Quotes & Sayings About Monotheism

Monotheism has also been recognized as inherently intolerant. — Ibn Warraq

All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship. — Julius Wellhausen

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist. — Gloria Steinem

For atheism and polytheism there is no special problem of suffering, nor need there be for every kind of monotheism. — Walter Kaufmann

Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history. — Isaac Bonewits

Paracelsus's grand project, which arguably is still going on today,* represents one of the many ways the Judeo-Christian tradition has deployed its genius to absorb, or co-opt, the power of the pagan faith it set out to uproot. In much the same way that the new monotheism folded into its rituals the people's traditional pagan holidays and spectacles, it desperately needed to do something about their ancient devotion to magic plants. Indeed, the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis suggests that nothing was more important. — Michael Pollan

The deepest difference between religions is not that between polytheism and monotheism. — Walter Kaufmann

Creating conflicts and killing each other to be in accord with our only Creator should be the definition of insanity.

By promoting divisions and hostility among men, all monotheisms have proven that they are nothing but banal manners of clan formation. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Monotheism is but imperialism in religion. — James Henry Breasted

I think [rock'n'roll] essence is what made it good and has a lot in common with what originally made monotheism good - it's against everything that is fixed, all the social structures that you can't go past. — Ezra Furman

Monotheism begins with a god who hates trees. — John Lamb Lash

Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone. — Reza Aslan

Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil.

They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Only a country that is based upon an extremely primitive religion, which is Christianity, I am a devoted enemy of monotheism in all of its forms, could have come with a categorizing of people as one thing or the other. — Gore Vidal

Ibn al-Wahhab was not the godfather of contemporary terrorist movements. Rather, he was a voice of reform, reflecting mainstream eighteenth-century Islamic thought. His vision of Islamic society was based upon monotheism in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews were to enjoy peaceful co-existence and cooperative commercial treaty relations. — Natana J. Delong-Bas

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. — Yuval Noah Harari

The 'Islamic State', that strange miscegenation of Medina with Westphalia, is always in mortal danger of linking the moral austerity of monotheism with the repressive and supervisor powers of the modern nation state. — Abdal Hakim Murad

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy. — Auguste Comte

In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam's Razor but Occam's Beard: Multiply entities unnecessarily. — J. Budziszewski

If by worshipping stones one can find God, I shall worship a mountain. If by immersion in the water salvation be attained, the frogs who bathe continually would attain it. As the frogs, so are these men, again and again fall into the womb. — Kabir

Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism. — G. Willow Wilson

By God, we shall not stop, God willing, except at the doorsteps of the White House, and to raise the banner of monotheism on their so-called Statue of Liberty. — Osama Bin Laden

Greatness should have no victims
Greatness should need no victims. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done. — Timothy Leary

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. — Emil Cioran

Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs. — Carroll Quigley

I have yet to understand the ritual of sacrifice in monotheism; to a supposed Creator who has supposedly given us what we will be eventually sacrificing.
If I take a small mirror and reflect sunlight back to the sun, am I sacrificing to the sun? — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being. — Israel Shenker

The plague of mankind is the fear and rejection of diversity: monotheism, monarchy, monogamy and, in our age, monomedicine. The belief that there is only one right way to live, only one right way to regulate religious, political, sexual, medical affairs is the root cause of the greatest threat to man: members of his own species, bent on ensuring his salvation, security, and sanity. — Thomas Szasz

Monotheism is in its turn doomed to subtract one more God and become atheism — Ibn Warraq

Only man's misdirected abstract mind can delude its own desire to know by creating contradicting belief systems using self-contradicting myths, and then make itself believe that these "revealed" belief systems are in fact the only "truths",
Then kill and die FOR them,
Instead of saving each other FROM them. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Monotheism strenuously denies the need to return to a cultural style that periodically places the ego and its values in perspective through contact with a boundary-dissolving immersion in the Archaic mystery of plant-induced, hence mother-associated, psychedelic ecstasy and wholeness, what Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious. — Terence McKenna

The orthodox doctrine of the Trinity taught that there are multiple (three) persons, but they all share one nature in the Godhead, preserving monotheism. Conversely, the personhood of Christ shares multiple (two) natures - God and man, timeless and subject to time, invisible and visible - yet he is one person.15 — Justin S. Holcomb

What we have been raised to think of as inevitable - division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states - actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history. — Gloria Steinem

The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of monotheism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room - and no need - for knowledge about God. — Erich Fromm

Monotheism does not appear through amalgamation and syncretism but rather through the annihilation of other gods. Other divine entities are not simply taken on board and integrated into the pantheon; they are thrown over and left to drown. If they must be acknowledged, it is only done by a kind of deconsecration that demotes them to the status of demons and insists that they were never anything else. They are to be destroyed and plastered over. Their worshipers are attacked, and if they cannot be slaughtered like the prophets of Ba'al, they are ridiculed, mocked and vilified. — Donald B. Redford

Jesus is arguing for the Trinitarian concept of divine diversity as being compatible with Old Testament monotheism, which was not compatible with man-made traditions of absolute monotheism that Rabbinic Jews followed. Remember, in the Bible, the concept of "god" (elohim) was about a plane of existence not necessarily a "being" of existence, so there were many gods (many elohim) that existed on that supernatural plane, yet only one God of gods who created all things, including those other elohim or sons of God. — Brian Godawa

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race. — Gore Vidal

The effect of Judaism's vigorous promotion of monotheism, and the dignity that this doctrine conferred on all humankind, as created in God's image, coupled with the discipline, warnth and security offered by the Jewish way of life, cannot be overestimated as a powerful catalyst for the undermining and eventual destruction of Graeco-Roman paganism. — Jeff Cohen

God did not create evolution
evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism
polytheism
monotheism
agnosticism
atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists. — G.M. Jackson

The last god has his own most unique uniqueness and stands outside of the calculative determination expressed in the labels "mono-theism," "pan-theism," and "a-theism." There has been "monotheism," and every other sort of "theism," only since the emergence of Judeo-Christian "apologetics," whose thinking presupposes "metaphysics." With the death of this God, all theisms wither away. The multiplicity of gods is not subject to enumeration but, instead, to the inner richness of the grounds and abysses in the site of the moment for the lighting up and concealment of the intimation of the last god. — Martin Heidegger

19. And whoever desires the Hereafter and strives for it, with the necessary effort due for it (i.e. do righteous deeds of Allaah's Obedience) while he is a believer (in the Oneness of Allaah Islaamic Monotheism), then such are the ones whose striving shall be appreciated, thanked and rewarded (by Allaah). — Anonymous

One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms. — Reza Aslan

He [Franz Rosenzweig] came up with the "two covenant" theory, a way of affirming the religious validity of both Judaism and Christianity.

Judaism and Christianity, he taught, needed each other, and God's plan for humanity needs them both.

Christianity needs Judaism to remind it of what pure, uncompromised ethical monotheism looks like.........But Judaism needs Christianity to remind us that the Word of God is not meant to be kept for ourselves alone. We are called on not merely to live by God's ways, but to do it in such a manner that the world will be persuaded to turn to God. — Harold S. Kushner

Communication media enabled collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiplied the power available to civilizations and enabled new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of info-nomads. — Howard Rheingold

The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. - GORE VIDAL — Richard Dawkins

In relation to Monotheism considered as such, Judaism stabilized but "confiscated" the Message; Christianity universalized but "altered" it; Islam in turn restored it by stabilizing and universalizing it. — Frithjof Schuon

Only if you have some knowledge of the human sacrifices, the vicious temple rites, the degrading superstitions and customs that were practiced ... can you realize how much the modern world owes to the Hebrew prophets, whose monotheism and moral teachings entered into Christianity and Islam ... — Carlton J. H. Hayes

the concept of monotheism — Marion Zimmer Bradley

I think the whole concept of monotheism is a gift from the gods. — Emo Philips

Here, then, is the genesis of two of the most important historical premises of Western science. The first is that there is a law of nature, an order of things and events awaiting our discovery, and that this order can be formulated in thought, that is, in words or in some type of notation. The second is that the law of nature is universal, a premise deriving from monotheism, from the idea of one God ruling the whole world. — Alan W. Watts

'Theogony' should be read before the great Homeric epics because it gives an account of the cosmology that is taken for granted by Homer. It does for paganism what the Old Testament attempted to do for monotheism. — Tariq Ali

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It's called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion. — Yuval Noah Harari

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.

The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.
The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.

Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.
The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

The three monotheism share a series of identical forms of aversion: hatred of reason and intelligence; hatred of freedom; hatred of all books in the name of one book alone; hatred of sexuality, women,and pleasure; hatred of feminine; hatred of body, of desires, of drives. Instead Judaism, Christianity, and Islam extol faith and belief, obedience and submission, taste for death and longing for the beyond, the asexual angel and chastity, virginity and monogamous love, wife and mother, soul and spirit. In other words, life crucified and nothingness exalted. — Michel Onfray

It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders. In fact, the very division between monotheism and polytheism is in many cases a confusion of categories. — David Bentley Hart

My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God. — Harold S. Kushner

It is now generally admitted, at any rate by philosophers, that the existence of a being having the attributes which define the god of any non-animistic religion cannot be demonstratively proved ... [A]ll utterances about the nature of God are nonsensical. — A.J. Ayer

If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension. — Stephen Fry

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. — Dennis Prager

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam
good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system. — Gore Vidal

All the three monotheist religions (Jewish, Christianity and Islam)claims that their God (Yahweh, God and Allah) created humans in a similar way: this indicates that creationist have not yet established the creator. — Ajay Kansal

The further humans move from hunters to horticulturists to agriculturists to urbanisation to industrialists, the further the sacred recedes, first to heaven, then condensed to monotheism and finally it dies in irony. — Lierre Keith

Reincarnation offers a better justification of evil than anything monotheism can offer, but it does so by blaming the victim and sanctifying the status quo. — Patricia Crone

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything. — Robert A. Heinlein

Most accounts of mystical experiences ... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose? — Barbara Ehrenreich

so many theological terms, words like 'monotheism' are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology, — N. T. Wright

Among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism. — Immanuel Kant

There is a danger in monotheism, and it's called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine. — Karen Armstrong

they not that Allaah, Who created the heavens and the earth, is Able to create the like of them. And He has decreed for them an appointed term, whereof there is not doubt. But the Zaalimoon (polytheists and wrong-doers, etc.) refuse (the truth the Message of Islaamic Monotheism, and — Muhammad Muhsin Khan

In the native world, major gods come in trios, duos, and groups. It is the habit of non-natives to discover the supreme being, the one and only head god, a habit lent to them by monotheism. — Paula Gunn Allen

Polytheism may be more consonant with contemporary life, its mixed populations, and its recognition of psychic complexity and interdependence, than a rigorous Protestant monotheism. — Page DuBois

It has been finely said that if Judaism as a religion had perished under Antiochus, the seed-bed of Christianity would have been lacking; and thus the blood of the Maccabean martyrs, who saved Judaism, ultimately became the seed of the Church. Therefore as not only Christendom but also Islam derive their monotheism from a Jewish source, it may well be that the world to-day owes the very existence of monotheism both in the East and in the West to the Maccabees. — Bertrand Russell

Impartiality of the state toward all religions. The only adequate option open to Muslims and Christians as citizens of the same state is to advocate the impartiality of the state toward all religions; no religion is preferred by the state, and all religions are impartially supported. This allows Christians and Muslims to be faithful to two fundamental impulses of monotheism simultaneously - to (1) honor the conviction that God is the God of all people and (2) obey God's command to act justly and practice neighborly love toward all people. — Miroslav Volf

A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life. — Christopher Hitchens

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches - and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It's still going on. — Philip Pullman

It's very clear from Biblical history and Jewish history that Jewish monotheism wasn't developed in an instant, that it became gradually the accepted norm. But undoubtedly, Jewish ancestors were polytheists. — Robert Winston

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. — Richard Dawkins

By defining Logos as a hypostasis of the divine, John underscored the most important aspect of Jewish religion: faith in one God. — James Mikolajczyk

Jesus would make available to the world the great teaching of Israel: ethical monotheism. There is one God, and he is the source and judge of all that is good. This — John Ortberg

Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice. — Reza Aslan

Monotheism generally allows for no greys. Ideas are either true or false. Hence, although science develops out of the alchemy of the medieval Christian milieu (derived from Arabic alchemy, which was stimulated by the much earlier Chinese alchemy), science is not understood by the nonscientific monotheistic population. The general Western public mistakenly thinks science presents unalterable truth, as does their religion, rather than theories to be tested and continually discarded to be replaced by new hypotheses, which is the actual scientific method. — Jordan D. Paper

If, in monotheism, God is man, man is God. Why does God look suspiciously like the ruling class? Why is Jesus, a Jewish guy from the Middle East, blond and blue-eyed? There — Gloria Steinem

All monotheisms should return to their respective times with our thanks for everything.
This is no longer their time.
If they stay, they will suffer and make us suffer.
If they really love humanity, they should step aside and let humanity outgrow them.

This is the time when humanity needs to learn about thinking and acting collectively for his collective, or else no monotheism-presented God can ever save him. — Haroutioun Bochnakian

Recognizing that God is the only deity that exists is the first step toward obeying him. He is absolute; there is no one who can offer an alternative truth nor assign humankind different instructions. — James Mikolajczyk

Thus, the removal of the Jewish people to Babylonia laid the groundwork for the Christian faith. Simply put, the Gentiles who followed Jesus had some familiarity with the Jews' monotheism because of their erstwhile proliferation throughout the Mediterranean realm. — James Mikolajczyk

Indeed, intolerance is essential only to monotheism; an only God is by nature a jealous God who will not allow another to live. On the other hand, polytheistic gods are naturally tolerant, they live and let live. — Arthur Schopenhauer

In John 10, learned Jews in the Temple challenge Jesus about his identity as Christ. Jesus says that he and the Father are one, a clear claim of deity in the Hebrew culture, which results in the Jews picking up stones to stone him because he, being a man, made himself out to be God (10:33). Their particular Rabbinic absolute monotheism did not allow for the existence of divinity other than the Father. Jesus responds by appealing to this very passage we are discussing: "Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came - and Scripture cannot be broken - do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?" (10:34-36). — Brian Godawa