RE: One God versus many
November 30, 2021 at 1:02 am
(This post was last modified: November 30, 2021 at 1:03 am by Fake Messiah.)
(November 29, 2021 at 7:48 pm)T.J. Wrote: I always found it a little interesting that, to my knowledge anyway, the only religions that cite to there being only one god is Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All the others to my knowledge cite there being multiple gods all with different purposes.
Last time I checked, Christianity also has multiple gods all with different purposes. Like Satan seem like a god ruling over hell. He's not so different from the ancient Greek god Hades, who is supposed to be running the underworld.
Christianity is not monotheism. Christianity is henotheism - meaning that only one deity among many should be worshiped because Christians still believe in a host of supernatural beings, particularly angels and the devil. They are beings created by the one all-powerful Creator - just as the Egyptian deities were the product of the one all powerful Egyptian Creator.
And when it comes to Hebrews depicted in the Bible, they never embraced a pure monotheism, nor was there a single universal religion. Many important biblical characters in post-Exodus times, for instance, had names ending in "Baal," who was a major Canaanite deity. Gideon, one of the most famous of the early Judges, also was known as Jerub-baal, and Saul, first King of Israel, had a son named Esh-baal and this son succeeded him on the throne.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
