Hello soulcalm17

[soulcalm17]

I'd be interested to hear of cases where it goes the other way -- monotheism to polytheism.

Sure, Belacqua. I present you some cases.

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:

Administrator Notice
At least some of the copy/paste/spam deleted.  Stop it! 

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.

Okay, thanks for the warning and open this thread again.

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"

[Ferrocyanide]

Hello soulcalm17,
It is a shame that Youtube fell into the hands of Google. They just randomly delete a comment, with no feedback, no explanation. I quote the Bible and they delete it. I talk about politics, science, chemistry, physics.
Once, a biologist said he wrote a lengthy comment about something (not COVID) and they delete it.


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soulcalm17 was saying that there is a piece of text in the Koran that is embarrassing for Mohammed.
soulcalm17 had written in our Youtube conversation:

Also, in there contains warning or cautions about prophet's mistake in some events. How come someone pointed it own mistakes if he made Quran by himself?

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You were talking about this
Surah Abasa 80:1
which I found here
https://quran.com/abasa

I didn’t notice the words “noble tribes polytheist”.
That might be a popular interpretation among muslims. I don’t know. I was never a muslim and don’t know much about it.

The text says The blind person might be mindful. I don’t know what that means. From the context of the text, I judge that “being mindful” is a positive trait, a desirable trait.
Might be? This doesn’t mean much.
The text should state a fact. A fact would be:
This man is mindful.
This man is not mindful.

For example:
“This crayon might be blue” is not a fact.

The text then says Mohammed is talking to someone who is indifferent.
It looks like the jewish god says “I don’t blame you(Mohammed) but don’t waste your time on non believers, on people who are not likely to believe you. Go for the guys who are more willing to believe.”

I see no case of embarrassment there.

Salesman sense when a person is willing. They will tend to focus on that person more. It is important that a salesman focuses on sales, specially when he makes his living on commission.

So, the Koran is giving good advice. When you are out there trying to make a sale, trying to convert someone to islam, don’t spend too much time on someone who is skeptical.
Note: I am not saying that Mohamed is selling shoes, cars, guns. I am saying that for Mohammed, it is important to get more followers.


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Actually, it came from the assumption that the fundamental stuff is matter that can produce living creatures.

 

You think that that early humans started with the assumption that stuff just turned into living creatures?
I don’t think so but you are entitled to your opinion.

I have never heard of a religion where the people believed that matter self organized without the need for aliens.

Why did early human fabricated or made the sophisticated thing about God that is powerful and omniscient, while they just face and understood their seen reality and can run their daily life (i.e by making simple tools for hunt, fire for cook, etc) without some divinity help?

 

Because there was a need to explain the natural world around them. I already explained this. I can explain it again if you want.

It is somewhat hard to understand your english. Yes, it took time for humans to collect knowledge. In other words, they did not know how to prepare silicon, purify it to 99.99999% and make siliconwafers, design ICs on DAY 1.
This is why there were no PCs on DAY 1.
The first step would be to know how to make copper and some of the other elements. Since it comes from the deep past, it is not recorded who the first human was who discovered that.
Logic leads us to think there was a DAY 1 when a human was able to prepare copper.

The same goes for languages. The same goes for cutting hair, making cloths, building houses, religion, preparing food and more.
Such things took time to develop. Different tribes discovered things at different moments. Some did not discover it at all.

So, if someone just life on earth for the first time, I would think that they just face the reality, no time to contemplate about what "behind" things, because they just think simple.

I guess you are saying that when a human is born, eventually they grow up, they don’t wonder about the past.
I disagree. Being curious is to be human. It is natural to wonder what came before him, who was his great-great grandparents and to also wonder who was the first human or have there been humans forever.

They face thunder that so frightening, so they just hiding and cover their ears. I they face raining, they will take shelter. These were what would they do because they had simple thinking.

I think that being curious is part of being human. Wondering things like “Where should I go?”, “Where can I find food?” is something that all mammals think about.
I have no idea if a cat wonders what thunder is but a human would wonder. They would wonder even before developing a language.

If you have no curiosity, then you are dead inside.

Someone still argue that their misery in life made them make that God’s thing. Okay, if there were really no God, they must be just sad, mad, or fear, without referring their emotions for the supranatural thing. If you believe that early human must be less educated in science than modern human now, they will just have negative emotions without crafting some story of supranatural thing that required more intelligence to did that.

