What caused the spread of monotheism?

Not the Christians. The Hebrews.

Meme Selection.

One superwizard is easier to worship than 20 superwizards.

you can’t make any money from your god if you acknowledge other religions gods existing too

Colonization… (it was not spread by and large by choice).

lol, first by Christians, learn to history

Monotheism is incredibly useful in the way it limits any living rulers detractors. In a polytheistic culture you will eventually have living people who specialise in being in touch with the individual gods, you will also have their followers, if they get too big because that god is cool and doesn’t make them do what your god does then your in the shit. If you can persuade everyone that there is only one god and what you are telling them is what he says, well you are gonna have a helleva lot less hassle from the people.

The threat of eternal damnation and torment.

@Jeruba- Actually, Zoroastrianism predates Judaism. This may be the world’s first monotheistic religion.

I want to say power. so I did

Simplicity?

by not washing your hands correctly , if only we had purel back them godsdammit….frak.

Imperialism
Destruction of local cultures
Murder of pagans and other heathens
Other atrocities

The Chinese have held that there is a single ‘creator’ as an omnipotent force since the earliest records.

Another early major monotheist teaching was with the Egyptians. I just read a theory that the multitude of “Gods” we have heard about was really just the different aspects of “the divine” or the One God.

christian wars like the inquisition or the roman catholic army actually a combination of both created suppression and force to peaceful pagan society’s either fight and die or abandon and join us ideals is what created monotheism

you know there is no other force since the dawn of humanity that has created more hate crime rape murder and pillage not to mention destruction of societies and entire cultures than the christian religion

I don’t want to be a nitpicker, just want to let you know. “Moslem” isn’t really correct to use anymore. The preferred spelling is “Muslim” now because the English mispronunciation of the former word has a bad meaning in Arabic.

Christianity and Islam spread through a combination of colonialism (the Roman and Arab empires, and the colonization of the Americas), trade, and missionaries. Judaism spread through a diaspora of the Jewish people. Civilization had kind of the same outward spread from the Middle East, so maybe something about that area is very well-situated to be influential.

@tinyfaery: empires didn’t start with monotheism.

The ability of the Hebrews to maintain their culture despite obvious disadvantages. While he doesn’t directly address this topic, I highly recommend that anyone interested in early modern human history read “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond.

@Mamradpivo That’s a great book! I’d definitely recommend it. Diamond gives human history a very impartial treatment and debunks some outdated conventional wisdom.

I have read Guns, Germs and Steel and agree with your assessment.

The point about the Jews is an important one. Polytheism is associated with a particular nation. The usual reaction of conquered peoples was to acquire the religion of the conquerors on the assumption that their gods were superior. To the consternation of their various conquerors, the Jews refused to do this. Their religion did not emphasize warrior characteristics, but focused on morality. I believe Zoroastrianism is similar, but for some reason its practice is largely confined to Iran. Christianity and Islam are also international religions in this sense.

I think the emphasis on morality represented a sea change in thought. When I read the Iliad I was struck by how small a role morality played in the book. It can be argued that horrible acts have been carried out in the name of Christianity and Islam, but I believe these religions represent a major change in the way the world is perceived as compared to polytheism.

@LostInParadise Without the socio-political strives of Emperor Constantin, there would most likely not be a Christian religion, if so, absolutely not in the way we know it.

And if you want to believe the bible, the origin of the Hebrews are the fertile cresent of todays Iraq, and if one examines the geographics of the Levant, one would probably have needed to be in a coma to not be aware of the ideas and principles of Zoroastrianism among the Hebrews. Furthermore – in believing the bible – it is clear that the Hebrews were not all monotheistic. There are, in the bible stories, several attempts to rid the people of polytheistic belief.

Reading the Bible and the Koran, I have trouble seeing that monotheistic religions have a higher moral standard than Pagan religions of their time.

Pesticides had yet to be invented.

A couple of things, people.

• Monotheism was not first started by the Hebrews (let alone the Christians). Before several hundred years before the first archaeological record of the Hebrews, the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten started a monotheistic cult based around the Sun God Aten. He basically “retconned” the entire Egyptian religion and replaced it with his new cult, starting a period in Egypt known as the Amarna Period.

