But where did it come from?

“If genius is the key, then there is no reason for Israel to have made these unique discoveries [of a transcendent God]. Pride of place would have to go to the Sumerians or the Old Kingdom Egyptians. Here were the real cognitive and cultural geniuses of the ancient Near East. Their discoveries shaped the thinking, commerce, politics, and science of the whole region for almost three thousand years. In fact, we still today use the Sumerians' sexagesimal mathematics when we divide a circle into 360 degrees. Yet when it came to their perception of ultimate reality, these profound thinkers came out where they started. If the given is this world and if any outside interpretation of that given in rejected, the final conclusions are all going to be the same—namely, those detailed in the earlier chapters.

“So if the Hebrews came out with different—radically different—conclusions about the nature of reality and the nature of human experience, they did so because they started somewhere different from everybody else. They, of course, tell us what that point was. It was in direct revelation from the transcendent One himself. Unlike the Greeks, who were willing to accept the accolades of being the world's greatest thinkers, the Israelites tell us that they were religiously retarded. Far from claiming to be unusually sensitive to religious truth, they tell us again and again that they were stubborn and stiff-necked, a people afflicted with severe spiritual myopia.”—The Bible Among Other Myths, page 148

<idle musing>
But, if you aren't willing to accept that a god can break into human history, what can you do? You end up running in circles; creating all sorts of interesting theories and ideas. They might make for good reading, and even spawn a new school of thought, but in the end they will fail. Without allowing for divine participation, they are all like dogs running on three legs.
</idle musing>