Department of Pro Poly…
…Sub-Department Of Not *That* Kind Of Poly [1]
Last week friend EHS sent me a link to an article, Monotheists Are The Worst, with the intro, “Thought you might appreciate this.” So, someone *has* has been reading my screeds against religious nonsense and bigotry thoughtful critiques of the dangers of entangling mythology and supernatural beliefs with cultural institutions and government.
The article reminded moiself of the many of the issues my fellow bookies [2] and I wrangled with during my decade-plus-long participation in a Hillsboro United Church of Christ book study group. [3] The books we chose to read and discuss had a connection to religion/spirituality in some way but were nonfiction (so, no scriptures – sorry, any biblical literalists [4] ), and ranged from comparative theologies to history and science and politics and biography and philosophy and essay collections….
My summation of the article’s provocative but not unfamiliar (to moiself, at least) premise: our world’s cycles of progress and regression can be attributed to the fact that over half of the planet’s supernatural-believing peoples subscribe to monotheistic religions. Monotheism leads to a concentration of power, rigidity and totalitarianism (your god doesn’t share power, so why should your ruler?), and that One True God ® “…never has faults, never varies his thinking, is perfect….” In monotheistic societies the one god idea extends beyond religion; it is conflated with every aspect of life – particularly, power and leadership – and thus associates the supposed attributes of the One True God ® (e.g., gender and ethnicity) with mortals who share the traits of the One True God ®. And guess what gender is attributed to every monotheistic god?
Our book group never got around to reading this.
“Karl Marx called religion the opium of the masses, but I disagree. It’s monotheism that fits this definition only.
In polytheistic religions, gods can have faults. They can have different and contradicting views of things. They can be questioned more. They differ from one another.
It’s harder to say that a society should be ruled by men when goddesses are part of the pantheon you worship. It’s easier to accept people and their differences if your gods don’t all have the same hair color or make the same choices or love the same kind of people.”
( Monotheists Are The Worst: They are how we got here
by Lilith Helstrom; excerpts; my emphases )
Of course, that second supposition – the alleged flexibility and tolerance fostered by polytheism – doesn’t hold up upon examination. The prime example would be the historically polytheistic cultures forming what is now Hindu-dominated India. Hinduism had/has a pantheon of deities, [5] whose avatars have different genders and species (not to mention number of limbs…but the human-looking gods in the pantheon have the same hair color as the humans.). Yet these pantheistic cultures found it quite easy to say that their societies should be ruled by men, then and now.
“India, despite making strides in development in the past three decades, lags behind on gender equality. It ranks 131 of 188 countries on the U.N. Development Program’s Gender Inequality Index Dowry, female infanticide and women’s education are persistent issues despite decades of successive governments’ efforts to address them…..the problems in India are not limited to villages and uneducated people — the behavior of outspoken critics of sexism shows how deeply entrenched these attitudes are.”
( “Why India’s modern women say it’s a ‘burden’ to be female,”
by By Vidhi Doshi, India correspondent for The Washington Post )
As for polytheism making it “…easier to accept people and their differences,” just ask any practicing Muslim in India about their treatment by the Hindu majority.
Like the Monotheists Are The Worst author, I am religion-free, and wish that more [6] people viewed the world in the same way. Unlike the author, I do not think that
“….our society would be vastly better, even (if it were still) full of religion, if we had pantheons instead of monotheisms.
Pantheons can absorb new gods. Pantheons can therefore absorb new cultures and types of people. Pantheons can grow and shift as a religion. Pantheons can evolve.
But monotheisms are stuck in one place, stuck in one time, forever, trying to imprison us all with their rigidness.”
But I’m quibbling here, with her use of one adjective: vastly. I *do* think society would be better (or at least, different) with pantheisms instead of monotheisms.
And I do think that we’d all be better by considering more beyond-the-ordinary-POV articles like these. Give it a read, sez moiself. And thanks for the link, EHS.
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Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself. Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [7]
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Department Of I’m Still Laughing At This
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [8]
The three monotheisms share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women, and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted.
( Michel Onfray, French writer, philosopher, teacher ) [9]
* * *
May you take time to enjoy an old joke that still gets you laughing;
May you cast a critical eye to the ___-isms in your own life;
May you devise a pantheon of deities that would be beneficial
(or at least, entertaining) for humankind;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] And why did your mind go there first?
[2] My affectionate name for the book group members.
[3] The church MH and I and our offspring attended, and were members of, until we outed ourselves as religion-free.
[4] Yeah, like there are so many reading *this* heathen’s blog.
[5] Although and actually, from my years of studying and reading about I think it is more accurate to describe Hinduism as a form of polytheistic monotheism – as in, the multiple deities/avatars are a useful tool for humans to try to understand the incredible and overwhelming abundance of that which is All…which is a lot more complicated issue and deserves more discussion than I care to devote to in a footnote.
[6] Okay, ALL.
[7] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[8] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[9] I think there should be a ninth footnote. And now there is.