• The cult of Aten, like the early Hebrew religion, was not strictly monotheistic in the sense that Aten (or Yahweh) was the only supernatural being that existed. The Hebrews acknowledged the existences of other Gods. The commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” shows this, as does the references to “heavenly beings” and other beings in heaven that Yahweh directly speaks to/of. The fancy religious studies word for this is “henotheism” where there’s a “high god” that ranks above the other gods. But henotheism is not really a relic of ancient Judaism; in modern Christianity and Islam too, with their angels and djinn and other supernatural beings are similar to “lower gods” in early henotheistic religions, completely subservient to the high god.

• The first instance of philosophical monotheism was probably Aristotle’s idea of the “unmoved mover.” Philosophical monotheism was later appropriated by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to describe attributes of their high god Yahweh/Allah. But really, philosophical monotheism has nothing to do with this particular deity (Aristotle was certainly aware of him) and could really be said to just describe the nature of a certain abstract paradox in logic and philosophy (i.e. since everything that moves has a “mover,” is there a first mover? Or is there an infinite chain of movers that goes on forever?) Later followers of religion agreed with Aristotle that there must be some kind of “first mover” and simply slapped on the name of their preferred cult’s high god.

As to why monotheism spread, it’s basically an accident of history. Followers of the henotheistic Hebrew high god Yahweh, whose subsequent cults (Christianity and Islam) spread far and wide, for no rational reason whatsoever slapped on his name to Aristotle’s “unmoved mover.”

As Christianity, Islam, and Aristotle’s philosophy all became politically entrenched in the areas conquered by their followers, so did their ideas about monotheism.

@LostInParadise and others, you are giving “the Jews” far more credit than they deserve for inventing and spreading monotheism. Their religion wasn’t even strictly monotheistic; it was henotheistic, just like the dominant Babylonian religion at the time of the ancient Hebrews (Marduk, the head Babylonian god, was the “high god” of a pantheon of heavenly beings just like Yahweh was).

The ancient Hebrews did not believe Yahweh was an “unmoved mover.” Like every other ancient people at the time, they saw the act of creation as a kind of intelligent sculpting of raw material that already existed (in Babylonian religion, the body of the defeated Ocean goddess; in the Hebrew religion, the “formless waters” that Yahweh divides and separates).

Yahweh didn’t become the “only god” in a philosophical sense of the “unmoved mover” until the Jews met the Greek philosophers. And the Christians deserve as much credit for this syncretism as the Jews. The Jews also didn’t do much to spread their religion. That’s more of a Christian and Muslim thing.

@AstroChuck Actually Atenism is usually attributed as the first monotheistic religion starting in the 14th century BC.

Dang, Qingu beat me to it!

@Qingu The Old Testament is all about the relation of the Jews to the one god. If they believed in other gods, they do not have much significance. For all practical purposes the religion depicted in the Old Testament is an example of monotheism.

@LostInParadise, the line between henotheism and monotheism is not very distinct. In Hinduism (for most of its history), Hindus worshipped either Shiva or Vishnu as a “supreme god” and believed all other gods existed as manifestations of Shiva or Vishnu. The religion typically involved “bahkti” (devotion) to Shiva or Vishnu, or for the Vishnu-worshippers, Vishnu’s avatars Krishna and Rama. Does it count as monotheism if you believe in multiple gods but think they’re all parts or enumerations of a singular high god that you focus all your worship towards?

And most religions, even “monotheistic” ones, are borderline cases like this. I can’t really think of any popular religion where there is only one supernatural being. Usually, in “monotheistic” religions, there are a bunch of supernatural djinn, angels, cherubim, magical saints, and etc, and then there’s an even more powerful supernatural being above the rest, called “God.”

Also, the central idea of the ancient Hebrew religion—the covenant with Yahweh—doesn’t really make sense in a context outside of henotheism/polytheism. The idea of the covenant is that, instead of having to worship a rain god for rain, fertility god for farming, a war god for war, this one god Yahweh will take care of all of that in exchange for exclusivity. It’s sort of like pagan debt consolidation.

But what you call “pagan debt consolidation” is the whole point. If there is one central agent in charge of everything, does that not suggest, or at least make easier to accept, that there are a set of consistent natural laws governing the universe?

@Qingu- And let’s not for get about the Christian faith with their Holy Trinity.

For theists another factor is logic when it comes to the issue of creation. If there is more than one god, what about a god capable of creating another god? Possible or not? I think this is how this kind of thinking got started in Zoroastrianism, Judaism or even by Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten etc.

@LostInParadise, I suppose you could argue that. Though I think that has much more to do with the philosophical side of monotheism, i.e. Aristotle’s “unmoved mover.”

