Meet the Three Stooges of Monotheism
How transcendent deities amount to cultural mascots
Yahweh, Jesus, and Allah.
Larry, Curly, and Moe.
That comparison would be blasphemous if the three gods of monotheism weren’t plainly mascots for human cultures, farcically mistaken for supernatural entities.
Monotheism comes off as comical because as steadfast and saintly as Jews, Christians, and Muslims may wish to be in their dedication to the one, true God, they fall back on self-serving images.
Larry
Jews turned the Canaanite pantheon into a complex literary character that could be their companion and comforter in their long history of being alienated and oppressed. Resentment and artistry fueled that literary invention, as Jews combined many gods into one who thus absorbed multiple personalities (as Jack Miles explains in God: A Biography).
And to save their theology from being falsified, Jews went the extra step of divorcing God from the Temple, the law, and Jewish rituals, making Yahweh as hidden from his world as the Jews were aloof from the empires that dominated them and that mocked their messianic aspirations. But while Jews condemned gross idols such as statues of deities, they idolized the mythic telling of their history in…
