From time immemorial, almost every human being wants to be the voice of authority –the one who represents the unknown power. Once someone claims himself to be that representative and people start calling him a prophet, eventually, his notions will become God’s notions. If some people find that hard to accept, they will hatch up slightly or drastically different ways to represent and follow this unknown power. Sooner or later, their notions will also become God’s notions. Then, other factions, in their respective ways, will emerge as the real ‘representatives.’ They will dream up stories about God, such as, he is a jealous God, a giver of life, a protector.
Anybody who cared to know how monotheism started, have most likely read about the effort of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten to impose Aten, the sun god, as the only god for his jurisdiction. “While initially, Akhenaten allowed the worship of many gods, as Egyptian kings had always done so, by the 5th year of his reign, which was around the middle of the 14th century BCE, there was a decisive move that made the worship of Aten the only recognized religion in the kingdom” (Maltaweel, & Lambrecht, 2019x). He shutdown shrines and demolished the images of various gods but this action wasn’t well received by the populace, especially temple priests. Many temples had their respective ways of performing rites, on behalf of their clients, to their deities; for that reason, to desist from worshipping other gods would have been devastating to the local economies and communities (Maltaweel, & Lambrecht, 2019x).
As you can tell, the Jews didn’t start monotheism. According to the Bible, they had many gods which they discarded after the gods ‘failed’ to help them achieve what they had asked for. At this point, they had no one else to discard Yahweh for, hence they stuck with him. They were also inundated with all kinds of petty rules concocted out of the brains of some men, which they construed as directives from Yahweh. In their frame of mind, their demigod, Yahweh, had to be better than other demigods, because other gods couldn’t hatch up any elaborate rules and regulations to entangle people’s lives; they couldn’t promise heaven and earth if people worship them; and, they couldn’t come up with the threat of burning in hell forever if they [the demigods] were abandoned. The jealousy associated with Yahweh was also enough to frighten anyone not to sway an inch. Bizarrely, the harder and absurd the rules the more they believed the rules had to be from “Almighty Yahweh” because he wouldn’t lower his standard to make easy rules the way humans would—if it is not hard and complicated it is not from Yahweh.
The idea of being ‘chosen among the rest’ was so appealing too. This was amplified by them saying “God” negotiated a covenant with them. That was why even when they were in captivity in Babylon, they couldn’t see such a humiliation as an indication of the powerlessness of their God, Yahweh. They kept formulating excuses on his behalf; the idea that he could sometimes be helpless like other human-made gods never occurred to them. They kept singing and reminiscing about him; they wouldn’t even pronounce his name out of reverence for him. Each time they machinated strategies or crafted weapons that helped them win a war, the credit would go to Yahweh instead. That would reinforce the supremacy of Yahweh, and the idea of monotheism would drench deeper into their psyche. If only they had realized that their deity never had any exclusive right to military strategy or superior weapons, they wouldn’t have become cocky and condescending to other demigods. It seems they were unique in this regard.
The people who worshiped other idols had little or no reason to fear their gods; they had no fabricated reasons. If a god failed to help them get what they had asked for, there was no need to continue depending on such a deity. War was one of the major factors in this. When people were defeated in the battlefield, that was a quick way for them to discard the god who they had reverently prayed to for success in the battlefield. Thus, it was easy to persuade them to ditch their unresponsive deity to worship another unresponsive deity who only happened to be hyped up more than the others.
The gods in other cultures, such as that of the ancient Greek, weren’t ethical or amiable; they were angry and vindictive entities just like brute humans. What they did best was to connive and destroy one another. Some were hedonists and rapists. The cannibalism among the gods was appalling. God Cronus, for example, swallowed his five kids due to fear of their potential rebellion against him. The gods were vulnerable to pain, illness, despair, etc. All these made Greeks to start questioning the invincibility, decency, and intelligence of their gods. However, they knew they could only do so much in regard to their subtle rebellion or else, Zeus, the god of thunder could strike them down. At this point, they, too, steadily began going the monotheist route by regarding Zeus as god above other gods, but at the same time open-minded about the concept of the unknown god.
When Paul spoke to them about this unknown god, his sermon resonated with them greatly. We placed the following selected verses here for more details: (Acts 17:2-3 NIV) As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah,” he said. (Acts 17:22-23 NIV) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. (Acts 17:29-31 NIV) “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
The Greeks also found out that all the crap they already believed about gods’ interactions with humans, such as god sleeping with women and having children by them, were also practiced by this unknown god, and this god seemed more intelligent, powerful, loving and merciful than the ones they had been dealing with. Unfortunately, they just couldn’t realize that the story about virgin birth and other highfalutin tales were most likely copied from their regular fables, or were from tales they had heard through the grapevine; in a strange way, those stories probably made them believe Paul the more. To hear that this unknown god loved them so much that he gave his only begotten son to die for their sins so they could stand the chance to go to heaven after death and live happily thereafter, was another crucial factor too good to ignore. The only simple thing this god needed was for them to have faith in him and no one else. At this point, the shift from polytheism to monotheism became quite noticeable.
Once Greece accepted monotheism, it was easy for the rest of the Western Block to accept it due to Greece’s influence in the world. We think that monotheism made the colonization of the world much easier than it would have otherwise been, which is a good thing or a terrible thing, depending on who you ask.