You would have to have that discussion with them.
What I said is that humans are curious and at some point in time, a human asked the big questions,. Some of those big questions are “What am I?”, “Where do I come from?”, “What am I standing on?”, “Who made all this stuff?”, “What happens when I die? Do I just fade away?”
Naturally, a primitive human would not have the answer to those questions. Instead of looking at each other’s faces, and saying we don’t know, someone made up those answers. History does not record who that first human was.
It is natural for primitive human to extend himself. He would think “I am something, I have thought, so perhaps there is something that animates those animals, something that animates thunder, .....”

Well, what do you think? Do you think that early humans were less educated in the sciences than modern humans?
I did not understand the rest of that sentence.


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The fact is, the discoveries of artifacts always found that human always did many things with God’s stuff. I quoted article from Britannica Encyclopedia :”As far as scholars have discovered, there has never existed any people, anywhere, at any time, who were not in some sense religious”
If the theory of "human made their own God" is true and inline with the theory of evolution, it must be in early time in human life, that they didn't refer all the phenomena they faced to the supranatural thing. And later at some time, when their brain developed, they made that supranatural thing and created their own religion. But the discoveries proved otherwise.

From what I understand, what you are saying is that at some point in time in the past, humans did not have a religion.
Yes, that is correct, that is the way it would be. It took time for humans to develop a language, to communicate with each other, to create tools, to develop a writing system and paintings.
There is always a first. There was a first moment, a first human decided to cut his hair.
There was a first moment, someone cut his nails.
There was a first moment when someone used animal skin or leaves to make cloths for himself.
There are a lot of “firsts”.

You say that discoveries prove otherwise. Show me the evidence.

Nah, I think when they say people, they mean sufficiently advanced culture. In order to have that kind of culture, you need communication. People need to verbalize their thoughts using sentences.

Look up language evolution. You’ll find a lot of interesting text. Here is one:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...018-9560-6

In fact, perspectives that embrace the idea of “language as action” deal with the issue of language origin referring to evolution of the communicative expressive modality. Acknowledgment that the action system has a crucial role in language comprehension and production has provided new views on the involvement of such a system in language evolution, bolstering the gesture-first theory of human communication, according to which human language first originated as a gestural-based communicative system (Arbib 2005; Arbib et al. 2008; Armstrong and Wilcox 2007; Corballis 2010a, b; Fogassi and Ferrari 2007).

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Third topic is about my assessment on fundamental stuff. I need to clarify, in that post, I already assumed that those possibilities are “the final basic origin of universe” which atheist and theist stand at. And I can say, if you still investigate what is behind my fundamental stuff, it would be unfair. I’m also not asking you: who was made that fundamental matter/s? Because it’s logically inappropriate question.

Why would it be unfair?

And for your third possibility, I'm not going to ask what is behind it again. I just assess by observed nature: there were no example in nature that printer can produce living creatures.

I agree. No one has observed a printer that makes living creatures. Nobody has observed a magic box that poops out a universe.
Along with that, nobody has observed any gods, aliens, alien gods. Nobody has observed these guys make anything.
There is a good reason why we stick with Occam’s Razor in the sciences.


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I asked previously:
Ever read Genesis?

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[Belacqua]

Sure, Belacqua. I present you some cases.

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:

Administrator Notice
At least some of the copy/paste/spam deleted.  Stop it! 

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.

Okay, thanks for the warning and open this thread again.

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:

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This text is hidden from the delicate eyes of those with short attention spans. 

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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.

[Nay_Sayer]

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.

That isn't at all what happened or is happening and you know it.

[Paleophyte]

In Greece and around the Aegean it seems pretty clear that there were lots of gods, and that gradually Zeus/Jupiter came to be thought of as dominant -- almost monotheistic in a Christian way. Of course they were comfortable with symbolic or allegorical representations, so there were always variations, but the later Roman religion is pretty monotheistic. 

Very much no. Zeus was first amongst equals at best and had little to no power in his brothers' domains. The Greek religions, which the Romans co-opted, were never even henotheistic or monolatric, much less monotheistic. We have that from both Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources.

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.