The laws of the universe promoted in the Hebrew Bible are extremely arbitrary, even with a single top dog deity in control. In Job, the power and dominance of this deity is used to criticize any questioning of those laws or attempts to make sense out of them because we are just puny humans compared to Yahweh.

Armies.

The Persians were practicing a monotheistic faith (Parsee or Zoroastrianism) at least 500 BCE, around the same time as the Hebrew faith was being codified. The two major monotheistic religions that actively sought to spread their faith were Christianity, then Islam. Many Muslims do not consider Christianity monotheistic, however, because of the doctrine of the Trinity.

I disagree with the statement “The idea of a universe governed by scientific law is much more compatible with the idea of a single god than with a group of them”. If you wanted a scientific religion, you could look at the god of thermodynamics, or the god of atomic fact. Even the god of water because water does not act like a normal material as it freezes or boils. Regardless, I think that monotheism came into fashion because the rulers realized that it was easier the control their subjects if they only had one god that did everything.

Don’t forget, the major path to conversion was to convert the king or leader. That is the way the Christians and Muslims worked their massive conversion scams. Conquer the country and convert the rulers. The people were whatever religion their rulers decide.

The fact that the renaissance occurred with monotheism is more a result of consolidating the populace, reducing wars that wasted the best minds, and having more leisure time for the growing middle class encouraged an increase in knowledge.

I think that the best minds were religious because the church controlled a disproportionate amount of grant money.

@Ron_C I am not endorsing any religion but only giving a historical overview.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land I’m not suggesting that you are endorsing it but I don’t see how having a single god over many advances science. It is much harder to rationalize a single god, involved in everything rather than multiple gods that split the labor of running the universe. Naming one god instead of many, as Richard Dawkins would say, “is approaching the correct number”.

@Ron_C Also the “one god” paradigm lead to fanatical absolutism; where in a polytheistic culture one must at least be respecfully polite to other god-cults. E.g. Following the cult of Serapis does not enable you to mock the cult of Aphrodite.

The way that having a single god is conducive to scientific advancement is that it suggests a single set of laws that govern the universe rather than multiple stories. With polytheism there may be one story for why the sun appears to circle the earth and another story for why there are different seasons. Having a single god at least suggests that there may be one set of laws that help to explain both phenomena.

@LostInParadise sounds good but in reality, monotheism didn’t do much to promote the single set of law theories. In fact, it allows the clergy the right to suppress any theory that has not already been accepted. Polytheism, at least, as @stranger_in_a_strange_land says, cause other theologies to “be respectfully polite to other god-cults. E.g. Following the cult of Serapis does not enable you to mock the cult of Aphrodite.”

When you have the One True God, you give yourself license to commit innumerable atrocities in HIS name.

My opinion is, still, that monotheism has done more to retard progress than advance science. Look at the last eight years. Politicians used religion to divide the country and foster the current state of revolt in the U.S. They are even claiming that this is a “Christian” country which puts us on the same level as Iran which actually allows clerics to have the final say on law. Only oppression and suffering can come from such a policy.

@Ron_C Bravo! +GA Better atriculated than my answer.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land thank you very much. I really appreciate your comments.

@LostInParadise A dominant monotheistic religion actually retards rather than advances scientific inquiry. Remember the case of Galileo. Also remember legislators trying to surpress the teaching of evolutionary biology.

You have to separate the religious authorities from the relgion. Galileo’s problem was with the Church, not Christianity, which he embraced. I am suggesting that there is an irony in that the Church tried to suppress the inquiry encouraged by the religion.

@LostInParadise In a dominant religion, the religion is whatever its leaders say it is. Those who disagree are outcasts and “enemies of the people”.

No matter how you look at it @LostInParadise the religious authorities are the religion. Very few religion gain large followings without strong leadership. Look at the relative size of the Quakers verses the size of the Baptists. The main difference is that Quakers consider their services meeting between friends.and the Baptists have strong pastors. You could close down the Quakers by closing down their meeting house. Baptists have all the guns, I wouldn’t mess with them.

@Mamradpivo I second @Haleth s assessment of “Guns, Germs and Steel”.

In the case of Galileo, the Church had exceeded its authority. There was nothing that Galileo said that in any way conflicted with the Bible, and Galileo well knew this. He said that the purpose of the Church was to tell “how to get to Heaven, not how the heavens go.” When Newton provided theoretical confirmation of what Galileo said, the Church eventually accepted it. For one thing, it provided a more accurate way of determining when Easter would occur.