No monotheism

So if humans hadn't developed monotheism, for whatever reason, how huge are the butterflies. If you were to step into the equivalent year 2014 for this universe, would it resembel ours at all? I'm not a religion expert so I'm hoping someone can provide an interesting response.
 
No monotheism at all would require a PoD so early (at the very best the III millenia BC) that the world would be without a doubt unreckognizable.

Think only about the importance of religion in our millenia : no monotheism meaning no Abrahamic religion at all, you can have an idea of the changes it implies. And that's nothing compared to what it would really change from the PoD.

(Now, I do think monotheism was bound to appear sooner or later, but it could as well having been temporary resurgences or extremly minoritary.)
 
I think it's pretty much ASB to have no monotheism. To have no dominating monotheism however is a bit easier - just butterfly away Zoroaster.
 
The underlying principle of monotheism follows from such simple logic that even polytheists generally accept it. Call God the Supreme Being, the Unmoved Mover, or any other similar concept, the basic idea is still there: If you accept any divinity, then either there is an Ultimate Cause of Everything, or you have infinite regression (turtles all the way down, so to speak). Once you get to the concept of an Ultimate Cause, someone will see fit to worship that Cause. After all, if you believe in many gods, and One Cause to Everything, including those gods, then that Cause is higher than the gods, and is, at minimum, deserving of equal worship as the gods themselves. And, as Aquinas says, and This, all Men call God.

Then, of course, you have the general acceptance throughout all Indo-European societies of a Supreme god, Dyeus (Deus, Zeus, Tiwas, Iupiter, etc. etc.) that even the pantheon worshipped across most of Eurasia is structured to point towards one God, even obliquely.

To avoid Monotheism, you'd pretty much have to avoid any theism. Which is... well, I have to think its impossible.
 
I can't find the name of it at the moment but there's a alt history novel in which the Jews under Moses fail to escape Egypt. No Israel leads to monotheism being the tiny minority religion and no Christians and no Muslims. Without being weakened by internal religious conflict Rome manages to hang on until the modern day and the world is mostly divided between a handful of nations, Rome, Persia, China, and the Mayans.
 
Roma Aeterna, of Robert Silverberg?

Yeah, I red it and it was a good book, while utterly implausible. Though the failed space exodus by Jews was fun.
 
Given that monotheism has tended to arise in some shape or form wherever enough people have the leisure to philosophise, I think the only way to avoid it altogether is probably to keep mankind permanently at a stone-age hunter-gatherer level of technological advancement. Otherwise the best you can hope for is probably to have the situation in pre-Christian Rome and Greece, where monotheism exists but as a very intellectual belief, and the common folk worship many different gods. Given that such a world would butterfly away Christianity and Islam, with all the historical and cultural ripples that implies, it's highly unlikely that the world would look anything like it does IOTL. Contrary to what some purveyors of alt-historical fiction seem to think, however, the Roman Empire almost certainly wouldn't have survived until the present day.
 
I can't find the name of it at the moment but there's a alt history novel in which the Jews under Moses fail to escape Egypt. No Israel leads to monotheism being the tiny minority religion and no Christians and no Muslims. Without being weakened by internal religious conflict Rome manages to hang on until the modern day and the world is mostly divided between a handful of nations, Rome, Persia, China, and the Mayans.

But you still have forms of "monotheism" in that TL. Akhenaten is pre-POD.Zoroastrians are there, and the "monotheistic" tendencies within Hindu thought are very likely to develop regardless. Not to mention something akin to Neoplatonic varieties of monotheism.
Nothing of this is the familiar Abrahamitic tradition we tend to associate more strongly with "monotheism", and some can be arguably said to be not really entirely "monotheistic" (Atenism is debated for instance), but still.
 
Otherwise the best you can hope for is probably to have the situation in pre-Christian Rome and Greece, where monotheism exists but as a very intellectual belief, and the common folk worship many different gods. Given that such a world would butterfly away Christianity and Islam, with all the historical and cultural ripples that implies, it's highly unlikely that the world would look anything like it does IOTL.
Is not that "upper monotheism - lower polytheism" sort of like catholic Europe in the later middle ages, where you have a number of powerful spiritual beings while still claiming to be monotheistic: the Son, the Holy Ghost, the Archangels, the Devil, the Mother of God, the Holy Virgin, the Angels, the Apostles, the Saints, the Antichrist, and so on.

The underlying principle of monotheism follows from such simple logic that even polytheists generally accept it. Call God the Supreme Being, the Unmoved Mover, or any other similar concept, the basic idea is still there: If you accept any divinity, then either there is an Ultimate Cause of Everything, or you have infinite regression (turtles all the way down, so to speak). Once you get to the concept of an Ultimate Cause, someone will see fit to worship that Cause. After all, if you believe in many gods, and One Cause to Everything, including those gods, then that Cause is higher than the gods, and is, at minimum, deserving of equal worship as the gods themselves. And, as Aquinas says, and This, all Men call God.

