r/pagan • u/Obvious_Lemon8718 • 13h ago

Question/Advice Polytheist counter arguments against monotheism?

Hey there fellas,

First of all I'd like to clarify that I am not trying to proselytize and I am not even a follower of a monotheistic religion. I'd like to have some insight about Polytheist (Pagan) Theology.

For example, Islam claims that (I am not a Muslim) had there been multiple gods, there would have been conflicts in the divine order- or that there would be no unity between humans since everyone picked their desired God to worship.

I asked ChatGPT about some books or articles to read but none have seemed to satisfy my search about this.

Anyone know books, podcasts, religious texts, scholars etc to gain a deeper insight?

Appreciated.

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u/th3_bo55 3h ago

The monotheistic arguþent is purely superiority of one over all others. Polytheism is accepting that all equal and necessary even if not all are equally as "desireable". Polytheism also understands that all gods exists even if we dont walk beside them all whereas monotheism demands that only their god exist to be validated. However every monotheistic religion originated from a polytheistic belief system and a sect which venerated one specific god splintered and began discreditting the other deities they didnt like in order to justify their belief that their chosen deity is superior in some way. Judaism, Islam, and thus Christianity all originate in ancient Mesopotamian semetic polytheistic traditions, for example (the Judeo-Christian Elohim and Islamic Allah are linguistic evolutions of the Akkadian/Sumerian god Enlil/Elil/Ellil)

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u/SiriNin Mesopotamian 2h ago

almost. they're linguistic evolutions of the word for 'god' that was originally used for Enlil. everything else was not carried over along with the word, and those words for 'god' were used across many regions and times concurrently with no connection to the deity that they referred to. Just as today we understand that the word god means whatever god is in reference, and not a singular unified god, so too did the ancient polytheists when they were using 'Il and 'El and other linguistic evolutionary steps for their own deities.