This book speaks about a most powerful phenomenon in social life, religion, regarding it as one of the strongest and most productive motifs in human life. This book deals with religion from its sociological point of view. It shows in part 1 that myth and rituals are tools that assist in the reception, and strengthening of religion, which together create a morality that enables people to live in society. They, together, form the wellspring of society. Since society, as will be elucidated later, has existed from the beginning of human life; religion , myth and ritual - together with speech - have also existed, as will be seen in parts 1 and 9, since the beginning of mankind. It will be concluded that all these exist today and willcontinue to exist till the end of humanity. Ethnic groups may be crystallized, within the context of certain religions, myths, rituals, language, arts, and sentiments- into a religion and its byproducts - and nations follow the same course, with the additional help of ethnicity, and lately, with the help of the state. Modern states are involved in creating new nations in order to survive. It will be shown how the endeavors of modern states are problematic, as will be described in parts 3,4,6,8 of the book. There is a difference in strength between civil religions, ideological religions, and theistic religions; and concerning the last-mentioned, differences in strength between polytheistic religions and monotheism. No discussion of ethics, which is described in part 5 of the book, and nationalism, can take place without relating to religion.

A person reading this book may well imagine that it was written in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center explosion in New York. The fact is that though this book opens a window into answers not yet proposed to many of the questions that that tragedy has raised; it was mostly written before that.

This book deals with the main anthropological and religious researchers (I'm not sure if you are referring to the studies or the people researching, if to the studies replace "researches" with studies- D. F) in the West who investigate the source of religions as well asthe social and individual phenomena of the religious creed, its outgrowths, especially in the fields of morality and nationality, as well as the variant and particular characteristics of different religions. Comparing the different routes of several religions, it appears that nobody in the West has put enough emphasis on the huge power and the complete spectrum of social byproducts hidden within the phenomenon of religion. It appears also that nobody in the West has understood, until now, that without religion there is no humanity. Only few imagined how that phenomenon became part of human life; not one of them has understood the basic truth, viz. that that phenomenon was a "must" for humanity andit is going to last for as long as humanity lasts.

Not many have understood that it is difficult to form a nation with no common religion (in the broadest meaning of that word, including religions with no God, like civil religion) as its basis. It appears, too, that what many imagine is a nation, is in fact a group at the beginning stages of its nationhood that is trying to create a nation out of its state's civil society.

It appears that no single thinker in the west has understood the common ground of all secular moral thinkers of the West and the common ground of all monotheistic religious (of Israelite origin) morals. Within that discussion this book reveals some special measure of morality that is unique to Jewish morality.

This book is made up of 9 parts, 4 volumes. The central message is that religion is a force that is indispensable to the formation, existence, and true source of any human group. The 4 volumes and 9 parts are as follows:

Volume I: The origins of Society - Religion and Myth
      Part 1: Religion and Society
      Part 2: Myth and Religion

Volume II: Products of religion - morality, ethnic Groups, nations
      Part 3: Nation
      Part 4: Ethnic Groups
      Part 5: Morality and Religion

Volume III: Specific Social Products
      Part 6: Black Africa
      Part 7: Imperial China
      Part 8: Latin America

Volume IV: Religion and the Believer
      Part 9: Religion itself
      Part 1 starts with an anthropological review of why divine religions came into being among humans, and incorporates a long-range historical review and a forecast based on a realistic look at the present, at modern life.
      Part 2 deals with myths and their religious tasks. It speaks about their formation of societies, whether religious, national (ethnic or states') or cultural, the way it (together with rituals) defines the humane borders of societies, how they make the members of a society to feel as if they know each other closely, feel sympathy and solidarity.
      Part 3 speaks about the notion and term of Nation and the influence of religion on it.
      Part 4 speaks about ethnic groups and their relations with religion.
      Part 5 speaks about morals and their relationship with religion.
      Part 6 deals with primitive religions, spirits and witchcraft.
      Part 7 deals with Imperial China and the West as a comparative case from which one can understand the great influence of different attitudes to religion and God.
      Part 8 deals with Latin America in comparison to the United States on one hand and to Canada on the other hand, and a comparison between the United States and Canada. The discussion is about the influence of religions, for example, the different attitude to native Indians. It comes that the motif of introverted hierarchical relations of the people of catholic tradition enabled the settlers in south and center America to occupy their part of America with no genocide policy. They mostly could come to America without female partners, taking Indian females to be wives, while the idea of equality inherited by the English settlers could not mary Indian women and practiced, actually according to a genocide way. They could not, mentally, arrange equal way of life with Indians.
      Part 9 deals with religion itself.

