Why are the dominant world religions monotheistic?

Great Debates
21

Christianity has historically converted people by force. Even when it was not done by literal forced conversions the threat of force and the persecution of those who didn’t convert were highly persuasive.

Islam was a bit more subtle. It had official toleration for other religions. However, they were made to pay taxes that Muslims were exempt from. People voted with their pocketbooks in large numbers. That’s how it spread along the Mediterranean coast to Spain, for example.

Most of the earlier polytheistic religions had no powerful priest-class that could enforce the religion on conquered peoples. Wars in classical times were about conquering of land and economic control. The Christians were the ones who changed that, and it’s likely that the Muslims followed that lead. Whether the proselytizing grew out of monotheism or just happened to accompany it is something I don’t know.

22

This is probably better suited to Great Debates than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

23

Yes, this. There’s no undistinguished mass called “monotheism” that has something more appealing to it than “polytheism” as a general rule. We’re talking about Christianity and Islam, which became prominent due to specific historical circumstances.

24

To my non-Catholic eyes, Catholicism, with its Patron Saints of this and that, looks like an attempt at a religion that has much of the appeal of polytheism without actually being polytheistic.

25

Well psychologically it makes sense, especially in a strongly hierarchical society where every organization winds up with one undisputed leader, at least as a figurehead. When were children we believe our parents always know what were doing (at certain ages of infancy mostly, into toddlerhood for some). This feeling of being watched over is always there. In households where the father is the obvious head as was the norm for a long long time the pattern is laid in the mind and then reinforced by religions run by hierarchical men who set god as a male figure. For kids who grow up with a stronger mother in the home it’s not hard for the culture to switch the pattern to male a little later. You’ll also probably find kids who grow up with a balance of power in the home and no clear dominant figure to be more likely to become athiests or switch to a non-monothiestic religion. It’s probably hard to pinpoint when and where this became dominant in human culture but once a cultural pattern is set it is self sustaining until something can come along that can compete with the feedback loop.

26

That’s sounds more like a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, since there was a significant time lag between Christianity and (especially) Islam, and the Greek Philosophers. I don’t see any causal relationship there. Christianity certainly arose in a Hellenistic world and was undoubtable influenced by Greek moral philosophy, but not by Greek scientific thought.

27

I agree. I wonder if those who think people converted because a monotheistic religion is more intellectually satisfying think that there were debating societies set up or something. You don’t even have to go back to Roman times. When Henry VIII left Catholicism, people got converted or else. During Shakespeare’s times Catholic missionaries who got caught got beheaded and had their head stuck on a pole.

However i disagree with your last paragraph. Often conquerors from polytheistic religions didn’t care about the faith of conquered peoples, since their gods were basically tribal gods and were perfectly happy that the conquered kept their own gods - as long as they behaved and paid tribute. Alexander the Great, who thought he was descended from the gods, married a Persian princess in that religion. I was taught that the reason so many Jewish boys are named Alexander is out of gratitude that when he conquered Judea he did not mess with the temple. Non-tribal monotheistic religions seem to get bent out of shape by the idea that anyone can believe anything else, which we still see today.

28

Except that the more we learn about the world, the more we understand that it obeys principles and rules.

I suspect that historical circumstances were the most important cause, but I also think there is something about these religions that tends to make them more relevant to people over centuries than, say, the Greek pantheon.

I’m not suggesting direct causation, I’m suggesting a environment and level of knowledge that is more conductive to their propagation. I’m saying that Christianity is less incompatible with Greek philisophical ideas and scientific thought than Greek mythology, and this may have been a factor in one replacing the other.

As I said in my first post, I don’t take a strong position on any of this. I think it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t consider it more than a partial explaination at best.

29

Gibbon in Decline and Fall had a whole chapeter IIRC on why once Christianity was legal, the entire Roman pantheon disappeared from worship pretty much within a generation. Basically, Christianity (and then Islam) inspired the “go forth and convert them” mentality, while polytheism of the Roman variety was more of a laid-back affair. People just didn’t CARE about the Roman gods, they were just convenient stories and explanations, like the sprites behind every tree and in every brook. They didn’t inspire the zeal of Christianity.

As for the rest, except for a few oddities, it’s Christianity and it’s similar Islam that account for “dominant”, followed by the convenient fact that Europe conquered the world that made pagan/polytheistic Americas, Phillipines, Australia, etc. monotheistic. Oh, and Islam conquered North Africa to India.

