Hello soulcalm17

[Belacqua]

And that religious plasticity is probably the best argument that could be made for polytheism. 

Well, OK. Here you're talking about what you consider to be best. I was talking about what happened in history. 

Monotheism begets orthodoxy and rigid intolerance. 

Sometimes. 

The wonderously varied and hellishly contradictory Greek mythos could never have existed under a monotheistic mindset. Instead you see tolerance and acceptance of foreign gods leading to a rich syncretic mess in Rome, because it's just plain dumb to annoy anybody's deity. 

I guess I should elaborate on what I was calling monotheism earlier. I talked about this a little in regard to Indian religion.

We'd need to differentiate between big-G God and small-g gods. The Hindu pantheon is full of small-g gods who get up to all kinds of things and act naughty sometimes. But they are essentially posterior to Brahman, which is what I think of as a monotheistic concept. This would be true also of a version of later Roman thinkers who take Jupiter as Prime Mover, but accept the continued existence of the small-g gods as well. 

The difference is that if a small-g god ceases to exist, the rest of the universe can go on. But if the Prime Mover ceases to exist, everything else disappears at the same instant. (This was always true of Prime Mover concepts up until 17th/18th century Deism.) 

With variations, the Prime Mover concept is called the One by Plotinus (who accepts many lesser spirits), Brahman by the Indians, and 不二 by the Chinese. You could have all kinds of small-g gods doing their thing while being essentially posterior to this highest thing. 

And if you want to call a system with a Prime Mover as well as small-g gods polytheism, it's OK with me, as long as we're clear that there is a highest, ontically different Ground of Being over all of them. 

There's never an evangelical drive to export the Olympian deities to foreign shores. 

Well, the Jews got kind of mad when the Romans insisted on putting a statue of one of their gods in the Temple.