Definition
A natural-law religion is a system of norms grounded not in the will of personal gods but in the operation of an impersonal law of nature. The law is not a legislator's command — it is a feature of how reality works, and the religious task is to align human life with it. Suffering, in such a system, is what happens when human action runs against the grain of the law.
Harari's examples include Buddhism (the law is dharma; suffering arises from craving and ignorance), Stoicism (the cosmos is rational and lived rightly by aligning with it), Daoism (acting in harmony with the Dao), and many strands of modern humanism that treat human rights, market efficiency, or evolutionary fitness as quasi-laws.
Why it matters
How it works
A natural-law religion identifies the supposed law, articulates how it works, and prescribes practices to bring human conduct into alignment with it. The Buddhist Eight-Fold Path, the Stoic exercises of attention and assent, the daily disciplines of liberal citizenship — each is a regimen for fitting the human inside the imagined law.
Harari notes that the boundary between a natural-law religion and a body of secular knowledge can be hard to draw from the inside. Both speak the language of how things really are; both prescribe behaviour accordingly. From the outside, however, the religious shape — sacred law, sacred practice, sacred specialists — becomes visible.