1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF MONOTHEISM

Monotheism is strictly Western in its origins. Eastern societies are either polytheistic or ancestor oriented; in both cases, this sidetracked any drive towards religious centralization and totalitarianism. However, monotheism was not the region's first religion. In the West, religions with polytheistic tribal gods began before recorded history. The first Western empires (Egypt, Sumer, etc.) all had many gods, as their surviving writings and temples demonstrate. We can date the origins of monotheism very specifically.

1.1 Monotheism - origin and value system

While most people don't know it, the first historical monotheist was the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaton (~1350 BCE), father of the famous King Tut. Akhenaten set the pattern for the emergence of monotheisms. The pattern is that monotheism is imposed from above, usually by an all-powerful king or emperor. It is necessary to have political power in order to remove and destroy the pre-existing polytheistic religious authorities and to suppress various factions of monotheists (i.e., "heretics"). Akhenaton built a new capital, Amarna, to rule over his new religion. However, upon Akhenaton's death, his sun-god worshipping religion was immediately overthrown and destroyed by the unbowed, polytheistic ruling class. Amarna was abandoned to the desert, where it lay unknown and untouched for 3,000 years, until a French Jesuit tripped over it in 1714.

Even in failure, Akhenaton's monotheism demonstrated the behaviors of monotheists that have consistently reoccurred. These behaviors apply equally to all religions, and they can be discussed in the abstract, without singling out a particular monotheism.

1.1.1 The core values of Monotheism

Starting with Akhenaton, monotheism has been characterized by what scholars call exclusivism, the belief that worship is to be offered to a single god to the exclusion of all other gods and goddesses...some monotheists insist that anyone who dares to offer worship to a false god is worthy of not merely exclusion but death. Indeed, the most militant monotheists - Jews, Christians, and Moslems alike - embrace the belief that God demands the blood of the nonbeliever...

the most rigorous biblical authors do not define wickedness and sin in terms of moral and ethical conduct. Indeed, they are far more concerned with the purity of religion rather than the pursuit of justice. The worst sin of all, as they see it, is not lust or greed, but rather the offering of worship to gods and goddesses other than the True God...

The strict and uncompromising attitude of monotheism, approvingly described in the Bible itself as "zeal", sometimes manifests itself in a strange phenomenon called rigorism - that is, extreme strictness in religious belief and practice. (paganism too produced its own rigorists)...But tragically rigorism is not always or only expressed through acts of self-discipline and self-affliction. Extreme strictness in religious observance...becomes quite literally a matter of life and death...Turned outward, rigorism may inspire the same man or woman to punish others who fail to embrace the religious beliefs that he or she finds so compelling. The history of religion reveals that rigorism in one's beliefs and practices can readily turn into the kind of zealotry that expresses itself in unambiguous acts of terrorism...Examples of this can be found in every faith, in every place and in every age, including our own.

- Johnathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism -- Henceforth, "GAG".

In what follows, one should always keep in mind that these behaviors are theology-agnostic. It is important not to start flinging accusations of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or persecution of Christians around when the detailed failings of someone's particular monotheism are being discussed. I'm not picking on any one religion. I'm picking on them all.

So, in reading the various historical facts below, keep in mind that exclusivism, rigorism, zeal, and terrorism are the common coinage of all monotheisms. In short, monotheism is tribalism on steroids, tribalism with a bureaucracy.

Orwellian propaganda techniques have amplified a fundamental problem of monotheism, namely Manichaeism - dividing the world into absolute good and absolute evil. Manichaeism is hard to completely prevent if you start from state-enforced monotheism, as the West has. You can hear the Manichaean style of "argument" in just about any fundamentalist monotheistic sect you care to study, whether it be Christian, Jewish, or Islamic.

1.2 Jewish monotheism and theocracy

The first successful monotheism began at the end of the bronze age (~700 to 500 BCE). True to pattern, it was imposed on a polytheistic Judea by King Josiah (640-609 BCE), who reigned just before the Babylonian Captivity (597-539 BCE). It was Josiah who, controversially, "discovered" the book of Deuteronomy and added it to the Torah. Of course, Deuteronomy was full of draconian punishments for the slightest deviation from "god's laws" - another common pattern in monotheisms.

Indeed, as it turns out, the newly discovered scroll is perfectly consistent with Josiah's own understanding of what God demands of the Israelites. It is precisely this coincidence that prompted one 19th century Bible scholar to call the lost scroll - which scholars believe to have been most or all of what we know today as the Book of Deuternonomy - "a pious fraud". Fraud or not, however, the scroll allows Josiah to claim that he is acting on specific instructions from God in escalating and expanding the purge he has been carrying out with such zeal...Idols and other paraphernalia for the worship of pagan gods and goddesses are dragged out of the Temple and burned down to ash...

- GAG

Judaism constantly reminds us that it is the oldest surviving monotheistic religion. What is left unmentioned is the trail of violence and subjugation that ALL monotheistic religions leave in their wake. It is the nature of monotheism not to bend or compromise, although monotheisms that flourish usually co-opt local cults and festivals in order to make the subjugation more palatable.

