Judaism, Christianity, Islam, One or Three Religious Metaphysics?

The three above mentioned religions claim that they are monotheistic and are proud of it. They even claim that they are the only one of this kind and for that reason scorn all other religions which were not supposedly able to conceive God as a unique abstract and universal divinity, and were consequently ‘primitive’ and ‘inferior’.

Furthermore the three religions claim the exclusivity of having been ‘revealed’ by God.

The kinship between the three religions based on the Book is an historical fact. The three religions have a book of faith in common the Bible of the Jews (what the Christians call the ancient Testament), although this Bible appears with very distinctive features in the Jewish and the Muslim religion, each religion claiming of course that only its version is the right one, that is to say the one which has been really revealed. Catholics and Protestants however accept the Jewish versions of the Bible, the former the corpus of the Jews of the Diaspora, the latter the one of the Jews of Jerusalem. This kinship could very well be explained by the very matter of fact of the proximity of the birth place of the three religions. Jesus Christ has lived in Palestine near the Jewish community of the country and may be among them. Islam was born in a nearby country which was pervaded by the faith of the Jews and the Christians, defied by them and especially by the Christianity of the civilised countries which almost encircled them, from Byzantium to Ethiopia.

In itself this kinship does neither preclude nor imply a priori the basic unity of the metaphysics of these religions.

All peoples on this Earth explain their creation and their place in the universal order there of by a mythology. All of them assume the role of the elected people whose mythology is the one and only true explanation of the creation. Their gods are therefore the only real ones; all other people are mistaken or have been misled. At the very beginning all gods are seen as different and as being the specific representation of one people. Nevertheless, even at an early stage in history there has been several lucid minds who have put in perspective those mythological accounts of creation and the specificity of those gods. One of the first healthy reaction was to accept the plurality of the various revelations of truth through religion (each people believes in his own truth, but it is the same albeit expressed in different languages) and thence to accept the equivalence between the different gods. This reaction encouraged a syncretic approach which is to be found for instance in the Roman empire, which melted together peoples from various origins as we can see it operating in contemporary Africa. On the other hand it is more and more a proven fact that mythologies have substantially borrowed from each other. The advances in archaeology, in history and excavations have led to the discovery of so called root-mythologies like the one which relates the Floods in the Middle East or the myth of Gilgamesh.

Therefore the Jews are not the only people who proclaim themselves to be chosen. All of them have done so. Do the Jews go on believing in their being chosen? I doubt it strongly. In the social reality of our time, the vast majority of the Jews, even those who are true believers, know that they are but ordinary human beings, even though, because of the Diaspora, Jews have been inclined, in order to survive, to bring out their particularities, that is to say their religious persuasion.

Our modern society has somewhat achieved much progress since 2000 years, even though the very idea of progress is no more fashionable to day, in some circles. Many fellow human beings, even though they maintain a strong com­mitment to their faith, have to some extent relativised their religious convictions. They are probably more tolerant not only in their behaviour but, and that is distinctly more important, in their intimate respect of the beliefs of others.

Because of progress, the mythologies dealing with creation have been under­mined. They are no longer articles of faith like they were earlier. Many fellow citizens of the earth, who once more have not given up their faith, have come to terms with the idea that those mythologies are no more than that, mythologies that are to be considered as stories with an educational purpose, even though, or precisely because, they are deemed to have been inspired by God Himself. Therefore the Bible of the three main religions or the mythology of the Bororo or Dogons is set on the same footing: their role is to be a sacred text in which the belief of one or more peoples is rooted.

On the other hand monotheism is by itself a strictly theological idea. To say that there is only one God does not amount to much. It is not obvious nor is it obviously untrue. Monotheism is probably more widely accepted than the followers of the deep formal cleavage between monotheistic religions and those religions they would have us believe, are polytheistic, would believe. Many of those who are in most cases only the multifarious expressions of one and the same supernatural power was to be regarded as one and the same.

Furthermore it may be asked whether those who proclaim themselves mono­theists are in fact such. All religions, the major ones included, refer to supernatural forces other than God. Himself, angels, demons, djins and so on. They proclaim that some human beings are inspired by the Deity, saints or prophets who have propagated the word of God.

No doubt these three religions of the Book have enhanced more than other religions this monotheistic feature of their own, just as they rationalised to a certain extent some of their constitutive ethical and organisational parts. One is then tempted to draw a parallel between this religious evolution and the evolution of the societies of the ancient Middle East, which led them to give up the tribal organisation and create a state superstructure. But if this mutual adaptation of the religious basis to the political organisation is credible; it is not, historically speaking, the only one possible. Other societies which were not a lesser stage of development, have followed other ways: in China prevailed a non religious metaphysic, Confucianism, and in India another belief, allowing the people to invent a variety of religious forms.

