I love the way Yuwal Noah Harari puts human beings in their ego-centered place.

In his first international bestselling book Sapiens ( 2014 ), he says that due to their belief in self-created myths and fictions, “everybody obeys the same laws, the same rules and the same norms” and are even willing tosuffer and even die for a common belief, whether religious, ideological or political.

As he says, you could never tell a chimpanzee that “after you die, you’ll go to chimpanzee heaven and there you will receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds here on Earth. So now, do what I tell you to do”.

If you said that, the chimpanzee would give you a weird look and say, “Are you nuts? Heaven? What is that anyway? I want my bananas here and now!”

Is Harari saying humans are more gullible than chimpanzees? The way that adherents are willing to sacrifice their lives here on Earth for the sake of heaven in the afterlife certainly gives that impression, doesn’t it?

All religions promise some form of heaven; that abstract cosmological place where gods, angels, spirits, saints and souls originate and eventually come home to — at least the good ones.

Is this belief in an afterlifethe motivation behind the rise of religious conservatism and hardline Islam in Indonesia since the advent of the Reform Era in 1998?

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