http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1218

Monotheism was a con from the beginning

It's when you look at the birth-pangs of a religion that you can see
most clearly how it was invented not by some mystical "God", but by
human beings - usually for cynical reasons.

Look, for example, at the inventor of monotheism. The man who
introduced to humanity the idea that there was One God was Pharaoh
Akhenaten, some thirty-three centuries ago. (I've been thinking about
him because you can see his likeness for the next few months in the
gaudy exhibition at the Millennium Dome, excavated from the tomb of
his son Tutenkhamun). Akhenaten declared that the sun-god Aten was the
only true deity, and all other Gods must be discredited and denied. It
was a crucial moment in human history, a radical break by a "heretic
Pharaoh" with all preceding superstitions. At that moment, he first
formed the idea that was later refined by Moses and Mohammed and
Maimonidies (and that's just the 'M's) until it became humanity's most
successful superstition.

But it was a lie - a political trick to maximise his power. Many
Egyptologists now believe that Akhenaten only gave birth to monotheism
because the priesthood of the rival god Amun was becoming too strong
for the comfort of the royal house. At the very moment of its birth,
monotheism was made up for the political convenience of man.

This shouldn't surprise us. (Especially not here in England, where our
state religion is not Catholicism thanks to the fluke of a fat man
wanting a divorce).

crude self-interested trickery. In Christopher Hitchens' brilliant new
book 'God is Not Great', the traces the preposterous invention of
Mormonism. My favourite example of a religion blatantly invented as a
con is Scientology. Its bare-faced Messiah was a huckster called L.
Ron Hubbard, a compulsive liar who declared in the 1950s, "If a man
really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would
be to start his own religion." And how - by 1982, he was raking in
forty million dollars a year.

Hubbard's religious "discoveries" strangely shifted to suit his needs
and whims. After psychiatrists condemned his theories as "nonsense",
he announced that psychiatrists were the root of all evil, "not just
on this planet but from time immemorial." He "discovered" that
psychiatrists existed at the start of the universe, and they actually
invented evil.

The same make-it-up-as-you-go-along can be seen in the works of Jesus
and the 'Prophet' Mohammed. Look at the affair of the 'Satanic
Verses', which many people wrongly assume was invented by Salman
Rushdie. The tale of the Satanic Verses is in fact a historical event,
extensively documented by the earliest scholars of Islam.

When Mohamnmed was starting out in Mecca, he was finding it difficult
to keep all his diffuse followers on side and retain good relations
with his Arab kinsmen. Some of them were particularly attached to a
few of the old deities, so they resisted the new-fangled 'there is no
God but God' spiel at the heart of Islam's message. So one day,
Mohammed had a convenient 'revelation', delivered by the Archangel
Gabriel. He announced that you could worship three of the old Gods
after all! Everyone was a winner, and peace prevailed.

But a few of Mohammed's followers were puzzled. They remembered him
saying the complete opposite only a few months before. How could God,
through his messenger the Archangel Gabriel, contradict himself?
Didn't you say he was all-perfect and all-knowing? Panicked, Mohammed
suddenly announced that clearly Satan had impersonated the Archangel
Gabriel and dictated false messages to him. The passages saying
polytheism was okay after all were swiftly dubbed 'Satanic Verses' and
scrubbed from the record.

At its very birth, montheism was a con. Until we start demanding basic
rules of rationality in human belief - like asking 'Where is the
evidence for your claims?' insistently - we will keep falling for the
transparently absurd inventions of the Akhenatens and the Mohammeds
and the Hubbards.