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God's pronouncements take on decidedly different tones in holy scriptures, and sometimes God's "mood" shifts from chapter to verse within the Bible and the Koran.

"What accounts for these changing moods that you see in all Abrahamic traditions?" asks author Robert Wright. "What circumstances, at the time the scriptures were written, might account for the vacillating tone of belligerence and tolerance? What circumstances bring out the worst in religion, and what circumstances bring out the best?"

Wright attributes God's changing moods to the political, economic and military events in the ancient world. In the Hebrew Bible, when Israel is under stress, siege or foreign occupation, the Prophets offer divine justice and occasionally God’s wrath against Israel’s enemies.

“I do think it’s the circumstances on the ground that matter,” Wright said at a recent Zócalo forum in Los Angeles. “When I look at the so-called religious conflicts in the world, my view is that they are not really religious conflicts; but they tend to be about underlying political and economic issues, even though the people involved invoke theology to justify killing. The root cause tends to be events on the ground.”

Wright espouses a "materialist" or Marxist view of religion, in which the material circumstances of the world are the primary influence in shaping religious ideas. Wright’s view might be described as “reductionist” - the notion that religion really represents something else, like politics, psychology, or economics. Countering this idea, sociologist Robert Bellah argues that religion is such a pervasive aspect of human existence — enduring from prehistoric times to the present — that it simply cannot be reduced.

"The conclusion grows ever stronger that religion is a part of the species life of man, as central to his self-definition as speech," Bellah wrote in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World. "Since religious symbolization and religious experience are inherent in the structure of human existence, all reductionism must be abandoned."

See a discussion of reductionism, fundamentalism and "understanding people of faith" in the University of Massachusetts Press book, Religious Liberty in America: The First Amendment in Historical and Contemporary Perspective by Bruce T. Murray.

Religious Liberty in America is available at numerous university libraries and the University of Massachusetts Press. Coverage of Wright's Zócalo lecture is available on SageLaw.