From: By the Pricking of my Thumbs: Pondering Ponerology
Monotheism is opposed to all systems of moral dualism, asserting the ultimate supremacy of good over evil. The Jewish, Muslim and Christian religions are strictly monotheistic. Monotheism differs from deism in that it asserts that God is not only the creator of the universe and the source of the laws of nature, but is also constantly active and concerned in the world.
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Unesco’s Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST) website -
As shown by the political impact of religious fundamentalism and ethno-religious movements, religious difference is a main factor of contemporary social conflict on a local, national and global level.
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To understand anything properly, we must first delve into its history. In the beginning, but whatever means (I personally favour cosmic evolution via the Big Bang), there was the planet and, eventually, humans. Early humanity equated the creators of life, i.e. females, with the sustainer of life, the planet. Even after males realised their role in reproduction, proto-society was probably still largely matriarchal, symbolising the abounding power of fertility.
We have no way of knowing how long this remained the status quo. It seems that the first actual temples/churches were caves covered with mural art, depicting various ceremonies, one of the the foremost of which was preparation for the hunt. A successful hunt was of paramount importance to prehistoric tribes and many factors went towards the culmination of a positive outcome. These factors would have been invoked during the hunters’ preparation. The weather, the prowess of the hunter, elemental factors present in the landscape and figures that stood in for the animals themselves would have been involved in such ceremonies.
When a proportion of the planet’s human population left Africa in a series of migrations starting about 60,000 BCE, they took this proto-religion with them to (eventually) all the continents of the Earth, using it to explain and comfort in the face of the wildly diverse forces of nature that were encountered on the way. Many are the stories of pilgrimages and sacred wanderings that have come down to us via the mythologies of various cultures. The Hebrew Exodus is probably the most well-known, although there is little historical evidence to support the Biblical chronology of the story. It is more likely that the Exodus episode pulls together several stories from Canaanite history.
The odyssey and the quest still have a strong mythic resonance, from the tales of classical Greece (Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas), through the mediaeval period of stories concerning the search for such things as the Holy Grail and pilgrimages to holy places, down to today’s Hollywood manifestations of the road movie. This stage of proto-religion lasted until approximately the end of the Bronze Age, when the human species begin to settle into more permanent habitations, therefore requiring a slightly different way of explaining the ebb and pulse of the world in which they now found themselves. Pantheons of gods were created for the different needs of the various tribal members - deities involved in the toil of farmers; metal workers; builders; practitioners of medicine now existed alongside the older, elemental versions. This was the beginning of polytheism. Various universal symbols, such as the snake/dragon (an extremely powerful symbol within most religions - one with connections to the original prototype of the Christian god, as shall be seen), tell us that certain themes were nurtured in humankind’s collective imagination from the earliest times. Polytheism came down through many prehistoric societies virtually unchanged.