Before goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450x, copies of the Bible were only handwritten, and available to a few elite, mostly in church. “Religious authorities pretty much had monopolistic control over written texts, which were written on papyrus or vellum and stored in the libraries of monasteries and cathedrals, which soon began to emerge as repositories of rare, sometimes even unique, texts” (Liulevicius, 2020x). The invention drastically changed everything; the Bible easily became accessible to the masses in the language they speak instead of Latin –‘God’s sacred language,’ which only a few elite were bestowed the privilege to interpret. Consequently, monotheism started to spread everywhere like wildfire.
Christians decided to position themselves at the forefront of this phenomenon. For the Jews to call them gentiles who shouldn’t be a part of the chosen people, was something they couldn’t accept. (Are you out of your mind?! We are no longer gentiles. The honorable Paul said we are a part of the chosen too –you can’t kick us out of that clique!) Brazenly, the Christians tweaked the crap about the chosenness craze and started calling themselves the New Jerusalem –the real chosen ones who God would one day rapture into heaven. Sadly, they are not alone in this. Today, some other groups waste their time arguing over a ridiculous idea that was manufactured in the brains of self-righteous men. They often point to some pages in the Bible where they somehow believe indicate that they are the original chosen ones.
If your idea of one God, comes from the eventual acceptance of Yahweh as the only true God, and that makes you regard people who follow other Gods as pagans and idol worshippers, you need to understand that you are also a pagan who happens to be among the largest group of idol worshippers in the world. For example, Muslims’ idea of one God was derived from the Bible; therefore, it means nothing more than the fact that, out of no concrete reason other than ease of worship, some people simply decided to stick with one deity out of many similar ones. To be a monotheist doesn’t make you more safe or more assured of anything than other people; in other word, you are still an idol worshipper because you are merely fooling around with a deity who is only as good or as bad as other deities –a fact that has alluded folks for years. Many polytheists have accounts of the great flood, virgin birth, etc., that predated biblical accounts. The only two main differences between monotheists and polytheists are: 1) monotheists waste less valuable time and energy devoted to ‘worshipping’ many Gods and doing all kinds of rubbish than polytheists do, and 2) the former are more in number than the latter.
Again, it wasn’t as if all the deities had a supremdential election and elected your deity to reign supreme over them. The idea that there is no god but Allah, was only invented by Mohammad and others. Irresponsibly, they superimposed that deity as the God of the universe. You need to know that the real God of the universe is nonreligious and not petty like your deity or thousands of others; hence, your deity is not the God of the universe. Hopefully, that should make you realize that your two major beliefs, that there is no god but Allah and that Mohammad is the prophet, are false.
Now, if other people also say that their deity is the only true God, what valid point do you, as monotheists, have to refute their claims? We need to remind you guys that you have been the only ones who think they are pagans; they have never seen themselves as such. They are simply henotheists, which is likely why they don’t fuss about your monotheistic claims. Thus, if they are pagans, you are not different from them—you are all pagans.
The way Muslims are now working hard to similarize the three major monotheistic religions, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see that in the near future people will no longer see much difference between Islam and Christianity. They would blend them together for the sake of peace and unity, especially if the deification of Jesus becomes attenuated severely. As a matter of fact, the future is here: they have now formed a word called Chrislam to represent one world religion. However, we are not sure how the Muslims will resolve the illogicality in their beliefs: If Mr. X believes that the contents in book-a are authentic and the contents in book-b are also authentic because they were both written by Mr. Genius, yet, book-a has some disparaging remarks about book-b and claims it is not authentic, how would Mr. X, who believes primarily in book-b, resolve that and what are the possibilities of him and those who only believe in book-a to coexist peacefully if no one is ready to abandon his beliefs? The only way out is the nonreligious route—the universal cordial beliefs.
To talk further about monotheism, when prominent people such as Constantine, the emperor of Rome from 306 – 337 CE, became a Christian, every other semi-god became irrelevant. From then on, in particular, Yahweh was no longer a god he became a God; he became the LORD God Almighty. Nonetheless, you should realize that things are still the same fundamentally; monotheism means nothing as long as it is about the elevation of one demigod over the other demigods who are in the same category. Also, note that there has been nothing but (unfriendly) competitions among human beings in just about every aspect of our lives. In an attempt for members of each group to show that the ‘power’ they ascribed to was more superior, the copy-cat business in religion has been pervasive in so many ways imaginable.
Although we inherited the fallout of religious fallacies, it is time for us to make it a point of duty to end them peacefully. We cannot betray our next generations by bombarding them with any form of religious ideology, especially now that we have concrete evidence to show that religion has been and continues to be a major source of disunity and conflict on earth.
Modern Age Movement (MAM)
–Universal Cordial Beliefs (UCB)
References:
Liulevicius, V. (2020x, June). The Religious Impact of the Printing Press. Wondrium. Retrieved from https://www.wondriumdaily.com/the-religious-impact-of-the-printing-press/#:~:text=Reading%20the%20written%20word%20in,easily%20accessible%20to%20the%20masses.
Maltaweel, M. & Lambrecht, E. (2019x, May). How did Monotheism Develop. Retrieved from https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_Monotheism_Develop#:~:text=The%20first%20monotheistic%20religion%20developed,monotheism%20by%20Hebrews%20in%20Babylon
