Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dekervin 5 days ago
That conclusion come from unknowingly defining monotheism as a religious tradition that is close or can be related to the israelite tradition. It's tautological.

In reality many human societies throughout the ages have been monotheists.

2 comments

Also, Christianity at least has never been truly monotheistic. For example the Second Council of Constantinople (I think that was the one) had to go in and weed out the great mass of pre-Christian cruft that had been snuck back in, old Babylonian and Hebrew supernatural entities cunningly disguised as "angels", and then more recently you've got the global veneration of Mary and, although this has mostly faded in the last 100 years, saints, also serving the role that lesser gods served in other religions but carefully fitted up to not make it heresy.

Islam, from my limited knowledge, does seem to be purely monotheistic despite at least one attempt to reconcile with followers of the goddesses Lat, Uzza, and Manat.

What are some of the other ones?
[1] Dinka: History, Religious Systems, and Rituals https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_104

[2] Perspectives on Lozi traditions. https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstreams/cca7ee20-46fa-4585-b1...

Ancient China had a monotheistic religion where they worshiped Shang Di, a monotheistic God without idols, who could not be drawn, and they made yearly sacrifices to at a single Temple.

There are schools that say Hinduism is monotheistic, where Para Brahma is God, and the different "Gods" like Shiva and Vishnu are different avatars of Para Brahma. But there are a lot of schools/philosophies of Hinduism and I only have a surface level understanding.