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The Forum > Article Comments > Monotheism: not as simple as you think > Comments

Monotheism: not as simple as you think : Comments

By Peter Sellick, published 14/9/2009

Christianity, Islam and Judaism are simplistically described as 'the great monotheistic faiths'.

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Yes, Peter,
They are inanely nasty - just a bunch of crackers filled with vicious hate avoiding any reasonable analysis.
Posted by Constance, Monday, 14 September 2009 1:44:15 PM
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What is hilarous is the nasty posters explanation of the universe. Their pseudo science takes so much faith to believe and yet they speak with such 'authority'. Looking at the sites Ho Hum has inserted says it all really. The pathetic attempts of man to explain away their Creator knows no bound. The puny little fists and mouths they wave at the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob is nothing short of pathetic. The apostle Paul put it so nicely when he spoke of the foolishness of those who denied what is so obvious to even children. I wonder how many of these posters will pay someone to say nice things about them at their funeral and pretend they have gone to a 'better' place.
Posted by runner, Monday, 14 September 2009 2:41:07 PM
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An apalling serve of garbled crapola.

Only Judaism and Islam qualify as monotheistic. Christianity is better described as polytheistic.

The struggle among the people of Israel expressed in Genesis to establish monotheism, and the commandments of Yahweh, have obviously failed, since if you flick 300 pages later into the Bible, we now have three deities: Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity."
Thomas Jefferson
Posted by Peter Hume, Monday, 14 September 2009 4:08:32 PM
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Peter S,
For what it is worth, here is a quote relevant to what you seem to be saying:

“The atemporal God of classical theology has the whole of history present to simultaneous view in a way that has no analogue in human experience. ... The (temporal) God of both the Old and New Testaments seems to have a deep engagement with historical process, with the becommings of the world. .... The God of the atemporal view knows all history and interacts with it in a unified, if mysterious, fashion. The God of temporal process does not yet know the unformed future and interacts with history as it unfolds, responding to its development in the way so often described anthropomorphically in the Bible. The One is the Composer of the whole cosmic score; the Other is the Great Improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity (in Arthur Peacocke’s striking phrase) of the cosmic performance. It is clear that the God of temporal process is the more vulnerable in relation to creation than is the atemporal God of classical theism. The converse of that is that it seems that the atemporal God presents greater difficulties for theodicy than does the God of temporality. ... While the former ... is the one endorsed by much of the classical Christian traditions, it is the latter ... which I believe accords best with late twentieth-century thought, both scientific and theological.” [John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, YUP 1998, pp. 72-74].
Posted by George, Monday, 14 September 2009 8:53:12 PM
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richard dawkins in the wall street journal:

Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: "Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists. Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation! It doesn't matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me. If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant? Such arrogance! Such elitism."

Well, if that's what floats your canoe, you'll be paddling it up a very lonely creek. The mainstream belief of the world's peoples is very clear. They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists. If sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap-heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again. Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten onto their God, and they will brand you an atheist. They'll be right.
Posted by bushbasher, Monday, 14 September 2009 10:34:18 PM
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I have recently spent an enjoyable time conversing on another thread with davidf and others about Genesis.

During that time we had occasion to compare Gilgamesh (A Sumerian fable written long before the Hebrew Bible and the source of the flood narrative) with the Genesis God.

The Gods in the Gilgamesh tale were just as capable of capricious behaviour toward human as the one in Genesis but the attitude from the writer was less than fawning.

“Even the Gods were terrified at the flood, they fled to the highest heaven, the firmament of Anu; they crouched against the walls, cowering like curs.”

Utnapishtim’s sacrifice after the Flood drew the Gods “like flies“.

One got the very real sense that the adulation demanded by monotheistic religion just was not there and one also felt that this might have been a good thing. The array of gods reflected traits within us all and man’s identification with them as a collective and individuals may well have been stronger.

Possibly there was also a hint of democracy and healthy cynicism about the motives of the deities. Certainly the motivation to kill or die for one deity among the many must have been less that in monotheistic structure.

An example might well be the Australian parliament compared to the cult of the personality that exists in North Korea. We tolerate our politicians, even admire a few, but know we can't trust them to have our best interests always at heart. Kim however enjoys a God-like status with unquestioning obedience delivered to him from his worshippers.

Seen in that light any out of work deities should be encouraged to apply.

Monotheism - not as nice as you think.
Posted by csteele, Tuesday, 15 September 2009 12:44:28 AM
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