Polytheism Sentence Examples

But whether the great gods of polytheism were really transfigured ancestors is very doubtful.

If polytheism is to be seriously defended at all, the basis must be empiricist.

The tenacity of this belief may be explained among other things by the living impression of the polytheism that surrounded the communities on every side.

Thus to take the preface as a distinct word is not reasonable unless there are cogent grounds for uniting the commandments against polytheism and idolatry.

The ignorant polytheism of the time could not tolerate such explanation, and the enemies of Pericles used the superstitions of their countrymen as a means of attacking him in the person of his friend.

It is true that Arabian polytheism in the time of Mahomet was in a state of decay.

The Stoics, for example, were more successful in criticizing the current creed than in explaining the underlying truth which they recognized in polytheism.

Hume endeavours to show that polytheism was the earliest as well as the most natural form of religious belief, and that theism or deism is ' See Burton, ii.

And can we regard the prohibition of polytheism and the prohibition of idolatry as one commandment?

By such conceptions the Hellenic polytheism was moralized; the physical character of the greater gods fell into the background, and the sculptor's art came to the aid of the poet by completely enduing them with personality.

They make counter attacks on polytheism as a folly and on the shamefulness of obscene myths.

Delitzsch, Jeremias (Monotheistische Stromungen) and Baentsch, that monotheistic tendencies are to be found in the midst of Babylonian polytheism.

This tendency, however, he, unlike the earlier conservative writers, rightly considers to have emerged out of polytheism.

The extant fragments contain sayings of Jesus, and warnings against Judaism and Polytheism.

Mithraism courted the favour of Roman paganism and combined monotheism with polytheism, while Christianity was uncompromising.

At that period the urban masses, but recently converted to Christianity, sought in the worship of the martyrs a sort of substitute for polytheism.

Just as a process of syncretism has given rise to cults of animal gods, tree spirits tend to become detached from the trees, which are thenceforward only their abodes; and here again animism has begun to pass into polytheism.

The term may, however, be conveniently used to describe the early stage of religion in which man endeavours to set up relations between himself and the unseen powers, conceived as spirits, but differing in many particulars from the gods of polytheism.

With the rise of a belief in departmental gods comes the age of polytheism; the belief in elemental spirits may still persist, but they fall into the background and receive no cult.

But in the ears of every pious Moslem such a judgment will sound almost as shocking as downright atheism or polytheism.

While these monotheistic, pantheistic doctrines were taught in the schools, the people were left to a debased polytheism and to new superstitions imported from the Orient; the philosophers themselves were by no means unaffected by the popular beliefs.

Other deities, like Zeus, rise to the head of a monarchical polytheism, in which their physical base is almost, ' Gotternamen, Bonn, 1896, p. 279 ff.

On the human side polytheism receives fresh groups in connexion with the development of social institutions and national feeling.

At the same time the Stoics felt at liberty to defend and uphold the truth in polytheism.

Sometimes he gives prominence, and correctly, to the fact that the disputants partially failed to understand one another, because they had separate interests at heart - those on the one side desiring above everything to guard against polytheism, those on the other being most afraid of Sabellianism.

But to maintain therefore that he originated in Thessaly as the special deity of a single tribe, who were able to impose him upon the whole of Hellas, is against the analogies offered by the study of the special cults of Greek polytheism.

Christianity in its Arian conception would have evaporated in a new polytheism.

The belief in these Mura-Mura or Alcheringa folk may obviously develop, in favourable circumstances, into a polytheism like that of Greece, or of Egypt, or of the Maoris.

Athanasius charges Arianism with dualism, and even polytheism, and with destroying the whole doctrine of salvation.

When we turn to more advanced forms of religion than pagan polytheism the same phenomenon recurs.

It is characteristic of polytheism to blur that line in several ways.

Descartes establishes a philosophic monotheism, - by which the medieval polytheism of substantial forms, essences and eternal truths fades away before God, who is the ruler of the intellectual world no less than of the kingdom of nature and of grace.

Even polytheism,' or something indistinguishable from it, is suggested to this doggedly empiricist mind by the Varieties of Religious Experience; they are all good to those to whom they appeal; and what right have we to talk of Objective standards?

The ancient Babylonian psalms clearly reveal that the highest minds were moving out of polytheism to a monotheistic identification of various deities as diverse phases of one underlying essence.

The change from Palestinian polytheism to the pre-eminence of Yahweh and the gradual development of ethical monotheism are facts which external evidence continues to emphasize, which biblical criticism must investigate as completely as possible.

Thus, whereas in his writings, so far as they are known to us, Xenophanes appears as a theologian protesting against an anthropomorphic polytheism, the ancients seem to have regarded him as a philosopher asserting the unity of Being.