Thought it may appear shocking to some, I would like to add that these three religions as the others have matured at times when the temptation of syncretism was great. Some learned researchers have discovered that those religions, have borrowed from others: Christianity has taken up parts of the ancient Egyptian creeds, Judaism has retained some parts of the beliefs of the ancient orient (Baal among others), and Islam has done the same with beliefs stemming from the Arabic peninsula.

Among the three religions of the Book, the proximity between Judaism and Islam is the most obvious. The learned have with very good arguments put forward that Islam is to a large extent an Arabisation of Judaism. Not only because its precepts, its law and its rites are to a large extent similar to those of Judaism but also, and that is more fundamental, because Islam shares with Judaism a common view of the relationship between society and religion. The Arabisation of Judaism started before the delivery of the message of the prophet of Islam. In history as well as in the Koran you can find mention of those Hanifs who recognised Abraham without declaring themselves as being Jews. In this respect Islam has presented itself as the religion revealed to humanity from the very origin in as much as it was revealed to Adam himself. Islam would have, according to that, always existed even before it spoke through its Prophet Mohammed. But was either forgotten or misunderstood by some peoples (polytheism) or only partially understood by the others (Jews and Christians).

It is easier then to understand how important Muslims participate in a curious dispute. There are many writings, which are not regarded as heretic by the authorities, which are the self proclaimed defender of Islam, tending to prove that Abraham was not a Jew but an Arab. This demonstration presents itself as sci­entific based on archaeological findings in Mesopotamia, and linguistic etymology is invoked. For those who read the Bible like a mythology among others, this question has no meaning. You can’t correct a mythology, you don’t look for the real figure who hides behind its mythological representation.

It is easier to understand then why owing to that thesis of the Arabisation of Judaism.

Islam appeared in concordance with the political unification of the Arab pen­insula, and a number of Arab historians have derived from that fact that mono­theism, which replaced the plurality of tribal deities, was the vehicle of the formation of the Arab nation, since recognising the same God meant also sub­mitting to the same political power. Of course the Arabs already knew Christian and Judaic monotheism. Had they opted for Christianity they would have run the risk of becoming dependent of Byzantium, which dominated the region and which was their major fear. Opting for a form of Judaism liberated them from that risk, Judaism not being associated with any State power. The Arabs were therefore much attracted by appropriating Judaism through a particular reading of its Scriptures, and therefore considering it not as the religion of a particular semitic people, the Hebrews, but as the religion revealed to their Arab (also Semitic) ancestors.

On the other hand the historical circumstances under which Christianity and Islam grew, were very different. Islam was constituted in the entire integrity of its dogmas inside an homogenous close circle, the one of the Arab tribes of Mecca and Medina. Therefore it had to reflect the main characteristics of those groups to the point it was uncertain at the beginning whether it would become an univer- salistic religion. In the first times of the Arab conquest beyond the peninsula, it was a common practice that the Arabs kept their religions for themselves and allowed other peoples to keep their own. If this practice had gone on, Islam would have remained an exclusively Arab religion. However two circumstances con­tributed to the opening of Islam to an universalistic vocation: first, large segments of the conquered nations converted to Islam; second the Arabs welcomed these conversions. Christianity in contrast developed in the cosmopolitan world of the Roman empire where a Hellenistic culture prevailed. Furthermore its development was slow. It was therefore marked from the very beginning by this multicultural and multiethnic environment which contributed strongly to its universalism.

I will make a last remark. Is monotheism really a wonderful advance in the history of though, a qualitative progress? There are plenty of devious minds (but when you say devious you could as well say perverted, inspired by the Devil) who draw a parallel between this unique God (who is represented in the popular picture lore, if not in the purified vision of the learned, as an old man with a white beard, which symbolises His wisdom and authority) and the patriarch of the patriarchal system, the autocrat of the power systems. In this imagery, which adequately reflects what is actually experienced; it is obvious that the wise old male is closer to God than a woman or a youth. This projection in the sky legitimises the patriarchal order and the autocracy which prevails on earth, as well as it eliminates the feminine deities, always important in non monotheist religions. Those devious minds will add that this only and all powerful God deprives them, poor bastards, of all power. For with numerous Gods, who were competing with each other and clashed, you may call for help the one who is best provided to help you and in the Greek way jeer at the one who aggravates you. Is it a coincidence that the Greek democracy is polytheistic? Is it a coincidence as well whether in the areas which will later be dominated by the major religions—Christianity and Islam in this case—this democracy disappears? But it may be objected that the power which adopts a non religious metaphysic in China and a religious pluralism in India was also nothing but autocratic.

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