To those who have lived with experiences of, or with memories of, jihads, holocausts and less lethal but nevertheless disabling forms of religious persecution the account, offered in chapter 13, of the place of religion in human adaptation, culminating in an outline of the Cybernetics of the Holy may well seem, at best, idealized and naive, apologetic and misleading. We may, however, recall here in qualification of such claims the maxim that every evolutionary advance is likely to set new problems as it ameliorates those already prevailing, and admit that the Holy and its constituents constitute no exception. We may recall, more specifically, the suggestion first offered in chapter 1 that the emergence of the concept of the sacred made the human way of life possible by ameliorating subversive possibilities intrinsic to certain aspects of language. The possibility that sanctity and other of religion's conceptions might well have problems of their own was also broached but not developed in chapter 1 and reengaged in chapter 13, particularly in discussions of the inversion, in the course of humanity's emergence from its prehuman (preverbal) forebears, of the relationship of the adaptive apparatus to the adaptive species. The species, it was suggested, became subservient to conceptions that it itself had imagined into being.

We turn now to the pathologies of religion, to the falsification of the sacred, the delusion of the numinous and the breaking of the Holy.