Universality and Monotheism

Western religious thinkers generally identify universality in religion with monotheism - the idea that there is only One God and hold that all truly religious human beings should worship this same Supreme Being. Yet this insistence on monotheism is exclusive, not universal. It rejects polytheism, pantheism, monism (the idea that there is only One Reality), and other forms of spiritual experience.

Such extreme monotheism reduces the Divine to a single formulation, insisting on one savior, one final prophet or one book for all people. Such a One God is not a truth of unity, which is universal, but the assertion of a single thing, which is opposed to all else. True unity is universality, it is not one thing as opposed to an other, but the One that is everything.

The partiality of exclusive monotheistic belief is revealed in how it fragments itself further into warring monotheistic creeds (which is why monotheists are always fighting with each other as to whose One God, or view of the One God, is correct). Such extreme monotheism is generally a religion of warlike people. It promotes conquests and aims at the building up of empires. The religion of One God is reflected in one state and one leader, and the denial of dissent.

 Not surprisingly, historically Western monotheism has appeared as the religious counterpart of political imperialism and empire-building, and its expansion to absorb all other countries and cultures. History has revealed how monotheism has been allied with invasions, colonialism and genocide, which may not be an accident but the very end result of a rigid, one-sided and therefore ultimately violent view of the Divine.

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