues were central to people’s concerns. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Absolutely. The scientific method is the only reliable method of achieving knowledge. It displaces ignorance without destroying wonder. By that I mean that in, for example, the case of death, science shows what happens when people die and whole solar systems die in the long term. Although there is no comfort in these explanations, there is certainly wonder about the intricacies that are being exposed."