BALDUCCI

It seems to me that there is another angle which hasnt been mentioned here. And that is the presumption that what one group of people called "God" was actually a single god. In fact, almost all (and I think all) "Gods" are tribal. It is fashionable for Judeo-Christians today to claim that they are all worshipping the same "God", but if their worship varies so greatly, how could it possibly be the same God. Anyway, it was a God derived from the Jewish God and Jehova was always (and still is) a tribal god that grants to his followers a superiority over all others. Hence the state of Israel and its justification. It would be an absurdity to think that Desmond Tutu and Pat Robertson are worshipping the same God. The monotheistic imperative was largely political, and historically an objective student would find it very difficult to conclude that there has ever been a period in in which there was just one God. So once we accept that the world has been and is populated by thousands of Gods, the notion proposed at the beginning of this thread becomes unnecessary. Even if one disagrees with my view, there is no doubt whatsoever that the Creation Story itself evolved in a world populated by tribal gods.

As I have never been able to understand the gobbledygook used to explain the Trinity, I am quite satisfied that Christianity too has many Gods. For the Catholics, the tapestry of the Gods hierarchy is as rich as it was in Roman mythology, with even the god mother, Mary, bunches of angels and seraphims, saints etc, all topped by three Gods.