30

The Abrahamic religions are spinoffs of Judaism. So it makes sense they have a monotheistic bent. Obviously Christianity and Islam are both strongly proselytizing religions, so I don’t think their spread is surprising. Note that Judaism, the basis of both, doesn’t care much about gaining new converts, and it has trivial numbers of adherents, as world religions go. There are about 14 million Jewish people in the world, the same as the number of Mormons.

So I doubt it’s monotheism specifically that drives growth. It’s monotheism, plus a proselytizing zeal, plus the ideological demand that all other religions are lies, or worse than lies, actual demons working against the cause of the only God that really exists, yours. So we get the big two monotheist religions force converting, and eradicating other religions when they find them.

Of course the two religions with teeth and hatred of all others are going to dominate over time.

31

Muslims think Christians are polytheistic (1+1+1=3 in the view of Islam).

Otherwise I’d venture to guess it’s an accident of history. Christianity is really a blasphemous sect of Judaism, Islam and Mormonism blasphemous Christian sects (there is no major statement or heresy in either one that was not detailed explicitly as a previously held heresy over 1,000 years before they each came to power: note that nothing in the New Testament even forbids polygamy).

Islam is not proselytic, strictly speaking. Technically, they don’t care who is Muslim. Your salvation, so to speak, is not their problem. They just want Muslims to be in charge of everything, especially taxes, and as such, expansion of their believers leads to conversion, since they don’t tolerate pluralistic administrations, governments, or trade systems. *ETA: I don’t mean every single one of them. I just mean the overall gist of the Qur’an implies this.

So it’s not a big surprise that Islam and Christianity (the believers of which DO care about your salvation) have the most believers.

But if you count Buddhism as an atheistic philosophy (though with metaphysical beliefs about spirits, which are not gods), it actually comprises a larger number of believers than Islam.

If you include animists, who believe in invisible spirits but few gods, as well as much of the “other”, you get very close to Christianity’s huge majority.

Not to mention everyone who can’t say their real religion. I would venture to guess that if this were an anonymous poll, the answers would be different.

32

I know exactly to whom and to what you were responding. It was you, not AK84, who reinterpreted the original topic in responding to his question.

33

If you’re asked to believe in one god – preferably one who likes working in mysterious ways, and who as ruler of the afterlife emphasizes rewards and punishments in the great beyond rather than here and now – then it’s not hard to explain why he keeps not showing up.

If you’re asked to believe in thirty-seven different gods – what, all of them have the work-in-mysterious-ways quirk? Isn’t the whole point that each deity has a different personality and different priorities? (And, okay, one of 'em might be calling the shots in the afterlife, but doesn’t that mean the rest concern themselves with worldly affairs? You’re a rain god! That’s your one thing!)

34

In a row?

35

Can’t answer the OP’s question. But should point out that the Roman empire was effectively Monotheistic long before it was officially Christain. Later pagan Roman culture was dominated by cults like that of Sol Invictus which worshiped a single god, and saw other gods as simply different versions of that same God.

By the time Christianity was starting to become dominant even pagans were referring to “God” in the singular, not “Gods”. So even if Christianity had not won out at the end of the day, Roman clearly become Monotheistic.

And of course the Persian empire was officially Monotheistic, with Zoroastrianism as the official state religion for a long time before that (Cults like that of Sol Invictus likely had their origins in Zoroastrianism).

36

It’s because they’re stuck at a stage in a logical chain: animism -> polytheism -> henotheism -> monotheism -> atheism

Over time, belief gets closer and closer to the truth. But it’s just happenstance that we’re stuck in the monotheism phase for the last couple millennia. That’s not so long, as human history goes.

37

It is the combination of monotheism and (especially!) the belief that unbelievers have to be “saved”, I think. If you have the one and only God on your side, and anyone who who agrees with you gets an infinite reward while unbelievers get an infinite punishment then the logic that it’s your moral duty to convert everyone you can and destroy all opposing beliefs is obvious. As is the logic that any measures to do so are justified, no matter how extreme. It’s a worldview that demands conversion by the sword, the slaughter of everyone who won’t convert*, and the destruction of any text or monument or tradition outside your own. In that worldview, if you have to kill ten thousand people by torture to get one person to convert, then you’ve done an infinite amount of good by saving a person from infinite torture; and the tortures you inflicted on the others are nothing compared to the infinity of torment that awaits them so it really doesn’t matter.