The book considers and searches for answers for basic questions about the social life many have not yet been dealt with or elucidated in the Secular Western Thought, questions that relate to religion from a social perspective.

The salient of these questions, that inverts Religion to be in the focus of social life, even in our Modern Society, are as follows:

1. 'Why religion?' - What interests, pressures, or needs impelled man to seek a connection with other worlds? Why couldn't man exist, in general, and as a social being specifically - before he formed a spiritual connection with God or with an entity that was beyond his realm of existence? Why did man desire and need to heed the voice of his God and the moral obligations imposed upon him, according to his beliefs, by his God? Why does human society - every human society - need to find something that is not from the world where man leaves, that cannot be proven to believe in and to follow (The book termed this religion, even if it is a belief in liberalism, communism, or Zionism). Why does Biblical-Christian religious morality exist even among secular people in the West? Why has modern Western men failed to design a moral code that would replace the Judeo-Christian tradition that shapes the lives of their societies today?

2. Among all the components of nationalism, what degree of salience does religion, ethnicity, language, economic interests each have? How do these different factors interact? How does a religion create a nation, expand its sphere of influence, or change its essence?.

3. What happens to a country that has no nation? How does it create one for itself?

4. What characteristics are shared by all Western systems of morality and how do they differ from divinely inspired systems of morality?

5. The struggle between secular and divine religions. The United States of America emasculating the divine religions, and bars them from any possibility of involvement in or connection to the government of the country, trampling on the rights of the Catholic and Jewish educational systems as part of the religious war it wages.

6. Western materialism and utilitarianism in contrast to Judaism's moral educational system.

7. Modernity versus tradition. The spiritual advantages of tradition and the scientific and technological advantages of modernity. Western world's inability to comprehend the traditional world of native Africans.

8. A comparison between African nepotism and Israeli-American nepotism (protective policy).

9. Understanding the difference between a tribe with roots in a primitive religion and an ethnic group whose religion thrives to embrace the world.

10. The difference between ethnicity and nationalism.

11. The standing of primitive tribes in a world of advancing nationalities

12. Ethnic and religious roots of aggression

13. Aggressive and non-aggressive religions

14. More resilient and less resilient religions.

It becomes clear how unrealistic the attempt is to eradicate divine religion from nationalism or even from civil religion. Hence any comprehensive discussion of these matters must include discussion of the essence of divine religion, civil religion, nationalism, and ethics.

The approach to the substance, like the book itself, was not made up according to an ordered plan. So it was because I would not dare from the beginning to come to a conclusion to write a systematic book of research to compete with the huge and most ambitious task as it came to be at the end of the day. The whole thing came out like the calf that sprang out in front of Aaron, the brother of Moses. In the course of last six years of research for PHD decree in constitutional Law in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem I was free to learn whatever I liked. Being interesting in the motif of religion because of some personal motives I have, in every Seminar of most of the 23 Seminars I participated I have found a religious corner. It was far away from anything like a plane. May be that it was hidden inside my bones, may be it was within the human substance I thrived to understand, yet, the same happened to the inside of the whole writing. Not I was the planner, or the 'plotter'. Also, it is not for me to explain why did I choose for example, Imperial China or Latin America in order to prove with their assistance how strong religion is. It could be the same with any other part of the world or the history that could or could not show by them the motive of strength coming out of the motif of religion. Yet, may be, and that is no prove at all, that in any thing I have search the motif of religion aroused, with huge force, a possibility that religion is a phenomenon that exists all over the human life, and is mostly dominant. I suggest that the lack of a pre-organized plan for that search is not an essential term without which conclusions in this book cannot be accepted. In a retroactive look, one may learn from the case of Aaron and his calf. There, the wide range of grants given by many different people who had the same intention or motivation, and that made their common intention to be fulfilled. Likewise, in this book, the composition of time and place, worldwide, speaks in favor of the conclusions reached to in this book to conclude that the picture from so different examples should teach us about same common motifs inherent in different societies, pointing at the common characteristics of religion. These common characteristics, mainly, look unchanged, unchangeable, any time, any place, in any circumstances.