When I was in grade school we were taught that monotheism was a historical advance, comparable to agriculture or other notable inventions. For example, we learned that Akenhaten was a significant figure because he was the first historical figure to advocate monotheism, although it was later repudiated by his successor Tutankhaten aka Tutankhamun aka King Tut. (Akenhaten lived about two centuries before the first historical evidence of Judaism; Freud suggested that Moses was actually a monotheistic priest during the reign of Akenhaten). Even in grade school this argument seemed vaguely suspect to me. The advantages of agriculture seem clear, the advantages of monotheism less so.
These days I do see monotheism as something of an advance. The earliest cultures we know of believed in gods who were much like people, albeit people who were both powerful and sometimes unpredictable. In some cases the gods were simply ancestors. I think this is a natural consequence of our tendency to attribute events to causes. When we want to understand the weather, our impulse is to give it a personality and motivations. It’s only a small step to think that there is a powerful person–a god–who controls the weather.
This then becomes an obstacle to actually understanding what is happening. If you already have an explanation for the weather, and your explanation inherently incorporates unpredictability, there is little purpose to looking for a deeper explanation. Since I do think that scientific thought is an advance in human culture, it follows that these early religions prevented advances.
Monotheism reduces the mass of gods to just one. This god still controls the weather, but now there is just one entity that you have to understand. It becomes possible to seriously think about god’s will and hope to reach some conclusions about it. As thinking progresses, the god becomes more abstract—created the whole world, pays attention to everything—and it becomes easier to think in terms of fixed laws rather than whims. It’s still a big step to get to science, but it’s more feasible, and monotheism may be a necessary stopping point.
I was reminded of this line of thought while reading about the Gospel of Judas. Today I don’t see how it’s possible to see Judas as anything but a patsy—hence his lyric from Jesus Christ Superstar “I only did what you wanted me to.” The Gospel of Judas doesn’t really present him that way, but it does suggest that Judas was himself a human sacrifice to Christ. This was, after all, a time when animal sacrifices to the gods were routine, though not a practice of the Christians. The Gospel of Judas was an alternate view of the Christ story, one that was suppressed by the early church as they coalesced on a single view of the religion. Ditching the Gospel of Judas was a good move, since it seems pretty complicated. Anyhow, reading about it reminded me that there is a lot of contingency in the religions that we have today. Monotheism may have been an advance in retrospect, but, unlike agriculture, it wasn’t an advance at the time. I don’t see any reason to think that things could not have gone otherwise.
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