‘Tis the season, so …
A question I just read on Quora.com asked this: “Is there only one God or multiple?”
Of course, any answer depends upon how you define “god.” There are many thousands of gods worshipped by various religions around the globe, so “multiple” is a valid answer. But some religions claim that their god is the only real god and all of the others are “false gods” or “imaginary gods.” Calling them false gods is specious as that would just be categorizing what kind of gods they were, rather than arguing they did not exist, so “imaginary gods” is the most coherent claim by those monotheistic religious people.
Let’s look at monotheism and whether it is valid.
Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are claimed to be the world’s foremost monotheistic religions. (Making the monotheistic claim is the only way for Judaism to get into the top three, it being a poorly subscribed “major” religion. The last I looked it ranked eleventh in number of believers.)
Throughout the Hebrew bible, you can read the transition of their religion from polytheism to henotheism to “monotheism,” yes, and from front to back, the entire book is needed to see the full story. I am inclined to see this transition as starting from the Canaanite gods. (I believe the Israelites started out as Canaanites.) The chief gods were El and his wife Asherah. You can find both of those names in the Hebrew bible/Old Testament.
El and Asherah had a council of gods, 70 in number, made up of their children. (They must have been “doing the deed” continuously.) Two of their Children were Yahweh and Ba’al. (Sound familiar?) Each of those gods was given a nation or land to lord over; Yahweh received roughly Judah and Samaria. Religious sanctify nepotism.
I am inclined to believe that the “Conquest of Canaan” was a metaphor for the conversion of the rest of Canaan to Yahweh worship (as the chief god among many). There is very little evidence of the battles described in the Hebrew bible in support of those texts. So, they were written to provide a glorious past for a tribe which didn’t have one, and to reinforce the theological position of the god Yahweh.
In the sixth century BCE, King Josiah lead a government effort to eliminate all of the worship of other gods, focusing on destroying the “altars in the hills.” Those altars were associated with the worship of other gods, because one couldn’t worship other gods in Jerusalem without taking one’s life in their hands. There are references to those altars into the first century CE so they weren’t stamped out way back when.
Then Christianity was invented, an offshoot of Judaism, but many Jews rejected it. The reasons were manifest and manifold. Many Christians worshipped Jesus as a god and the Jews already had a god and you can’t have two gods and consider yourself to be monotheistic. Similarly many Christians claimed Jesus to be the Messiah which flew in the face of the Jewish characterization of messiahs. (Messiahs didn’t die before completing their mission, for instance.) Christians doubled down (tripled down?) by inventing a third god, the Holy Spirit, and worshipping it. There is no support for such a thing in scripture.
Focusing on Christianity as that is the religion I know the most about, it is riddled with demi-gods, which should not exist in a monotheistic scheme. The powers of Satan alone qualify “him” for god status. For instance, Satan can hide his intentions and plans from the so-called all-knowing and all-powerful god, Yahweh. Angels are called “messengers” but why would an all-knowing, all-powerful god need messengers? Surely the archangels are demigods. And the demons … and Islam’s jinn. They all possess powers that compare favorably with minor or “demi-“ gods of the polytheistic religions.
And then there are the things Catholics call “saints.” Saints are entities prayed to when looking for supernatural assistance. For instance, Saint Christopher is revered as the patron saint of travelers, protecting them from bad weather, accidents, sudden death, and any other malady that might befall them on their journey. And the definition of demigod is “a being with partial or lesser divine status, such as a minor deity, the offspring of a god and a mortal, or a mortal raised to divine rank.” Since “Saint” Christopher was an historical person, supposedly, he is “a mortal raised to divine rank,” no? And his “attributes” (aka disguises?) are “tree, branch, as a giant or ogre, carrying the Christ child, Spear, shield, as a dog-headed man.” Doesn’t sound like a mere mortal to me, you?
Catholicism is riddled with dozen upon dozens of these “saints.” They have a defined process for determining “sainthood” which seems to be designed to make sure that Popes all make it there. Gosh, Christianity was shaped by the Roman Empire, and Roman Emperors expected to be become gods when they died, so Roman Popes and Roman Emperors have the same pattern, a polytheistic pattern.
Monotheism is a tall tale told so that each such religions can claim “my god is bigger than your god” in some form or other. Sad … but true.
Uncommon Sense 
Tradition … Tradition!
Tags: conservatives, traditions
I was reading a blog post just now in which the author stated “I never felt the pull of tradition for its own sake.”
I have spent some time addressing the value of tradition. I have characterized traditions as “things we have always done that way.” And it seems to me that tradition is a way of preserving knowledge. So, I imagine a scenario in which a member of a tribe sitting criss-cross with a patch of leather in his lap and pieces of flint which he is knapping to make axes and knives and awls. A curious child of the tribe comes and sits watching him. After a time, the child is asked “Do you want to learn how to do this?” If the child answers yes, not only does he receive instruction on knapping, but also on the use of the tools so created, the value those tools have to the tribe and, if he becomes adept, he may end up being the knapper the tribe relies upon, which means he also would need to pass on the skills to the generation following him.
Tradition, that way, is an inherent good in the form of preserving important knowledge.
But tradition becomes a net bad thing when it is honored for just being. So, when automobiles came along, what happened to the traditional process of making buggy whips? When knowledge gets superseded, some arts or crafts are worth preserving, others not so much. We now have extensive electronic mechanisms for preserving and creating sounds, but there is still a need for luthiers to make violins, guitars, and whatnot.
Where it seems that we run off the rails is when we use our social structures to locking in certain skills, thinking traditions to be sacred, rather than just old and time-tested. For example we created craft guilds, not to encourage innovation or the spread of the basic skills, but more to keep “the bums out of the racket.” A practitioner not “guild-certified” could end up face down in a canal, or merely beaten to a pulp. A guild member who innovates and is using techniques not certified by the guild could be expelled, and so on. In this case “tradition” is used to protect the livelihood of the practitioners, not just as a knowledge preservation technique.
Is tradition a net good or net bad thing? Yes. On a case by case basis you can see where things go well or go poorly. The famous case of the Japanese company, maker of the first commercially produced quartz watch, approached the watchmakers in Switzerland who rejected the thing out of hand because where were the gears, where were the jewel? The advent of the quartz watch gutted the mechanical watch industry in just a couple of decades (this, in retrospect, was called “the Quartz Crisis”). Don’t cry for the tradition-steeped businesses, the survivors “retreated” into the luxury watch business and are doing quite well.) And the irony of ironies is the basic quartz time keeper was invented in the U.S. and the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Switzerland developed their Beta 1 and Beta 2 prototypes around the same time Seiko launched its first watch (the Quartz Astron 35SQ).
Today there is interest in learning traditional skills as a hobby activity as well as a business opportunity. Problems accounted in those endeavors are that fairly often the skills needed have to be rediscovered as they died out with the last remaining practitioners. Enterprising re-discoverers also look to find people who still practice those traditional skills, even though they might not have been involved in the use of those skills formally.
So, sing after me … “Tradition … Tradition!”