So... to my perspective, monolatry is the point. Monotheism is a good enough approximation in practice though.
Also, it's not the idea of monolatry or monotheism that matters... it's the development of a religious culture than is effective at banning other religions. This is what made monotheism what it is, historically.
This is my personal belief as well. The evolution of monotheism appears to be a boon for scientific thought: it sets up the idea that the rules are the same everywhere.
> and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions
I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Isla¯m became so popular?
You're throwing polytheistic religions together with monotheistic ones. You should not do that. Polytheistic religions give hope for short term goals and explanations about each part of the world. Monotheistic religions give explanation for the world and give hope for the afterlife.
Yeah, but polytheistic approaches at least allow for diversity of thought. Like the hermetic philosophies that influenced alchemy. Monotheism (the enforced kind) really stunted philosophy.
Agriculture did not shape monotheism. It happenrd both on nomadic and non nomadic nation's, as well as polytheistic religions of Asia. No correlation here.
Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination
Sure, but that monotheisic number isn't a large number of religions. It's completely dominated by what are all offshoots of the same religion.
Almost every culture that develops religion independently develops a polytheistic religion. Those almost never morph into monotheistic religions.
The numbers of adherents are just dominated by Christianity and Islam, which are by no coincidence the principle proselytising religions in history. In fact proselytism was historically rarely observed outside of those two religions.
A level of indirection was added to move from gods of nature, through gods within nature, to a monotheistic level of indirection further. That they are the creator or creation (usually). Judaism and Christianity aren't something apart, that move to "a creator" seems to be a tendency of monotheism. They are no more or less convincing than any of the rest of the monotheisms - or pastafarianism come to that. They are just the story that arose in a particular society tied to region and/or time, then belief spread wider, particularly if there was inclusion of evangelism. Or holy wars.
Pastafarianism is the interesting one. It's clearly parody, yet it's equally clearly holding up a set of beliefs that are difficult to argue against - be nice to each other, don't kill people and so forth. The efforts to have it recognised as a "real" religion are interesting as on most counts it's as real as any of the rest. Despite it being humour, it's equally clear it's a nicely formed object to fit the monotheism pattern perfectly. Perhaps not surprising that some people are now claiming to "believe in it" wholeheartedly, even whilst knowing it's comedy.
Using monotheism and polytheism as a metaphor here was a poor choice. I really get tired of the myth that the polytheistic cultures of antiquity were much more religiously tolerant than the later monotheistic cultures.
This is a myth caused by an appeal to common sense that is not supported by the evidence. Let's take Roman society as an example. They may have had plenty of gods to worship, but there was an official state religion with compulsory worship, and they were hardly tolerant of deviation (see the ancient Christians for examples).
reply