I share your dislike of the term “Judeo-Christian” for the reasons you stated and more.
In my job at the Minnesota Legislature, I come across plenty of Republican lawmakers trying to push their Christian beliefs where they constitutionally don’t belong: in public schools, in the bedroom, in health-care decisions, etc. (not as bad as in the South, but this crap happens north of the Bible Belt, too).
When lawmakers with a better understanding of the 1st Amendment’s establishment clause and the separation of Church and State point out that Republican efforts to encode Christianity in state laws are unconstitutional, they reel it back a bit and say they are not promoting Christianity, but rather long-standing “Judeo-Christian” tenants. “See how inclusive we are?”
But it’s all just lip service to help them sweep their real intentions under the rug.
And as if establishing two state religions and not just one makes it okay, right?
That’s because the two mythologies have separate origins. Rome had a history before it got into contact with Greece, and had its own myths and legends that developed in that period. Later, when the contact with Greece was established, Roman mythology was largely aligned with the Greek one - not only in terms of the gods but also by retconning Roman stories into a shared universe with the Greek ones. An example for this would be the idea that Aeneas, ancestor of Romulus and Remus, supposedly left Troy for Italy after the end of the Trojan War. But there were also specifically Roman myths that had no connection to Greece, such as the rape of the Sabines.
The Roman gods, before Greek influence, weren’t even really people. Like, Zeus is a big buff guy with a beard holding a lightning bolt… but Jupiter is a lightning bolt. Roman religion was animist, meaning that everything had a spirit associated with it: There was a spirit of rocks, but there was also a spirit of that particular pebble that you just stepped on, and that individual blade of grass, and so on. The spirits of big, important things, like a mountain or the sky, might be called “gods”, but they were no qualitatively different than the spirits of pebbles and blades of grass.
Probably part of the reason why the Greek interpretation took over is because it’s a lot easier to tell stories about anthropomorphized gods, and people like telling stories.
Whowp! I think you’ve got something there!
And people like telling stories about people. So the gods turn into people.
Quite correct.
That has been debated for centuries.
Many Muslim rulers, when they calculated that collecting taxes from Zoroastrians would be more profitable than exterminating them, ruled that they were People of the Book.
On the other hand, today there are far more Zoroastrian Parsis living in India than in Muslim countries.
It’s not that clear cut, at least not since the Middle Ages. There is some indication/argument that Islamic influence caused a move towards monotheism in “modern” Zoroastrianism. But whether always the case or just in the last thousand years or so, Ahura Mazda has taken the position of sole creator deity and his opposition Angra Mainyu demoted to a lesser and unequal evil spirit or in even more modern theorizing a lesser creation of Ahura Mazda. So still kinda dualistic in nature, while also being technically monotheistic. Sorta (extremely) similar to the God/Satan dichotomy in modern Christianity.
Philosophically, there’s also a question of what constitutes a different god? One bit I remember from my younger days, but can’t cite the source, probably some pablum movie, was to think that everyone who worshiped was worshipping the same god, as they understood the ineffable. They just don’t realize it any more than the three blind men couldn’t understand they were all talking about the same elephant. In that construct the argument is over whose understanding is more complete and accurate …
Can that really be true? Assuming there is a real historical Abraham, who lived about three thousand years ago, then if he has any living descendants today, then pretty much anyone living today will be one of his descendants. It really is everyone or noone?
Indeed, if the people returning from the Babylonian captivity were actually descendants of Abraham, then presumably most other people living in the middle east then were also his descendants? That’s a five hundred year gap with continuous intermarriage (starting with Abraham himself), or am I confused about dates?
Nicely done. By suggesting that almost all of Abraham’s descendants living today ‘are not Abrahamic people’ you create a lot more wriggle room for creative theology.
I like to say the Romans imposed their own layer of Disneyification on the Greek myths.
Perhaps the nearly extinct ancient religion of the Qemant people should be added to this list.
Or perhaps they don’t qualify. “Abrahamic” refers to a descendant of Shem ibn Noah, but the Qement claim descent from Ham ibn Noah:
As someone with no small amount of Eastern European heritage, I’m probably a descendant of Genghis Khan, but that doesn’t mean I consider myself Mongolian.
It’s not a matter of genetics, it’s how people define themselves. While all Jews, Muslims and Christians consider themselves the spiritual descendants of Abraham, Jews and Arab Muslims also see themselves as the physical heirs to Abraham, through Isaac and Ishmael, respectively. Whether they actually are or aren’t, whether other people are also descended from him, or even whether he existed at all, is not really relevant.
You can say it, but don’t lose sight of the fact that these myths really were the popular religion. Most people believed them the way many people today take the Bible literally.
That’s not to say that not everyone did. Ovid had no problem retelling and recasting the myths into completely different things. Dionysius Skytobrachion went even further, completely changing myths around. And there were those who used the situations and characters in satires, like Lucian
It’s easy to read these works and come away with the impression that the Romans didn’t take mythology or religion seriously. But , if so, have a look at Arthur Bernard Cook’s massive opus magnum Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, in its massive three volumes (sold as five to eight individually bound books), filled with tons of illustrations of statues, figures, paintings, temples, etc. and behold how seriously people took their religion.
That’s all entirely reasonable. I misinterpreted your earlier post, and incorrectly took you to be one of the posters who are literally offended by people identifying as part of the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition. I apologise for my confusion.
Hush you. Stop bringing science into theology. 
I’m not offended by people identifying as “part of the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition.” I’m offended by people using the term to justify political positions and/or to assume that everyone identifying as Jewish shares all basic assumptions with the bulk of people identifying as Christian (or, often, with the particular Christian sect they happen to be part of).
I can’t see how this can ever be anything other than a matter of opinion?
Since no god has ever to my knowledge manifested in any objectively measurable form.
The case for pretty much every philosophical question. In this case to the same degree whether one is a believer or not.
If a believer then are all believers actually worshipping the same thing just with different understandings and perceptions of what that thing is?
If one instead sees belief as a fiction created by humans, are all of these different god concept beliefs just variations satisfying the same basic functions?
That is a matter of definition, not opinion. See philosophy, anthropology, comparative religion, and HPS.
There’s the notion that if there is A God, and there can only be that God (“…and he doesn’t dress like that”) then ALL various views are interpretations or misinterpretations of the same fundamental thing.
But the question arises what if your particular misinterpretation is so radical that it can no longer be logically describing the same fundamental thing?