*Every person they convince to not believe and child they raise in unbelief is someone who is condemned to eternal torture remember. Which means that killing unbelievers before they can reproduce or can persuade others is not only good, but infinitely good.

I don’t, since that’s the opposite of what actually happened. Under Christianity it became dogma that the universe operated under different rules in different places. There was the corrupt, decaying, imperfect Earth; and the perfect & incorruptible heavens. The discovery of sunspots was fervently denied by the Catholic Church; the Sun is not of Earth, therefore it has to be perfect.

If anyone deserves credit for putting forth the idea that everything everywhere operates under the same set of laws, it’s Isaac Newton, not Christianity.

38

Monotheistic gods are more resistant to people gaining knowledge. It’s more amporphous and it can flow into, and out of, gaps of knowledge more than specifically-purposed gods.

For instance, let’s say you have a sun god. The sun moves across the sky either because it’s a god itself and it likes to fly in nice circles, or some god is pushing it across the sky, and that’s his job.

Okay, so human knowledge advances and we figure out how the solar system works. Now what use is there for a sun god? It doesn’t make sense anymore. Can you chuck out one god and still be assured that all of the other things you think gods cause really are caused by gods? What about when you learn about how the climate and weather works? Do you need your rain gods and harvest gods anymore?

On the other hand, with a more subtle monotheistic god, who designed everything but isn’t necesary to run things from day to day, you can answer everything with “yep, ok, but… god did it”. Figure out how the solar system works? Well that’s just how god designed it. Big bang theory? God said “let there be light”. Evolution? Well - you can take the ignorant route and just deny it, or you can say “Well, yes, it happened, but god guided it!” which is pretty much untestable and meaningless.

Speaking of - that’s the core conflict between theists who believe and disbelieve in evolution. We invented gods to answer things we didn’t know. Early cultures made gods for everything - the sun, the moon, the tides, the seasons - because they didn’t know how anything worked. As we learned more, we went down the list and checked off more and more things that no longer needed to be explained by god or gods because we knew how the natural world worked.

And then we get to evolution. Surely all of the animals and plants that exist are there because that’s how god made it, right?! Surely we humans are special and not just the result of some natural biological process, preposterous! So while evolution and theism aren’t totally exclusive (lots of people don’t deny evolution but just instead say god did it), that was one of the great mysteries that we needed god for, and people want to cling to it desperately.

So when we figured out the solar system, it killed the sun god. When we figured out evolution - it doesn’t quite kill the monotheistic god, because he’s vague and you can just ascribe whatever purpose to him that you wish - but it really strikes people in a very deep way. They may not have a big personal stake as to whether a sun god pushes the sun across the sky vs the earth rotating, but they have a big personal stake about whether or not they’re special and created in god’s image, and the universe is designed for us. The very nature of our species - of who they are - is so critical to their identity, and yet here we are not really needing god to explain it. That robs us of our specialness in their eyes, and it’s a tough pill to swallow.

39

I don’t think that monotheism is the key feature. I think universalism (vs tribalism) is the primary reason some religions are more globally dominant.

Christianity, Islam, Buddhism: their beliefs allow for anyone to be go to Heaven/reach enlightenment.

Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Taoism, Zoroasterism : their beliefs are intimately tied to specific tribes and/or locations.

40

I think if you closely examine religions, the distinctions tend to disappear and what you find is that within each religion (or more appropriately, religious tradition) there are aspects that are “universalist” and others which are “local” or “tribal”.

Take “Hinduism”. To what extent is “Hinduism” a religion? In some senses, it is many religions - each with a local pantheon (which overlaps with others of course, but contains distinct features). Out of this mass there has grown a philosophical tradition that has “universalist” features.

Take Taoism - it has gone the other way. The Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu (excuse my Way-Giles) was a philosophical tradition of universalist application. The Taoism of local Chinese dieties is more local.

Buddhism is even more expressly like this - there is philosophical Buddhism and there is Buddhism of the more devotional schools, with their Buddhist dieties, saints, and heavens (naturally Western adherents are more attracted to the philosophical tradition).

The great monotheistic religions are no different. Folk Catholicism resembles folk Hinduism as much as anything - just replace local Hindu gods with local Saints. Even Islam has, with the popularity of shrines to local “saints” in some sects, some of this.