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The Monotheist God View

The Monotheist God View

Last updated on: January 24, 2018 at 1:32 pm by Bekah Evie Bel

The Monotheist God View 2018-01-24T13:32:50+10:00 Bekah Evie Bel

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

My mum is an Atheist, but she is a New Agey sort of Atheist. She doesn’t believe in gods, she doesn’t believe in religion. But she does believe in, or at least believes in the possibility of, certain not-very-Atheist things – ghosts, powerful and unknowable entities, divination, Reiki and other things like that.

But she doesn’t believe in gods. She can’t even conceive of the idea of gods being real. She cannot believe that there are beings out there who are all powerful, all knowing and all seeing. She cannot agree that such exists.

It’s a very monotheistic tainted viewpoint. Sorry mum.

Most of us in places like America, Australia, the UK and much of Europe are raised in a Christianised world. The Christian view is that God, singular and only and supreme, is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent – and probably a bunch of other omni-things. He is the Creator of the Universe and everything within it. He is the All, the Alpha and the Omega. He is everything.

So it stands to reason that those of us raised in the Christianised society, even if we aren’t raised in Christianity itself, are tainted by this idea of what a God is. After all, we are raised, for a decade or more, with this Omni-ness idea pushed into our heads.

I was raised Agnostic bordering on Atheist, and even I knew this truth – gods are all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, all everything.

It is pretty much the definition of the word “god”.

I remember my parents arguing (debating really) about the word “god”. Mum used to get annoyed with how my dad would use the word, he used it all wrong. But, sorry again mum, she was the one who was wrong – because she was stuck in that montheistic viewpoint. There are many ancient and modern conceptions of what gods actually are, ranging from all-powerful supreme beings to the more controversial position of them being archetypes and of course everything in between.

Polytheists also have differing views of what the gods are. Some do believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing and/or all-seeing. Others do not.

I tend towards the not side of the issue.

One has to wonder how they can all be the most powerful, when there are many of them. If they are equally powerful with each other, then none of them are the most powerful. If one is more powerful than the others, then the others cannot be gods. It doesn’t really work in polytheism. But I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘all-powerful’.

And if you learn about the gods, from various cultures and religions, you learn pretty quickly that they are not omni-anything. If the Theoi are all knowing and all seeing, how could Prometheus trick Zeus with the ox sacrifice trick? How could Demeter not know where Persephone was? How could Hermes do, well, everything He does?

And what of the Mesopotamian Gods who were afraid of the flood? What of the Egyptian Gods and the various trickeries of Set, and the ‘death’ of Osiris? And the Germanic Gods, well, Loki tricked Them all the day long.

abduction of prsoperina

If they are all-powerful how could Prosperina/Persephone even be abducted? Public domain via wikimedia commons.

Sure enough, much of this is Gods tricking Gods. So perhaps, all knowing and all seeing only refers to Their knowledge and view of humans and animals and non-divine creatures and things. But, that is a bit limited isn’t it? So, again, not all-knowing and not all seeing. And you cannot be all-powerful without the other two anyway.

Our Gods are not omni-everything. They are surely very powerful, they know a lot more than we do and can understand things we are probably incapable of understanding. They may be immortal. They can see more than we do, deeper and further, perhaps even read minds and hear thoughts and see into the future (though not all of them can).

But the gods, in the end, are truly nothing more than extremely powerful beings or entities or energies, depending on how you view them. This doesn’t mean they are not gods though – it just means they are not the popular monotheistic view of what gods are. And we have to remember, the monotheistic view is fairly modern in the grand scheme of things. Even Jehovah-Allah-Yahweh was only one God within a pantheon of many Gods. His apparent rise to supremacy is not, in my opinion, about Him being all-powerful, but it is about the rise of the church among humanity. That doesn’t make Him anything more than popular, certainly not all-powerful.

So it’s funny really, I happen to agree with my Atheist mother. When it comes right down to it, I do not believe in all-powerful gods either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the gods – I simply don’t believe in the monotheistic view of what gods are.

If you are able to believe in ghosts, fairies, angels and other powerful beings, then you are also able to believe in the gods as they actually are. You just need to let go of the monotheist god view.

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