Terry Pratchett - The Globe

If you are religious, and you want to feel comfortable about what we're saying, you can always assume that we're talking about all the other religions, but not yours. Some years ago, during Ecumenical Week, Rabbi Lionel Blue was giving the 'Thought for the Day' on BBC Radio 4, as part of a series on tolerance. He was the first speaker in the series, and he ended with a joke.

'They shouldn't have asked me to start the series,' he said, and then explained how the later speakers from other religions would differ from him, and how he would be tolerant about that.

'After all,' he said, 'they worship God in their way ... whereas I worship Him in His.'

If you see that this is a joke, as the good rabbi did, but also understand that outside that cosy context this is not, in a multicultural world, a good way to think, let alone speak, then you're already getting to grips with the ambivalent role that religion has played in human history. And with the mental twists and turns required to live in a multiculture.

The big problem with religion, for a dispassionate observer, has nothing to do with belief versus proof. If religion were susceptible to scientific-style proofs or disproofs, there wouldn't be a lot to argue about. No, the big problem is the disparity between individual human spirituality -the deep-seated feeling that we belong in this awesome universe -with the unmitigated disasters that organised, large-scale religions have at various times, including in all probability yesterday, inflicted on the planet and its people. This is upsetting. Religion ought to be a force for good, and mostly it is ... But when it isn't, it goes spectacularly and horribly wrong.

In both Pyramids and Small Gods, we see that the real problem in this connection is not religion as such, but priests. Priests have been known to seize upon the spiritual feelings of individuals and twist them into something terrible; the Quisition in Small Gods was hardly an invention.

Sometimes it had been done for power, or for money. It's even been done because the priests really believe that this is what the god of choice wants them to do.

Again, on an individual level many priests (or equivalent) are perfectly nice people who do many positive things, but collectively they can have some very negative effects. It is this mismatch that will form the core of our discussion, because it tells us interesting things about what it is to be human.

We are very tiny, fragile creatures inside a huge, uncontrollable universe. Evolution has equipped us not just with eyes to see the universe, but minds to hold little models of it within us; that is, to tell ourselves stories about it.

We have learned, over the millennia, to exert more and more control over our world, but we see evidence every day that our ability to control our own lives is extremely limited. In the past, disease, death, famine and ferocious animals were part of everyday existence. You could control when you planted your crops, but you couldn't control when the rains came, and you might just get jumped by a pride of lionesses while you were bending down to pull up weeds.

It is very uncomfortable to have to cope unaided with that kind of world, and many people still have to do so. Everyone feels much happier if they believe that there are ways to control rain and lionesses.

Now, the human mind is an inveterate pattern-seeker, one that finds patterns even where none exist. Every week millions of perfectly sane people look for patterns in lottery numbers, oblivious to the absence of any meaningful structure in random numbers. So it's not really necessary for the belief in an ability to control rain or lionesses to correspond to an actual ability to do so. We all know that even when things are under control, they can still go wrong, so our faith in our beliefs seldom gets seriously challenged, whatever happens.

The idea that there is a Rain Goddess who decides when it will rain, or a Lion God who can either keep you safe from lion attacks or unleash them upon you, therefore has irresistible advantages. You can't control rain, and of course you can't control a Rain Goddess either, but, with the proper rituals, you can hope to influence her decisions. This is where the priesthood comes in, because they can act as an intermediary between everybody else and the gods. They can prescribe the appropriate rituals -and, like all good politicians, they can claim the credit when things work out and blame someone else when they go wrong. 'What, Henry was eaten by a lion? Well then, he must not have shown proper respect when making his daily sacrifice to the Lion God.' 'How do you know that?' 'Well, if he had shown proper respect, he wouldn't have been eaten.' Ally that to the priests' soon-acquired power to throw you to the earthly representatives of the Lion God if you disagree, and you can see that the Cult of the Lion God has an awful lot going for it.

People look at the universe around them, and they feel overawed. It's so big, so incomprehensible -yet it seems to dance to a tune. People who grow up in a culture -especially one with a lengthy history and a well-developed set of techniques for making buildings, planting crops, hunting animals, building boats -immediately recognise that they are faced with something that is far greater than they are. Which immediately raises all the big philosophical questions: where did it come from, what's it for, why am I here? And so on.

Imagine how it must have seemed to Abraham, one of the founding fathers of Judaism. He was probably a shepherd, and he probably lived in and around Ur, one of the first true city-states. He was surrounded by the icons of simple-minded religions: gold-plated idols, masks, altars. He was wildly unimpressed by them. They were trivial things, small-minded. They did not begin to measure up to the awesomeness of the natural world, and its stunning power. Additionally, he was aware that 'something' much bigger than him was running that world. It knew when to plant crops and when to reap them, how to tell whether rain was on the way, how to build boats, how to breed sheep (well, he would have known that bit), how to have a prosperous life. Even more: it knew how to pass all this knowledge on to the next generation. Abraham knew that his own tiny intelligence was nothing compared to this majestic something. So he reified it, and gave it a name: Jehovah, which means 'that which is'. So far, so good, but then he made a simple but intellectually fatal error. He fell for the trap of 'ontic dumping'.

Nice phrase. What does it mean? Ontology is the study of knowledge. Not knowledge itself, just its study. One important way to firm up new knowledge is to invent new words. For instance, when you make an arrow, someone has to produce the sharp pointy thing that sits at its business end. They chip it from flint or cast it in bronze; either way, you can't go on forever referring to it as 'the sharp pointy thing on the end of an arrow'. So you cast around for a metaphor, and you remember that the thing that sits at the business end of a person or animal is called its head. So you invent the term 'arrow-head'.

You have now dumped the knowledge of what the flint or bronze gadget is into a name. We say

'dumped', because for most purposes you don't need to recall where the name came from.

Arrowhead (no hyphen) has now become a thing in its own right, not a property possessed in relation to an arrow.

The human mind is a storytelling device, a metaphor machine: ontic dumping comes naturally to creatures like us. It's how our language works, how our minds work. It's a trick we use to simplify things that would otherwise be incomprehensible. It is the linguistic analogue of a political hierarchy as a way for one person to control millions. As a side effect, ontically dumped words wallow in associations. We are seldom conscious of these, except when we occasionally stop and ask something like 'What on Earth does "gossamer" mean?' Then we rush off to the dictionary and discover that it probably (no one ever knows these things for sure) comes from