Then, of course, you have the general acceptance throughout all Indo-European societies of a Supreme god, Dyeus (Deus, Zeus, Tiwas, Iupiter, etc. etc.) that even the pantheon worshipped across most of Eurasia is structured to point towards one God, even obliquely.

To avoid Monotheism, you'd pretty much have to avoid any theism. Which is... well, I have to think its impossible.
Monotheism would seem to imply that there is only one god, and not just that one of the many gods is more powerful.

And if "god" would be "the ultimate cause of everything" then this supreme god (Zeus/Yahweh) would not be that one, since he was born later and came to power later.

For that matter, in our modern view where matter mindlessly creates itself and becomes life, why would such a process be higher and more worthy of worship than the gods? The gods are at least thinking persons that bother with human stuff, and you can bargain with them. The "underlying causes" can probably not be reached in a conversation, either.
 
Is not that "upper monotheism - lower polytheism" sort of like catholic Europe in the later middle ages, where you have a number of powerful spiritual beings while still claiming to be monotheistic: the Son, the Holy Ghost, the Archangels, the Devil, the Mother of God, the Holy Virgin, the Angels, the Apostles, the Saints, the Antichrist, and so on.

People seem to have that tendency to paganism.

Monotheism would seem to imply that there is only one god, and not just that one of the many gods is more powerful.

And if "god" would be "the ultimate cause of everything" then this supreme god (Zeus/Yahweh) would not be that one, since he was born later and came to power later.

For that matter, in our modern view where matter mindlessly creates itself and becomes life, why would such a process be higher and more worthy of worship than the gods? The gods are at least thinking persons that bother with human stuff, and you can bargain with them. The "underlying causes" can probably not be reached in a conversation, either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism

First polytheism, then a strong belief in one of the gods as opposed to the others, then excluding the other gods altogether. And then attributing all things to that god.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Going to be rather difficult for it to never develop, as the idea isn't unique to the Abrahamic religions. Atenism was the state religion of Egypt for twenty years, when Akhenaten (known as Amenhotep IV for the first five years of his reign) made Aten the supreme god (henotheism) before eventually making Aten the sole god. That was some time in the 1300s BCE, so Atenism happened only a few hundred years after Judaism was established. I've read that early Judaism had some henotheist elements, so it's possible Atenism might even have been the first monotheist religion.

Essentially, henotheism is a rather old idea, and monotheism is only a few hundred years newer than it (assuming Atenism occured before Jewish monotheism). Henotheism is only a step away from monotheism, so it would be improbable for monotheism to simply never happen.
 
People seem to have that tendency to paganism.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henotheism

First polytheism, then a strong belief in one of the gods as opposed to the others, then excluding the other gods altogether. And then attributing all things to that god.

There is evidence in the early Bible that Judaism had polytheistic roots before switching to one God. The most famous is the passage "Thou shall have no other gods before me".
 

SunDeep

Banned
So if humans hadn't developed monotheism, for whatever reason, how huge are the butterflies. If you were to step into the equivalent year 2014 for this universe, would it resembel ours at all? I'm not a religion expert so I'm hoping someone can provide an interesting response.

Well, let's go back to the beginning. Logically, there must have been a point, or several point, where the concept of a god arose. And at that moment, that embryonic faith would always be monotheistic. So, simply put, if monotheism never develops, then theism itself never develops in any form. And if the concept of theism never arises, then the concept of atheism never arises- after all, how can you reject a belief in something when there's no belief there to reject? And without any understanding of the deity concept, how you have a agnostic stance? Agnosticism says the question of whether any deity exists or not is unanswerable, but how can you argue that a question is impossible to answer when the question is never asked?

Without theism, without atheism, and without agnosticism- in short, ITTL, humanity never develops theology, or any religious stances whatsoever. How feasible is this? And given that it can be argued that every political structure was either originally built upon or split from a existing theological framework, would we even see complex civilisations coming into being ITTL? I'd argue that you probably wouldn't, which would in all honesty make stepping into TTL in 2014 pretty boring, with nothing more complex than alliances of tribal entities to comprise human civilisation. Still, if you're a botanist or a zoologist, it'd be a fun trip into the wilderness that would have been...
 

Nilesap

Banned
A advanced society lacking monotheism is far from impossible, organized civilizations outside the western world and the middle east have many gods. Japan, China, India, the Aztecs or Incas- all were organized and innovated. Yet they never developed monotheism like that seen in abrahamic faith, buddha doesn't really count since he's more like jesus than god.
 
