My friend linked me to this article earlier: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lefkowitz23oct23,0,7722137.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

I don’t understand how taking such a huge step backwards is going to help anyone escape the problems of religious fundamentalism. The entire notion that we should solve our problems with religion by adopting some other form of religion seems to miss the point entirely. Maybe I’m being an arrogant atheist, but I don’t see how twenty or so imaginary friends is somehow better than one.

Well, it’s totally a moot point, because nobody is going to go back to the greek gods. But historians of religion do note that the monotheistic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is a particularly jealousGod ... he doesn’t get along with other pretenders. As such he’s more prone to promote ethnic divisiveness.

Polytheistic religions did to a certain extent tend to have less specifically religious violence, since a polytheistic pantheon can more easily be rejiggered to include the other guy’s deities as well. (Or to see them all as “avatars” of each other).

Of course, there are modern-day monotheists who do something similar, by claiming that all the monotheistic religions worship the same God. That’s perhaps not a majority position, but it could be. The problem is that monotheistic religions really can’t take that stand in relation to polytheistic ones ... while polytheistic ones can view monotheists as worshipping the “king” god, like Zeus or Jupiter.

So there is something to what she’s saying.

There’s the additional problem that in fact Catholicism is a polytheistic religion. Not only does it worship a tripartite God, but it also worships Mary and the saints. This is monotheism in name only, and it is quite jealous.

But anyway it’s totally a moot point.

The saints, that is the oldest saints, not the more recent saints, were once pagan gods.  I could argue that todays montheistic religions do not worship the same god, but as Doug said, it is a moot a point.

Theism is potentially dangerous whether monotheistic or polytheistic because they are both false superstitions.  A figment of the imagination is a facet of oneself, so all god worshipers are all really just worshiping that facet of themselves.  I tend to think less “mono”-polizing, however, of the polytheistic sort.  If a polytheist is not satisfied with the musings of their current deity, it is their luxury to switch their allegiance, at will, to another.  Polytheists also accept and often respect the choice of others to follow other gods, and don’t deny their existence.

Although most monotheists think that they worship the same god as one another (the only one true god that is) there are as many conceptions of that god as there are worshipers.  The attempt to empower ones own imagination as possessing greater authority than that of other persons means seeking to control and “mono”-polize them.  Monotheists state that there is no other god but theirs.  In other words, the monotheist acts as though he is a god, and the one true only god.