Salvation Through Literacy

Many religions of the world use one or more holy texts as the source or confirmation of a divine message. The Bible and Qur’an, according to many traditions, are divinely inspired and contain the necessary information for attaining salvation.

If a crucial divine message is contained in a book, then literacy is a prerequisite for salvation. Independent development of a writing system has occurred only three times in human history (Cuneiform, Maya hieroglyphs, and Linear B), and these developments took place late in human history, even after the Agricultural Revolution.

Writing is clearly a human invention (and a recent one, at that), yet it would seem that certain divinely inspired messages require the ability to read. Books are certainly a convenient means of sharing information, and there is no reason books should not spread religious ideas as well as secular ones. But the idea of a holy text that forms the basis for a faith or religion is questionable, since it requires a human invention in order to access a divine message.