Yuval Noah Harari

It tells people, the 10 commandments, it's okay to have slaves.

It's just not right to covet the slaves of somebody else.

Then God will be angry.

And there is just no mechanism to change that.

because it pretends to be not a human creation, but a divine revelation.

Yeah, this is a central problem of liberalism.

On the other hand, I would not kind of fall into the trap of imagining religions as this primeval cohesive force that keeps people together.

I'm a medievalist, like my original field of study was the Middle Ages.

Probably the worst war in European history was the Thirty Years' War.

In terms of percentage of population who died in the war, very complicated, but to make a long story short, between Protestants and Catholics in Central Europe.

And, you know, Catholics and Protestants were willing to slaughter each other because of tiny differences in the way they interpreted the religion of love.

And liberalism rose in part out of the frustration

that people had with religion because it constantly created more and more conflicts and divisions.

And, you know, if you look at Germany today, nobody cares, almost nobody cares, if the person running to be chancellor is a Protestant or a Catholic.

And in this sense, liberalism is a better basis for uniting a large scale and diverse group of people just because it's more flexible.

Again, it's a complicated story.

There is no redemption in the end.

It's based on not on some charismatic leader.

It's based on these very complex, impersonal, self-correcting mechanisms and bureaucracies and institutions.

So in this sense, it's less appealing.