Word: monotheist
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Josiah was probably a monolatrist, not a monotheist. But within a few decades of his death, true monotheism would finally emerge. In 586 B.C.E., Israelite élites were exiled to Babylon after conquest by the neo-Babylonian Empire. In passages from Isaiah that are thought to have been written during the exile, Yahweh says unequivocally, "Besides me there is no god." Does this extreme intolerance of other gods - the denial of their very existence - flow from a zero-sum view of Israel's environs...
...existed as a person. (If he did live, it would have been between 2100 B.C. and 1500 B.C., hundreds of years before the date most historians assign to the actual birth of the religion called Judaism.) But Abraham represents a revolution in thought. While he is not a pure monotheist (he never suggests that other gods do not exist), he is the Ur-monotheist, the first man in the Bible to abandon all he knows in order to choose the Lord and consciously move ever deeper into that choice, until the point of no return on Moriah...
...reality, the average atheist is not much different from the average Christian or other monotheist. Christians reject many gods and think nothing of it. Atheists simply believe in one fewer god than they do, and want to have the same rights and show of respect that Christians expect. Like Christians, we value moral excellence and the common ethical teachings of men like Socrates, Buddha and Christ. Of course, we do have our differences: we do not worship Christ as divine and find some of his teachings, like those about hellfire and eternal punishment, very harmful. But on the whole...
...have been blind ideological purity, a supremely flawed political correctness. According to one account, when he was asked to bow before Adam, God's newest and best-beloved creation, Iblis refused. "There is only one God," he declared, "and I will make obeisance only to Him." More of a monotheist than God himself, Iblis was banished from Heaven...
...request by British television's Channel 4 to write and present a six-part documentary series on St. Paul revived her interest in religion. "What I really am is a historian of ideas," she says, "rather than a theologian, which sounds a bit narrow." She considers herself an unaffiliated monotheist who appreciates many aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy but finds it easier to pray with Jews and Muslims. "Only Western Christianity makes a song and dance about creeds and beliefs," she says. "The authentic test of a religion is not what you believe. It's what you do, and unless your...