Well, let's go back to the beginning. Logically, there must have been a point, or several point, where the concept of a god arose. And at that moment, that embryonic faith would always be monotheistic. So, simply put, if monotheism never develops, then theism itself never develops in any form. And if the concept of theism never arises, then the concept of atheism never arises- after all, how can you reject a belief in something when there's no belief there to reject? And without any understanding of the deity concept, how you have a agnostic stance? Agnosticism says the question of whether any deity exists or not is unanswerable, but how can you argue that a question is impossible to answer when the question is never asked?

Without theism, without atheism, and without agnosticism- in short, ITTL, humanity never develops theology, or any religious stances whatsoever. How feasible is this? And given that it can be argued that every political structure was either originally built upon or split from a existing theological framework, would we even see complex civilisations coming into being ITTL? I'd argue that you probably wouldn't, which would in all honesty make stepping into TTL in 2014 pretty boring, with nothing more complex than alliances of tribal entities to comprise human civilisation. Still, if you're a botanist or a zoologist, it'd be a fun trip into the wilderness that would have been...

I have absolutely no idea on what basis this assertion is made. Nearly all civilizations began with a polytheistic belief, most likely arising from the ascension of spirits to worship. We can see an intermediate step in the form of animism.

Theism is by no means necessary for any religious stance to exist. I know from personal experience that skepticism in non-monotheistic cultures is a common and sometimes widely tolerated stance. In fact, some treat religious skepticism in the same way that one treats skepticism of superstition.
 
A advanced society lacking monotheism is far from impossible, organized civilizations outside the western world and the middle east have many gods. Japan, China, India, the Aztecs or Incas- all were organized and innovated. Yet they never developed monotheism like that seen in abrahamic faith, buddha doesn't really count since he's more like jesus than god.

If we compare them to European, they were not so technology advanced. Because people do not try to find out how every thing that a god is supposed to make was really made. For example, why explain lightning by electricity when Zeus.

P.S. About evidence in the early Bible that Judaism had polytheistic roots before switching to one God is that His name, Adonai mean "my lords", not "my lord".
 

SunDeep

Banned
I have absolutely no idea on what basis this assertion is made. Nearly all civilizations began with a polytheistic belief, most likely arising from the ascension of spirits to worship. We can see an intermediate step in the form of animism.

Theism is by no means necessary for any religious stance to exist. I know from personal experience that skepticism in non-monotheistic cultures is a common and sometimes widely tolerated stance. In fact, some treat religious skepticism in the same way that one treats skepticism of superstition.

How can you possibly have several gods before you have a single one? This assertion is logically counter-intuitive to its core. And how exactly do you define what a 'god' is? Can't animist entities such as spirits just be categorised as more mundane gods? Or indeed, anything which is revered as being hallowed and sacred- the authorities of imperial rulers and tribal leaders, ancestors, the earth, the sea, the plants and the animals, all the way back to that first fire harnessed by a caveman over a million years ago.

And without spiritualism, which is really just the most basic form of theism, how can you have the notion of spirituality? Without spirituality, how can there be religion? And without religion, how can there be a stance on it? After all, ITTL, what is there to be sceptical of, when no unified religious theories have ever been developed? It is in our nature to see more than there is in things. This is the root of religion and superstition, but it is also the root of scientific theory, technological innovation and advancement. Removing this trait from humanity is the only way to prevent the concept of a 'god' from being developed, and if you do so, then no human civilisations will ever come into being.
 

SunDeep

Banned
A advanced society lacking monotheism is far from impossible, organized civilizations outside the western world and the middle east have many gods. Japan, China, India, the Aztecs or Incas- all were organized and innovated. Yet they never developed monotheism like that seen in abrahamic faith, buddha doesn't really count since he's more like jesus than god.

Of course it isn't impossible for non-monotheistic cultures to create advanced societies- there are too many examples to count. But with any polytheistic religion, their pantheon of gods and deities has to be formed from something- each of those gods first has to be conceived on its own before the pantheon can come into being. Which means that it has to start off as a monotheistic faith, even if only for the brief interlude that it takes for the brain signal to cross a single synapse. And if the concept of a god is never developed as ITTL, how can there possibly be any religions with several gods? You can't just skip that first step...
 
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It is not necessary to start with one god. If the gods are natural forces, such as the sun, the moon, the wind, the rain, and so on, they could gradually become persons at the same time, without anyone ever having only one god.
 
The thing is I dodn't know if it's possible for the idea to not develop in one form or another. Many Native American cultures are monotheistic; spirits and other beings are more comparable to say angels and saints in terms of their roles and divinity. And these spiritual concepts were developed outside of the framework of the Arbramic and Dharmic faiths. Even in Africa, say the Yoruba religion, really only has one god too. The Orishas are again more comparable to angels and saints, just possessing a more prominent role than their Christian counterparts, but not to the degree of being outright seperate gods like in European-style polytheism.
 
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