Though no gods would be ideal, many gods are preferable to one god

As I wrote about on my HinesSight blog yesterday, the Artemis II voyage around the moon that ended with a splashdown in the Pacific yesterday showed the inspiring best of science and technology, while the Iran war negotiations are a disturbing reflection of the worst of humanity.

It was beautiful to see the photographs of Earth from space, which naturally showed no dividing lines between nations. Astronaut Victor Glover said during the voyage to the moon:

“Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful. And from up here, you also look like one thing. Homo sapiens, all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like, we’re all one people.”

I sure wish the leaders of the United States, Iran, and Israel could take that to heart. Because the Iran war is bringing out the worst of humanity — our cruelty, our lies, our lack of compassion for people who don’t belong to our “tribe.” All three nations are behaving badly.

One problem, among many with the Iran war, is monotheism. United States leaders believe God is on their side. Iranian leaders believe Allah is on their side. Israeli leaders believe Yahweh is on their side. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all believe there is only one god. But they vehemently disagree about the nature of that one god.

An article in The New Yorker by Manvir Singh, “How God Got So Great,” argues that the Big Three monotheistic religions (Singh is a Sikh, a smaller version of monotheism) have become the world’s predominant faiths because a belief in one god draws people together in a way that polytheistic religions don’t. This is largely due to what’s been called the “Mosaic distinction,” a fancy term for if you don’t believe in my god, you’re a damn idolater!

Monotheistic religions may have less to do with counting gods than the word suggests. Although Grossberg finds no stable positive meaning of the claim that “God is one,” he does identify a recurring negative function: the denunciation of idolatry.

…Is anti-idolatry the core of monotheism, then? Several writers have argued as much. The Israeli philosophers Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit made the case in their book “Idolatry” (1992), though the argument is most closely associated with the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In two volumes—“Moses the Egyptian” (1997) and its sequel, “The Price of Monotheism” (2010)—Assmann contends that monotheisms are defined by a “Mosaic distinction” separating true from false religion.

These religions, and these religions alone, generate the categories of heretic and unbeliever, false god and idolater, even Devil worshipper. In Assmann’s view, ancient Israelite religion marked a decisive rupture not just because it insisted on God’s singularity but because its exclusionary logic supplied a template for later divisions and conflicts, including those “between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christians and Jews, Muslims and infidels” and, later still, “Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Socinians and Latitudinarians.”

The Mosaic distinction helped produce the idea of religions as distinct identity groups. In Greco-Roman antiquity, people adopted new gods—including imports from as far away as Egypt and Syria—without relinquishing their existing cultic commitments. Gods were “supplements rather than alternatives,” as the Harvard classicist Arthur Darby Nock put it. Only after an ascendant Christianity cast paganism as its opposite did it become possible to think of “conversion” in the modern sense.

While Singh notes that Hinduism and Buddhism spread widely without being monotheistic religions claiming to speak for the One True God, it does seem that monotheism encourages an us-versus-them attitude. There’s only one god; my religion knows what this god wants; so if you don’t believe in my god you’re a useless pile of spiritual shit. Roughly speaking.

Imagine if Christianity, Islam, and Judaism were part of a polytheistic band of religions. Then the leaders of the United States, Iran, and Israel would likely be saying, Of all the gods, ours is the wisest and most powerful; he/she/it can kick the butt of those other gods. Roughly speaking.

I’d prefer this to an attitude that the one and only god is on our side, because that encourages disparagement of anyone who doesn’t embrace the religion of that one and only god. It also encourages efforts to convert unbelievers to believers in that religion, this being what the one and only god supposedly wants. (Judaism being an exception, as I haven’t heard of Jews going door to door looking for converts.)

Singh’s article contains other interesting observations about monotheism. For example, how something so simple as “only one god” can be so difficult to define in practice. Christianity speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A polytheistic religion would see these entities as being different gods, but Christianity labors to explain how the Trinity actually isn’t three separate gods but a single manifestation of one god.

Monotheistic religions also have a counter-god of sorts, like a Devil or Satan with godlike powers but who is subservient to the Almighty God. Well, that sure sounds like polytheism. If you want a crystal clear conception of god with no contradictions, become an atheist. Works for me.