Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
Their worshippers had no quarrel with each other. Polytheism, by its very nature and the necessity of its being, is tolerant. All its rabble of gods have a mutual understanding, and are banded together against the only One that says, 'Thou shalt have none other gods beside Me. But now, I take this vision in a meaning which the prophet had no intention to put on it.
If so, to worship him would be no degradation to the soul; even if absolute omnipotence were not attributed, nay, nor a past eternal existence. It thus became clear to me, that Polytheism as such is not a moral and spiritual, but at most only an intellectual, error; and that its practical evil consists in worshipping beings whom we represent to our imaginations as morally imperfect.
If there is but one God, who is the fount and cause of all being, it is easy to see why the truths of science should be universal and absolute, rather than local and diverse, as they would be were they subject to the jurisdiction of various local deities. The universality of nature's laws was inconceivable under polytheism. Monotheism thus found a ready access to many minds.
Nor is it long before we ascribe to them thought, and reason, and passion, and sometimes even the limbs and figures of men, in order to bring them nearer to a resemblance with ourselves." Hume asks whether polytheism really deserves the name of theism.
Miss Hepzibah Tarbell, daughter of that archenemy of his kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family, accusing her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the magnetic needle.
Thus Varro had arrived, with the help of Posidonius and the Stoics, at a monotheistic view of the Deity, which is at the same time a kind of pantheism, and yet, strange to say, is able to accommodate itself to the polytheism of the Graeco-Roman world.
I am not displeased with the inquiry into the origin and nature of the gods of polytheism, which might deserve the illustration of a riper judgment. Upon the whole, I may apply to the first labour of my pen the speech of a far superior artist, when be surveyed the first productions of his pencil.
And so do the mob of Christians in our day, following the heathen vulgar or by unbroken tradition. For in holy writ is no polytheism of any sort or kind. "We have not invented so much as a form or variety of polytheism. The pagan vulgar worshipped all sorts of deified mortals, and each had his favourite, to whom he prayed ten times for once to the Omnipotent.
Richard Winter Hamilton, reflecting that sacrifice to heroes is reserved until after sunset, recalled William Carey, eight years after his death, as "wielding a power to which all difficulties yielded, but that power noiseless as a law of nature; great in conception as well as in performance; profound as those deep combinations of language in which the Indian philosophy and polytheism hide themselves, but gentle as the flower which in his brief recreation he loved to train; awful as the sage, simple as the child; speaking through the Eastern world in as many languages, perhaps, as 'the cloven tongues of fire' represented; to be remembered and blessed as long as Ganges rolls!"
Talmudic Judaism and Oriental Christianity despised idolatry and worshipped the same Jehovah, even though they disputed with each other, and indeed, among themselves, concerning the various attributes, amorous pursuits, and lineal descendants of the Godhead. Now, to one who chose to regard himself as a prophet, Monotheism had distinct advantages over Polytheism."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking