Toti dei sunt aut non dei sunt.

The title essentially means "All Gods are or there are no Gods"
Since I was a little kid who believed in god and my mother's catholic faith, I have had trouble grasping the idea that believing in one religion invalidates the existence of all other religions.
even if I weren't so emotionally brain fuCked and could actually Believe in the Christian god, I would consider say, Norse or Hellenistic paganism equally valid, though not my gods necessarily.
like.
If YHWH is real why can't Zeus or Nut or Thor be?
basically my religion is confused and a sort of all or nothing thing.
which I guess it weird.

 

As a shamelessly syncretic fuck who worships the Virgin Mary and Janus equally, i totally feel you here and don't think thats a problem? Like, I suspect the only reason to assert someone else's gods arent real is so you dont have to feel bad about being disrespectful about their religion.

If it makes you feel any better, the admonition is 'no other gods before me' not 'no other gods at all'.

 

That's what always weirded me out.
Like, obviously at the time of Abraham there were Many Polytheistic Religions about.
And i dunno, I'm pretty firmly an atheist (possibly even a political atheist, which I realize sounds utterly horrible), but like, religions with many gods make more sense to me?
and Mary is the fucking bomb (i think that may be blasphemous...) because she is awesome.

 

I don't think it necessarily does, but believing in certain religions - or certain tenets of certain religions - does. E.g. "Thou shalt have no God but me" etc. It's not so much the belief that there's only one plausible God, rather that the religion on which you base your belief commands that there is only one God.
(Er, that is to say, it doesn't invalidate the existence of other religions, but it doesn't accept their Gods as real.)
Of course, there are plenty of theists who believe that many different religions worship the same God under different names (although I think that argument tends to be almost entirely applied to monotheistic religions...?)

Iirc this was one of the major points of contention between the Romans & the Jews in classical times. The Romans were all like, "okay, your god is pretty weird? But you can add it to the pantheon, we guess." And the Jews were like "Adonai says all your gods are shit and fake, fuck you."

 

Spoiler: maybe offensive atheist, autistic, fandom mentality thoughts on this

i always thought - in an atheist, autistic, fandom mentality way - that "no gods but me" was basically 'cause religions contradicted each other when it came to the details of How Stuff Works and What Happened In The Past, their canons. worldbuilding type details essentially. like, both thor and zeus have control over storms in their respective religions and i think in mainstream canon, they've very much... not met each other.

and like, that believing in All The Gods would mean believing that the world is, well, basically a Bad Crossover Fanfic.

i dunno how well i'm conveying this but... this is what i always thought it was about (though i didn't conceptualize it in fandom terms when i was younger).

 

I'm pretty sure it's that you won't put any gods above Adonai??? instead of there are no gods?
w/e
Not sure though.

And like, I agree with @unknownanonymous
though i feel like also the origin stories could be humans imposing stories on deities, and different gods have different territories

Spoiler: possibly offensive angry ehtheist stuff

I cannot bring myself to believe in anything.
My thoughts on god are no NO NO YOU DON'T EXIST and while i'm not a militant atheist it just works better for my mental state

 

@wes scripserat yeah, though i was kinda talking about how i interpreted things when i was younger, as well as how i interpret them now, so... i figured the (possible) inaccuracy of that particular interpretation would work well when it came to explaining why i thought/think that.

and yeah, i think i've heard the Gods Having Different Territories thing before but... i found it hard to conceptualize 'cause well, it seemed to mean that every area works by Very Different Rules, almost as though our universe is several universe instead of one and all those worlds share the same planet, all the time. just yeah...

 

Hm...the Abrahamic religions are pretty big on monotheism. E.g. Judaism you've got the Shema Yisrael prayer, which starts "Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is One." (c/p'd from Wikipedia, because I wish I spoke Hebrew :L ), Christianity you can look at the Nicene Creed - "I believe in one God", or alternatively the many prayers which end "...one God, now and forever." And Islam has the Shahada: "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God." (Wikipedia again, because I know even less Arabic than I do Hebrew.)

But yeah, believing in one or more gods doesn't necessarily imply believing in all gods. I mean, using the example of Hellenistic vs. Norse beliefs (fight!): it could be that a person would say "well, Zeus is just a way more plausible thunder god than Thor. I mean, he's so virile," (or...some other example) and decide that all the thundering attributed to Thor was actually done by Zeus. (Although I think Hellenistic/Norse religions are not necessarily the best example to use, because they've slipped so far into "myth" status that most people's only experience with them will be as fiction. I'd be really curious to hear about how popular non-monotheistic religions consider monotheism, though. Are there any Hinduism experts on the forum?)