Some people argue that the Jews must be exceptionally obnoxious in order to have been banned, expelled, persecuted, and ghettoized so many times.

Prior to the rise of the Catholic Church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional persecution for their refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and professed superiority of their religious culture - that is, for the content of their unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of "a chosen people", while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world. Among cultures that worshipped a plurality of Gods, the later monotheism of the Jews proved indigestible... Christianity and Islam both acknowledge the sanctity of the Old Testament and offer easy conversion to their faiths. Islam honors Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as forerunners of Muhammed...Judaism alone finds itself surrounded by unmitigated errors. It seems little wonder, therefore, that it has drawn so much sectarian fire. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its literalism, and it is at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other religion.

- Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp93-4.

(NOTE: Harris is a Jewish atheist. He is also a screaming Islamophobe.)

My opinion is that, as the oldest monotheism, coming from a tiny population that never amounted to a powerful empire, Judaism constantly put itself in front of oncoming trains and got run over. The theological outcome of any particular suppression/diaspora was unpredictable. It could lead to a more militant and intolerant Judaism (Zionism after 19th century pogroms); or it could lead to a more tolerant Judaism (e.g., the Talmud after the Roman conquest of 70 AD):

Via the Talmud, Judaism made its peace with paganism. The call to zealotry is replaced by the celebration of "acts of loving kindness", and rigorism is confined to the study and observance of religious law. The rabbis whose teachings are collected in the Talmud are not Bible literalists or religious fundamentalists: they preserve the passages of the Torah that command a faithful Jew to keep the Sabbath and the dietary laws of kashrut, but they overlook the passages that call on a faithful Jew to take up arms against the "abomination" of paganism.

- GAG

1.3 The Western theocracies up to the Dual (Industrial, French) Revolutions

Unlike Judaism, Catholicism and Islam came to rule powerful theocratic empires, so that they played the role of the oncoming train to any religion that got in their way.

1.3.1 Catholicism

The moment that Catholicism was made the state religion of Rome by the murderous Constantine, it began to destroy Graeco-Roman Civilization - a crime of huge magnitude. The burning of the Library of Alexandria and the murder of the scholars there was a notable example.

Rome under the Christian emperors set out to destroy its own rich patrimony - the writings of pagan poets, philosophers and historians, which were among the highest achievements of classical civilization. Scribes were forbidden to copy out old pagan texts on pain of death...Existing texts were seized and burned...

- GAG

The list of Catholic crimes of zealotry after the fall of the Western Empire is long: the unprovoked assault that was the Crusades (which even attacked and looted Christian Constantinople), the slaughter of the Albigensians ("kill them all, God will know his own." - how quintessentially monotheistic), the 400 year reign of terror that was the Inquisition, the Borgia Popes, the Spanish expulsion of the Jews in 1492, the destruction of the native civilizations of the Americas and the enslavement of their peoples, all the way down to the Catholic collusion with the Fascists and Nazis.

1.3.2 Islam

In less than two hundred years from its founding, Islam ruled from Spain to Persia. Interestingly, it recognized Christians and Jews as fellow "people of the book" and allowed them to practice their religions, albeit with penalties. Classical Islam, up to 1200 AD was literate and scientific, bequeathing the West algebra and copies of the classical writings destroyed by the Catholics, and allowing Jewish scholarship to flourish. But, about 1200 CE, in reaction to a growing agnosticism among the sophisticated Moslem philosophers that predated the Enlightenment by 700 years, it suffered a massive outbreak of fundamentalism and began its journey to its current fossilized state.

I wrote about the Moslem fundamentalist backlash in 2008, and republished it here at c99p in 2018. The 2008 version generated a really good discussion.

1.3.3 The state of play as of 1789

The Christian and Islamic theocracies, despite being wracked by heresies, rebellions, and Christo-Islamic wars, endured for over a thousand years. From the point of view of this outline, nothing much changed religiously.

It was the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 was the impetus that kicked off the Renaissance and put Europe on the path to modernity. The Renaissance, in turn, provoked the Protestant Reformation, which then led to the bloodbath of the Thirty Years War and the discrediting of religious fanaticism in Europe. From 1648 onwards, Europe was turning to religious moderation and technical advance. These changes were not pronounced by theocratic edict, but accumulated out of changing social practices

So, by 1789 in the West, Protestant pluralism had cracked the totalitarian control of the Catholic Church. The Enlightenment had been raging for almost 50 years. So, Christianity was moving on, despite the various rabidly fundamentalist sects of Calvinism. Nevertheless, the Inquisition's last victim was murdered in 1826.

The Islamic world was in decline, the result of its fundamentalism causing it to take a pass on the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It was rapidly falling behind the West.

The Jewish community was still largely ghettoized, except in Poland; and Poland was about to be dismembered in 1795. The Polish Jewish community fell largely inside the part given to the Russian Empire and was treated horribly.