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Updated: May 6, 2025
If then it appears that as man's intelligence and morality develop in due proportion, he advances from a material polytheistic immoral conception of the All, to a spiritual and moral monotheism, it may be claimed that the latter is a less inadequate conception. And similarly with regard to other dependent religious beliefs which usually radiate from the central notion.
The mass of the people became Christians at the bidding of others, and with no sufficient preparatory instruction, without even having passed through all the stages of that polytheistic evolution from which other nations of Europe had emerged before their adoption of Christianity.
In a word: Greek philosophy, independent of Semitic influences, developed the form of the chief types of the theistic argument, but it failed utterly to deduce from them a theism, being throughout in its theology either polytheistic or pantheistic.
Thus the elements of religion are universally distributed in all degrees of culture, though one element is more conspicuous in one place or mood, another more conspicuous in another. In one mood the savage, or the civilised man, may be called monotheistic, in another mood atheistic, in a third, practically polytheistic.
Ea's position, like that of Nusku, was too marked in the magical texts to encourage a conception of them entirely independent of their power to release victims from the grasp of the demons. A hymn to Nebo, which unfortunately is preserved only in part, illustrates the extent to which polytheistic conceptions may be spiritualized: ... Lord of Borsippa, ... son of E-sagila. O Lord!
Their tribal name, "men of fire," and their great veneration for that element have given rise to the conjecture that the Cherokees were originally fire-worshipers, as well as polytheistic.
Fechner, with his distinct earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use it.
Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power.
On the other hand, polytheistic gods are by their nature tolerant: they live and let live; they willingly tolerate their colleagues as being gods of the same religion, and this tolerance is afterwards extended to alien gods, who are, accordingly, hospitably received, and later on sometimes attain even the same rights and privileges; as in the case of the Romans, who willingly accepted and venerated Phrygian, Egyptian, and other foreign gods.
Thus did the different successive states of the human intellect, even at an early stage of its progress, overlap one another, the Fetichistic, the Polytheistic, and the Metaphysical modes of thought coexisting even in the same minds, while the belief in invariable laws, which constitutes the Positive mode of thought, was slowly winning its way beneath them all, as observation and experience disclosed in one class of phaenomena after another the laws to which they are really subject.
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