Theism
In the last post, we broke down religion (or rather, religious belief systems) into four main categories: Theism, Deism, “Ever-Present�, and Nontheism. Today I am going to break down theism further into subcategories of identification
You’ll recall that theism is the belief that gods/beings exist and they also interact with the world/universe.
Theism can further be broken down into monotheism and polytheism. If you look at the prefixes ‘mono’ and ‘poly’, it’s easy to keep their definitions straight.
Monotheism is the belief that there is one and only one god. This is a fairly well known line of belief and is the current state of what you could call the evolution of religions being primarily polytheistic and moving to monotheism over time.
An interesting belief falling under the monotheism category is ‘misotheism’ which encompasses the belief that there is one god but that one god is evil instead of the benevolent good god of many other religions.
Where mono means one, poly means many. Those who have polytheistic beliefs believe that there is more than one god/being wandering around in the great ‘out there’.
The subcategories of polytheism are mostly to do with leaning towards one god in one area or another.
Henotheism, while believing in more than one god, believes that one god is supreme above all others.
Monolatry doesn’t believe so much that one god is supreme as it believes only one god should be worshiped.
Lastly, the one with the fun name – kathenotheism – is more of an equal opportunity worshiper. It believes in more than one god and worshiping one of the many, but the difference is that each god will get their turn in supremacy.
In future posts, I’ll break down the remaining three categories of religion.
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