 

(Btw I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm highly unlikely to get offended by anything in this discussion. JSYK.)

 

That does require the acceptance of this single superawesome thing first though.

Spoiler: Not terribly flattering opinion on the abrahamic god

And honestly, the abrahamic god just reminds me of a spoiled child "Mine mine mine, how Dare you like anyone else!" Yeah no. I don´t do exclusive worship.

Something that honestly pisses me off is when christians tell me their god is real and mine are imaginary, therefore I am crazy for believing. Excuse me, you can´t prove your god existence any more than I can.
/almost rant.

 

I think thats a bias born from being abrahamic, seebs. Not all gods are creators, and thats not the only metric someone can uses to define godhood. Imagine if there were a very powerful being who was kind of a childish asshole. It makes a world that involves many types of intelligence, one of which is people and another of which is a spirit that spends its time healing and sustaining people. The creator spends all its time basically just trolling the shit out of the world just for lulz. Which do you as a person decide to worship? Which deserves worship? I basically think something sort of like this situation applies, so.

 

i'm aware of at least three four schools of thought in christianity concerning other gods:

a) they don't exist, period.
b) the beings that non-christians worship as gods are demons intentionally leading people astray.
c) they do exist, and are not necessarily demons, but aren't gods and shouldn't be worshiped. i think this one is based on interpreting "principalities and powers" as referring to powerful non-human beings, possibly angels and/or demons, who were given some kind of authority on earth in pre-jesus times.
d) they do exist and it's okay to worship them. (rare, i don't think i've ever actually seen someone say this, but i'm assuming that it's the view agnostic christians would take.)

while i don't think that there are other beings in the same class as the trinity, i don't really like options a and b. i mean, option a definitely contradicts the experiences of countless humans who have formed some kind of spiritual connection with some kind of powerful being who did not identify itself as the abrahamic god, so that's right out.

and the whole thing is made more complicated by, uh, everything. like for example, as @wes scripserat said, it's not "no other gods exist," it's "thou shalt have no other gods before me." plus a command not to make or worship idols. and the church can't even agree if the injunction against idols means that it's a sin to represent the trinity visually - i think reformed presbyterians take the view that that means no images of gods, period, not even of our particular one, especially not of our particular one because then you might worship the image instead of the real thing. while orthodox denominations and the roman catholic church don't. see: icons, crucifixes, and also art history. and then there's arguments about whether praying to the virgin mary or other saints constitutes "worshipping" because if it does it's probably a sin, we think, maybe...?

(i mean, some people definitely think it's a sin. roman catholics are considered heretics by some other christians because of the praying-to-saints thing.)

 

I'd posit:
(e) they do exist, but are facets of God the creator;
as another possible stance, but I don't know if that's accepted by any Christian denominations or authorities. Could be a special case of (d).

 

^Actually I have heard that stance from wiccans. That all gods and goddesses are facets of The god and goddess.

 

@EulersBidentity that's an interesting one! there are already plenty of similarities between christian and other mythologies. (i'm using the word in the sense of "a collection of traditional stories" rather than "a collection of stories which are definitely not true.") you can explain it with all-oral-tradition-has-a-common-source (noah and his wife, presumably) or you can explain it with we're-all-seeing-the-same-thing-but-from-different-angles. or you could probably also explain it with humans-all-like-the-same-stories-for-some-reason, i guess.

 

^And that´s where your abrahamic bias is. This is not a thing with is accepted by everyone, not by far. I for example happen to think the universe is an entity that created itself. Further out from that are people who thing everything is a collaboration between several entities, which I also don´t find all that hard to believe.
Related, I personally feel like, if this one superawesome entity created the world and everything, why would it care so much which name people worshipped it under, or care about being worshipped at all? Why does it care about being the only thing that is worshipped?

Also it´s true we can´t do much about god and goddesses and the structure of the world, but thinking about then can be entertaining and also mind broadening. From another POV, how people think dietys work, if they believe in such, tells you a lot about how they think the world works.

 

Well also i guess, what if the god existed but had not made the world? Would he suddenly be a different category of thing?

 

^Excellent question. Not in my book, but I´m polytheistic in case that wasn´t obvious.