The next time you hear someone say, “It’s disrespectful to the victims of 9/11 to build near Ground Zero a monument to the religious ideas that motivated their murder,” tell them: “Darn right, we shouldn’t have any mosques or churches or synagogues in the area – it’s an insult to those victims of monotheist ideology.”
Churches? Since when is Christianity monotheistic? “the father, the son, and the holy spirit” — that sounds like at least 3 gods right there, and then there’s this idea of the devil, which sounds like a villainous god, and “angels” etc.
Like Malcolm X once said — “It is difficult to keep track of their many gods”.
The Trinity is three persons in one God, not three separte entities. Also, the Devil isn’t a God, he is the guy who tempts mankind, he is powerful but not Omnipotent. I’m not saying this is true, but that’s what I remember from the Cathecism.
The Trinity is weird, but that’s why is called a Mystery.
By the way, how I can become a Jove’s Witnesses?
Start here.
Oops how do I delete that?
I was trying to post this link
I wonder why the monotheist religions always seem to be the most fanatical. Or is that just selection bias because those are the major ones that are around right now?
Definitely selection bias. Even the ancient Israelites (when they were at their most fanatical, running around genociding everybody they could get their hands on) may have been at least henotheistic.
“Definitely selection bias.”
I don’t think so — polytheists have a hard time being fanatical (about religion, anyway) — after all, what’s another god or ten to add to the bunch?
Gene:
Really? Try telling that to Justin Martyr, or Saint Sebastian.
It’s true that intolerant polytheists rarely get very exercised about the things intolerant monotheists get exercised about — in particular, the fact of worshipping gods other than their own — they usually either accept that there are more gods out there; or else interpret your cult as the worshipping of the gods they already know, only under a different name. But they do easily get exercised if you refuse to worship the gods that they worship, or do things that they consider desecration towards the things that those gods hold sacred. Some of the most famously syncretic pagans, such as the Romans, were also some of the most ultraviolent — the pagan Roman state was constitutionally a theocracy — since the Emperor was both supreme pontiff and held to be literally divine. (*) Those who refused to worship the Roman civic gods (e.g., Christians), or who practiced other religions considered to undermine the supremacy of the official Roman religion (e.g. “Egyptian rites” and various mystery cults) could be persecuted with extreme violence, including round-ups, massacres, and all kinds of gruesomely inventive ways of torturing people to death for their religious convictions.
(*) Caesars were routinely deified after their deaths; “Son of God” was among Augustus’s official state titles (referring back to the posthumous deification of Julius Caesar). Domitian and Diocletian went so far as to demand to be venerated as living gods during their own earthly reigns.
I pretty much familiar with this history, RadGeek. But:
1) You’re citing just one example from thousands of pagan cultures;
2) All the Romans wanted was Christians to pay lip service to the public cults — yes, to Christians that seemed very bad, but the Christian attitude was pretty much incomprehensible to a pagan official. When the Christians wouldn’t “play along”, they looked like subversives;
3) You talk about the characteristics of the late Empire as if they applied to all 1000 (or 2000!) years of Roman government, and, in particular, you are pointing to a time when Roman paganism was largely dead as a living religion and was being used as a political tool to cobble together a multi-national empire — this is a bunch of tyrants USING paganism; and
4) Anyway, Jews were exempted from the public cult performances, so the Romans could even be tolerant of that if the religion was old.
So, I really don’t think you’ve touched my point, which is not really that controversial, and is not meant as a criticism of monotheism.
Sorry, I thought of my summation just after I hit “Submit”: I think you are mistaking a *political* intolerance of any hint of subversiveness in an autocratic empire with religious fanaticism.