{"id":547,"date":"2016-07-22T12:06:41","date_gmt":"2016-07-22T02:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/hearthwitchdownunder\/?p=547"},"modified":"2018-01-24T13:32:50","modified_gmt":"2018-01-24T03:32:50","slug":"the-monotheist-god-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/hearthwitchdownunder\/2016\/07\/the-monotheist-god-view.html","title":{"rendered":"The Monotheist God View"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

My mum is an Atheist, but she is a New Agey sort of Atheist. \u00a0She doesn\u2019t believe in gods, she doesn\u2019t believe in religion.\u00a0 But she does believe in, or at least believes in the possibility of, certain not-very-Atheist things \u2013 ghosts, powerful and unknowable entities, divination, Reiki and other things like that.<\/p>\n

But she doesn\u2019t believe in gods.\u00a0 She can\u2019t even conceive of the idea of gods being real.\u00a0 She cannot believe that there are beings out there who are all powerful, all knowing and all seeing.\u00a0 She cannot agree that such exists.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very monotheistic tainted viewpoint.\u00a0 Sorry mum.<\/p>\n

Most of us in places like America, Australia, the UK and much of Europe are raised in a Christianised world.\u00a0 The Christian view is that God, singular and only and supreme, is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent \u2013 and probably a bunch of other omni-things. He is the Creator of the Universe and everything within it.\u00a0 He is the All, the Alpha and the Omega.\u00a0 He is everything.<\/p>\n

So it stands to reason that those of us raised in the Christianised society, even if we aren\u2019t raised in Christianity itself, are tainted by this idea of what a God is.\u00a0 After all, we are raised, for a decade or more, with this Omni-ness idea pushed into our heads.<\/p>\n

I was raised Agnostic bordering on Atheist, and even I knew this truth \u2013 gods are all powerful, all knowing, all seeing, all everything.<\/p>\n

It is pretty much the definition of the word \u201cgod\u201d.<\/p>\n

I remember my parents arguing (debating really) about the word \u201cgod\u201d.\u00a0 Mum used to get annoyed with how my dad would use the word, he used it all wrong.\u00a0 But, sorry again mum, she was the one who was wrong \u2013 because she was stuck in that montheistic viewpoint.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Polytheists also have differing views of what the gods are.\u00a0 Some do believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing and\/or all-seeing.\u00a0 Others do not.<\/p>\n

I tend towards the not side of the issue.<\/p>\n

One has to wonder how they can all be the most powerful, when there are many of them.\u00a0 If they are equally powerful with each other, then none of them are the most powerful.\u00a0 If one is more powerful than the others, then the others cannot be gods. It doesn\u2019t really work in polytheism.\u00a0 But I suppose it depends on what you mean by \u2018all-powerful\u2019.<\/p>\n

And if you learn about the gods, from various cultures and religions, you learn pretty quickly that they are not omni-anything.\u00a0 If the Theoi are all knowing and all seeing, how could Prometheus trick Zeus with the ox sacrifice trick?\u00a0 How could Demeter not know where Persephone was?\u00a0 How could Hermes do, well, everything He does?<\/p>\n

And what of the Mesopotamian Gods who were afraid of the flood?\u00a0 What of the Egyptian Gods and the various trickeries of Set, and the \u2018death\u2019 of Osiris?\u00a0 And the Germanic Gods, well, Loki tricked Them all the day long.<\/p>\n

\"abduction
If they are all-powerful how could Prosperina\/Persephone even be abducted? Public domain via wikimedia commons.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sure enough, much of this is Gods tricking Gods.\u00a0 So perhaps, all knowing and all seeing only refers to Their knowledge and view of humans and animals and non-divine creatures and things.\u00a0 But, that is a bit limited isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 So, again, not all-knowing and not all seeing.\u00a0 And you cannot be all-powerful without the other two anyway.<\/p>\n

Our Gods are not omni-everything.\u00a0 They are surely very powerful, they know a lot more than we do and can understand things we are probably incapable of understanding.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

But the gods, in the end, are truly nothing more than extremely powerful beings or entities or energies, depending on how you view them.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t mean they are not gods though \u2013 it just means they are not the popular monotheistic view of what gods are.\u00a0 And we have to remember, the monotheistic view is fairly modern in the grand scheme of things.\u00a0 Even Jehovah-Allah-Yahweh was only one God within a pantheon of many Gods.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That doesn\u2019t make Him anything more than popular, certainly not all-powerful.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s funny really, I happen to agree with my Atheist mother.\u00a0 When it comes right down to it, I do not believe in all-powerful gods either.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t mean I don\u2019t believe in the gods \u2013 I simply don\u2019t believe in the monotheistic view of what gods are.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 You just need to let go of the monotheist god view.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2764,"featured_media":548,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,39],"tags":[22,106,40,24,20,32,29,25],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-religious-philosophy","tag-deities","tag-monotheism","tag-nature-of-the-gods","tag-non-theism","tag-opinion","tag-paganism","tag-polytheism","tag-religion"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Monotheist God View<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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 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