(July 12, 2024 at 6:48 pm)soulcalm17 Wrote:(July 11, 2024 at 9:28 pm)soulcalm17 Wrote: Sure, Belacqua. I present you some cases.Okay, thanks for the warning and open this thread again.
In Hindu scripture, actually God is depicting as uniquely one and unseen entity. Not many people know about it I guess. But it was mentioned in Upanishad. Hinduism start from about 3000 BCE (some says 8000 BCE and even timeless according to Hindus people) and as time continue, it goes to polytheistic style and had millions of God. Here is the verses:
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About Arabian Peninsula that are pagans, actually that was a proof that their paganism deviated from monotheism. According to history, Arabs were descendant of Ishmael, the son of Abraham who was also practice monotheism. And as time goes by, they deviate to paganism.
Now, I'm write my self. The verses are as follow:
1. He is one only without a second (Chandogya Upanishad 6:2:1)
2. Of Him there are neither parents nor lord (Svetasvatara Upanishad 6:9)
3. There is no likeliness of Him (Svetasvatara Upanishad 4:19)
4. His form is not to be seen; no ones sees Him with the eye (Svetasvatara Upanishad 4:20)
And even God prohibited to worship at demigods as written in Bhagavad Gita 7:20:
"Those whose intelligence has been stolen by material desires surrender unto demigods and follow the particular rules and regulations of worship according to the their own nature"
Thank you for these detailed explanations. I understand your position a lot better now.
If I'm getting you correctly, I think your view is that monotheism is generally the first, perhaps the default, for any society's religion. But that this may devolve into polytheism over time. I can certainly imagine how this might happen -- for example, if there is said to be one God, but also intermediate beings between this God and humans (e.g. geniuses as in Roman religion, or daemons in Greek) and then misguided people begin to worship these intermediate characters as gods. That would change from a mono- to a poly- vision of things. And of course there are Protestants who accuse Catholics of just this sort of thing, when they say that Catholics worship saints in ways which should be reserved for God alone.
I think you give two examples: first, the fact that Abraham and Ishmael begin as monotheists, and then (somehow) the descendants of Ishmael in Arabia revert to polytheism by Muhammad's time.
Probably you won't be surprised to hear that a lot of us are reluctant to take Old Testament stories as accurate history. Especially the oldest narratives, from Adam to about Joshua, seem likely to me to be myths, made up later on to create a national foundational story. So I'm not ready yet to accept the truth of Abraham's experiences.
Then, even if we take those stories as fully real, we have to ask what people were doing before Abraham and Ishmael converted them to monotheism. There were fairly advanced cultures up and running already in Mesopotamia at that time. If I remember right, the Sumerians were polytheistic, and their culture lasted quite a while. Was that the same time as Abraham? I can't remember. So at least in terms of the history time-line, Abraham came out of a polytheistic culture and converted to monotheism. (If we accept that he existed.)
Your references to the Upanishads are wonderfully interesting and also too hard for me! That is such a complex and fascinating web of thought that I remain a terrible amateur on the subject.
What little I know indicates that there is a highest, indivisible God at the top of Indian philosophy. Though there are so many schools of thought over the millennia that it's hard to make a single true statement. But in Hinduism, anyway, Brahman is said to be the ultimate level of reality, unchanging and undivided, which emanates everything else. What we call Hindu gods are not God in this sense -- in fact the English translation is probably misleading, because they do fill a role very much like the geniuses, daemons, and other intermediate beings in many Western systems -- including some versions of Christianity.
Brahman, I think, is very similar to the idea of God that many schools of Western thought hold to. Plotinus wrote of the One, for example, which seems similar. The familiar Christian idea of God as Ground of Being is compatible, though different in detail.
So in this view, Brahman is certainly a God which is essentially prior to the many gods. By "essentially" I mean that it is the thing that must exist in order for the gods to exist. So that is a kind of monotheism.
However, I don't know about the temporal, historical timeline of people's beliefs. And I think that's what we're talking about here -- whether monotheistic systems existed in history prior to polytheistic ones. It seems just as likely to me that ancient India, before Hinduism got organized together, was a polytheistic culture, but the idea of Brahman was introduced later to unify the very sophisticated philosophy which grew up in Vedic literature.
Again, I don't know which system came first, but it seems likely that a polytheistic system became unified under a single level of Ultimate Reality, essentially converting pre-Hindu beliefs into a monotheism.
Now, a change of subject here:
As you can see, this forum doesn't look kindly on extensive quotes from other sources, even when you're using them directly to support relevant parts of the argument. I don't mind reading long passages, but some people do.
One way to deal with this is to use the "hide" tag. You can type square bracket, hide, square bracket, and then the text you want to quote, and then at the end type square bracket, forward slash, hide, square bracket. This will hide the text so that the reader has to click a button called "show content" to read it.
It looks like this:
Whether this will allow you to post all of what you wish or not, I'm not sure. But it might be deemed more acceptable.
