Mind explaining that?
Possibly some Jews, but few, if any, Muslims. Islam has its own brands of religious intolerance ( as anyone who pays attention thesedays may have picked up on 
), but interestingly enough shared-God-denial isn’t ordinarily one of them. The Qur’an pretty much lays out the “People of the Book” as all being of the same tradition and hence God.
- Tamerlane
Re: Catholics as polytheists (just to keep it simple)
#1 Catholic theology is quite clear that the variety of supernatural beings acknowledged in the faith are not gods, and not to be treated as such. End of story.
#2 Many Protestant groups, especially, use the saints and other aspects of the religion to slander Catholics as non-Christian / idolatrous / heathen / pagan / what have you. Doctrinally, this is groundless.
But.
#3 Many (not most, and certainly not all) religious practitioners who self-identify as Catholic have, in various times and places, treated saints and / or angels as gods. They are never called gods, but they function as such. In other words, these Catholics would consider themselves monotheists, and only outside observers (ethnologists, anthropologists, etc.) would label them otherwise. And then only for academic reasons; socially, it would be rather rude.
For some odd reason, people have a hard time distinguishing between types of folk religion practiced by individuals or groups of Catholics and Roman Catholicism as a whole, painting them all with the same broad brush. Either #2, or “my Catholic faith is carefully monotheistic, and therefore everyone else’s is, too.”
IIRC, early Mormons were taught to say that they were Mormons, not Christians, with the church reversing this teaching in later decades.
Still, I also can’t get my head around calling a group that pays substantial religious attention to Jesus Christ non-Christian…
Early members of the Church were not taught that, AFAIK. We have always called ourselves Christians.
John G. Saxe’s The Blind Men and the Elephant is, I think, very applicable here.
The point, regardless of the reality of the referent, is whether or not two or more people, each attempting to describe an entity, are in fact referencing the same entity. To do a quick parallel, there are clear distinctions between the character of the various deities in the Greco-Roman pantheons that are set up as parallels. The Zeus of Crete is not quite the Zeus of Olympia; both differ from the womanizing Zeus of some of the myths; and all the above do not match either Jove or Jupiter, the two (slightly variant) Roman conceptions of King/Father deity. Likewise Poseidon has multiple characters in various Greek conceptions (deity of horses does not match sea-god) and none are quite Neptune. Yet they all are claimed to be pointing to the same two deities.
In this case, the character of God as known by pre-Exilic Jews, rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, liberal Christianity, mainstream Protestantism, evangelical Protestantism, Mormon belief, and the four schools of Islamic theology exhibits clear differences. Yet each claims to be pointing to the same deity, the one who allegedly had one-on-one sessions with Abraham. How each understands him differs greatly, but all claim to be pointing to the same entity.
Not really correct. Early Mormons were taught to say that all other Christians were incorrect. Actually, they were still saying that as late as the 1980s, it’s just they have started to wimp out lately.
This is not true in any sense. Perhaps you are confusing this with the concept that Mormons do not consider ourselves to be Protestants, since we did not “protest” or break away from the Catholic or any other church, but consider our church to be the “restored” Church of Jesus Christ.
Huh. I figured there’d at least be some Jack Chick types among Muslims, who say that anyone who isn’t worshipping God in the exact same way that they do is in fact worshipping a different god.
Well, there are certainly hard-core Salafis or Wahhabis who insist that people who follow a different version of Islam, such as Sufis or Ismai’ilis or even Shi’ites in general, are heretics and “not real Muslims”. But I don’t know of any claims that such “not real Muslims” are actually worshipping a different God rather than just worshipping the same God “incorrectly”.
Sufis are sometimes accused by hard-line fundamentalist Muslims of deifying other beings as well as worshipping God:
But that’s not the same as claiming that what they call God is actually a different god entirely, the way Jack Chick types do.
Aren’t Protestants already Christians, well, at least a subset of the whole?
Well, the Trinity is complicated, even for those who believe in It, and even more so when you consider the views of others on how it’s perceived. To a Christian, Jesus is God, but to a Muslim or probably a Jew, he’s just another mortal (albeit very holy/inspired/good one). So in that sense, a Muslim or a Jew would say that a Christian doesn’t quite worship the same God, since we worship Jesus and they don’t. Meanwhile, a Christian would answer that Jesus and the God worshipped by Muslims and Jews are two different Aspects of the same Being, and that the Aspect (or Aspects, if you count the Father and the Holy Spirit) worshipped by Jews and Muslims is also one of the Aspects worshiped by Christians.
Quoth Polycarp:
It’s my understanding that Poseidon isn’t particularly Neptune at all, not just “not quite”. Before the Hellenic influence, the Romans didn’t particularly have a true sea-god at all. But when the Greek culture became so dominant, they had to find a Roman counterpart for the Greek Poseidon, and settled upon Neptune, the Roman god of water as a substance. So the sea would be under Neptune’s jurisdiction, so to speak, since it consisted of water, but so (and perhaps more so) would be the kitchen sink. At least, that’s how I learned it from some Latin teacher or another (yeah, I know that’s a pretty pathetic cite).
Are there any instances of Muslims or Jews making such statements, though? IME, as I said in my reply to Anne, Muslims (and Jews) don’t think that the Christian God is actually a different deity from the God of the Torah/Qur’an. They think he’s the same deity, just with some rather blasphemous/idolatrous/polytheistic aspects tacked on by the “not-quite-monotheistic” Christians.
AFAICT, insofar as Christians identify the God of the Old Testament as being identical to the God they worship, Muslims and Jews recognize him as being the same God that they worship. They just disagree with Christians about whether this God actually encompasses aspects known as Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
So the disagreement is about what God is like, not which God he is.
Nope. Sorry. Check your dictionary.
The dictionary does say that “intervene” can be a synonym for “intercede”, but Cunctator is right that “intercede” is the theologically correct term in Catholic doctrine to describe what the prayers of the living request saints to do.
It’s intercession. You can call it “intervention” if you want to but only to the extent that the saints “intervene” by appealing to God. Catholic saints do not themselves intervene in the physical universe or alter the fates of humans. They’re mediators between people and God. Really all Catholics are doing is asking the sainst to pray for them. Even the above mentioned Hail Mary prayer explicitly asks Mary to “pray for us sinners,” not for direct intervention in the universe.
On the subtopic of smug Protestants smugly talking about Catholic polytheism and Saints and superstition, I’d like to bring in as a counter example the topic of the “Incombustible Luther”, a miraculous printed image, made in the post-Reformation era of reason and enlightenment and the death of magical thinking of course, but a miraculous portrait of Martin Luther on paper (I mean, a Protestant miracle, so it’s not idolatrous or superstitious. It’s Protestant, after all), of many copies, which would not burn. If you ate it, as an added benefit, you would be cured of disease and wouldn’t be hit by a truck, etc. But not superstitious. And it’s monotheistic. It’s Protestant, after all.
Catholicism doesn’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing.
Pliny, interceding. Check your theology.
The “correct term” may indeed be different in Catholic doctrine, but what I wrote is quite correct in English. This confusion about authority of language expertise is common enough, but still erroneous. Many an elementary student has made me grin with a haughty comment such as, “You say ‘rust’, but technically that is iron oxide.”
Just caught this. I meant to say Protestants and CATHOLICS. Sorry about that.
What you wrote was misleading and the your misunderstanding of catholic theology went significantly beyond any quibble over the technical/theological definition of a single word.