You seem to have that front to back. The early Vedic religions (~2nd millennium BCE) were polytheistic, animistic, and shamanistic in many respects. These eventually transition into Brahmanism around the beginning of the first millennium CE, which is what you find in the Upanishad. That underwent further syncretic fusion with a whole host of local religions to produce modern Hinduism, which is incredibly heterogenous. Importantly, Brahman isn't a deity in the sense that any Abrahamic religion would employ the term but rather a metaphysical concept. It's the "ultimate reality" from which the universe originated and into which it will one day return, similar to the "raw firmament" of western religions but without the requirement of any deity to shape it. At no point to you get anything even vaguely like monotheism.

[Belacqua]

Very much no. Zeus was first amongst equals at best and had little to no power in his brothers' domains. The Greek religions, which the Romans co-opted, were never even henotheistic or monolatric, much less monotheistic. We have that from both Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources.

What we call Roman religion lasted a long time and changed a lot. You're certainly right that Zeus was one of many. 

By the time we get to Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Jupiter is gaining in importance, to the point where he far overshadows the others. Since the philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle posit a highest power - a prime mover ontically different from Apollo or Venus - later writers begin to associate this prime mover with Jupiter. 

As for example in Vergil's Eclogues, where he says "all things are full of Jove; he keeps the world..." 

But there was never a central authoritative source for what people had to believe, so the idea of Jupiter as prime mover no doubt existed alongside other versions as well.

[Paleophyte]

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.

The archeological record shows that the god of Abraham originated in the native Canaanite pantheon with the addition of Yahweh from a foreign source. Yahweh and El undergo syncretic fusion, which is why the god of the OT seems a bit schizophrenic by times. If you fuse an older, wiser head of a pantheon with a red-handed god of raiders and storms you get an OT god who is handing down parables and psalms one moment and slaughtering all but the virgins the next.

Abraham and Ishmael were both fictions concocted during the First Diaspora by priests in Babylon. There's no archeological evidence for extensive early monotheism in the Arabian peninsula, with the first real influences arriving via Jewish communities followed later by Christians. Poltyhesists outnumbered either prior to Islam.

[Belacqua]

Abraham and Ishmael were both fictions concocted during the First Diaspora by priests in Babylon. There's no archeological evidence for extensive early monotheism in the Arabian peninsula, with the first real influences arriving via Jewish communities followed later by Christians. Poltyhesists outnumbered either prior to Islam.

This seems most likely to me, too.

[Paleophyte]

Very much no. Zeus was first amongst equals at best and had little to no power in his brothers' domains. The Greek religions, which the Romans co-opted, were never even henotheistic or monolatric, much less monotheistic. We have that from both Greek, Roman, and early Christian sources.

What we call Roman religion lasted a long time and changed a lot. You're certainly right that Zeus was one of many. 

By the time we get to Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Jupiter is gaining in importance, to the point where he far overshadows the others. Since the philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle posit a highest power - a prime mover ontically different from Apollo or Venus - later writers begin to associate this prime mover with Jupiter. 

As for example in Vergil's Eclogues, where he says "all things are full of Jove; he keeps the world..." 

But there was never a central authoritative source for what people had to believe, so the idea of Jupiter as prime mover no doubt existed alongside other versions as well.

Hard to reconcile Zeus with a Prime Mover given that he was widely recognized as the youngest of the offspring of Cronus and Rhea, themselves the children of Uranus and Gaia.

What we know with reasonable certainty is that virtually every Greek city, town, and hamlet had their own patron god, or goddess and sometimes more than one. We don't see them giving those up in favour of Zeus, which is what we'd really expect from any move toward monotheism.

[Belacqua]

Hard to reconcile Zeus with a Prime Mover given that he was widely recognized as the youngest of the offspring of Cronus and Rhea, themselves the children of Uranus and Gaia.

What we know with reasonable certainty is that virtually every Greek city, town, and hamlet had their own patron god, or goddess and sometimes more than one. We don't see them giving those up in favour of Zeus, which is what we'd really expect from any move toward monotheism.

Hard for modern people to do this, I suppose. Not so hard for them. Greek and Roman myths were malleable and frequently contradictory. For example, Eros is Aphrodite's son but also existed before she did. 

You remember Plato's Symposium. They change the myths all around to illustrate the philosophical points they want to make. 

Later Roman thinkers influenced by Neoplatonism could take a name and plug it in where useful, and not worry about strict adherence to writers like Hesiod.