On the history of Neoplatonism with special reference to the decline of Roman polytheism, see, e.g., Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1898), pp. 82 foil.

According to the various skin jobs (Sixes, Leobens and Eights), the Cylons are monotheistic and believe in one God as opposed to the polytheism of the Colonies.

Besides those who were ready to go the whole length and accept circumcision, numbers adopted particular Jewish practices, observing the Sabbath, for instance, or turned from polytheism to the doctrine of the One God.

For a true appreciation of the chaotic polytheism that reveals itself even in the earliesttexts it would be necessary to be able to trace its development, stage by stage, out of a number of naive primitive cults; but the period of growth lies behind recorded history, and we are here reduced to hypotheses and a posleriori reconstructions.

The Bible wholly rejects polytheism, and the Decalogue jealousy reserves worship for YHWH.

Wolff's list is of some historical importance - atheism, deism (a God without care for men) and naturalism (denial of supernatural revelation); anthropomorphism (assigning a human body to God); materialism, and idealism (non-existence of matter); paganism (polytheism); Manichaeism, Spinozism, Epicureanism.

Lastly pre-Mosaic polytheism seems to be implied in the Mosaic prohibition Ex.

Of the epic fragments, the more important are those in which he attacks the "anthropomorphic and anthropopathic polytheism" of his contemporaries.

The first, De Falsa Religione, and the second, De Origine Erroris, attack the polytheism of heathendom, show the unity of the God of creation and providence, and try to explain how men have been corrupted by demons.

Their belief might be described as a polydemonism rather than a polytheism, or more correctly, to avoid altogether the intrusion of foreign notions, as a "multinuminism."

In polytheism the grades of superhuman beings are continuous; but in monotheism there is a sharp distinction of kind, as well as degree, between God on the one hand, and all other superhuman beings on the other; the latter are the " angels."

Porphyry marks the transition to a new phase of Neoplatonism, in which it becomes completely subservient to polytheism, and seeks before everything else to protect the Greek and Christianity.

The necessity of a constant protest against polytheism led to a tenacious insistence on the divine unity, and the task was to reconcile this unity with the deity of Jesus Christ.

In the Apology, after contrasting the judicial treatment of Christians with that of other accused persons, he refutes the accusations brought against the Christians of atheism, eating human flesh and licentiousness, and in doing so takes occasion to make a vigorous and skilful attack on pagan polytheism and mythology.

Unlike the Hindu, Xenophanes inclined to pantheism as a protest against the anthropomorphic polytheism of the time, which seemed to him improperly to exalt one of the many modes of finite existence into the place of the Infinite.

Whilst it can hardly be allowed that Xenophanes, so far from denying, actually affirms a plurality of gods, it must be conceded to Freudenthal that Xenophanes's polemic was directed against the anthropomorphic tendencies and the mythological details of the contemporary polytheism rather than against the polytheistic principle, and that, apart from the treatise De Melisso Xenophane et Gorgia, now generally discredited, there is no direct evidence to prove him a consistent monotheist.

With the rise of species, deities and the cult of individual animals, the path towards anthropomorphization and polytheism is opened and the respect paid to animals tends to lose its strict animistic character.

We have, however, yet to notice the enlargement of the sphereof ethics due to its close connexion with theology; for while this added religious force and sanction to ordinary moral obligations, it equally tended to impart a moral aspect to religious, belief and worship. " Duty to God " - as distinct from duty to man - had not been altogether unrecognized by pagan moralists; but the rather dubious relations of even the more orthodox philosophy to the established polytheism had generally prevented them from laying much stress upon it.

The church and church theology, to whose guidance the masses now surrendered themselves, took in along with them their superstition, their polytheism, their magic, their myths, and all the machinery of religious witchcraft.

The advent of the Persians, bringing with them a conception of religion of a far higher order than Babylonian-Assyrian polytheism (see Zoroaster), must also have acted as a disintegrating factor in leading to the decline of the old faith in the Euphrates Valley, and we thus have the interesting though not entirely exceptional phenomenon of a great civilization bequeathing as a legacy to posterity a superstition instead of a real achievement.

The catechetic course included instruction in monotheism, in the folly of polytheism, in the Christian scheme of salvation, &c. (c) They were again and again exorcized, in order to rid them of the lingering taint of the worship of demons.

But with the decline of dogmatic belief and the spread of religious doubt - as the special sciences also grow more general, and the natural sciences become more speculative about matter and force, evolution and teleology - men begin to wonder again about the nature and origin of things, just as it was the decay of polytheism in Greek religion and his own discoveries in natural science which impelled Aristotle to metaphysical questions.