# Co-existance between one-god worship and polytheism



## Gurkhal (Sep 18, 2020)

Just a question for a topic. Is it possible to have some form of one-god-only worship co-exist with polytheist traditions beyond mere individual level?

I mean a monotheist and a polytheist person can certainly co-exist in peace, but when it comes to general society and institutions it usually does not become so easy.

Historical examples would be very much appreciated.

EDITED: Probably in the wrong sub-forum. Please, mods, move this to world building.


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## skip.knox (Sep 18, 2020)

Historical monotheistic religions have all been pretty intolerant of polytheism, so just on that side alone I'd say there's no help on that front. Speaking *very* broadly, and restricting to pre-modern eras, monotheistic religions will tolerate a fair amount of divergence in beliefs and practices, but will insist that you honor the one god and not try to preach more than one god. That seems to be a line that cannot be crossed. 

Polytheistic religions have a more complicated history. They can absorb a great many "new" gods but at the same time won't hesitate to draw their own uncrossable lines. You'd have to look at specifics for more.

But there's some gray here. What do you mean by "beyond ... individual level?" You're probably envisioning how the Roman Empire was tolerant of Christians (and others) so long as those people observed Roman religious traditions publicly while keeping their weird monotheism private. Someone else will have to lay out why Rome tolerated Judaism for generations before abruptly turning on them in the first century AD. But when religion gets to the institutional level, things get more difficult.

I'll turn the question around. How do you picture co-existence working, regardless of historical precedent?


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## Ban (Sep 18, 2020)

Henotheism is the belief in multiple gods, but veneration of one above all. Monolatry expands on it by claiming only one god is worthy of worship, while still accepting the existence of other gods.

Google those terms and you will find examples, from dualist religions such as Zoroastrianism and forms of Gnosticism, to streams of thought within Hinduism and ancient Hellenism.


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## Svrtnsse (Sep 18, 2020)

Ban said:


> Henotheism is the belief in multiple gods, but veneration of one above all.


I had never encountered this word until now, and I'm sure I'll forget it, but I'm glad I know it exists.

In the setting I've created, there are multiple gods. The pantheon is vast, and most of it hasn't been fleshed out. 

There are plenty of churches/religions (not sure that term applies) devoted to one or more of the gods in the pantheon, and there are churches devoted to gods that don't exist at all but which people believe in anyway. For the most part, and especially in the more civilised parts of the world, the various churches are able to coexist peacefully, but not everywhere.


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## CupofJoe (Sep 19, 2020)

India springs to mind.
Not an easy peace to be sure, but Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism and probably a dozen others rub along together. And have done for a very long time. There has to be a political [big P and small p] and societal will for it to happen.


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## Insolent Lad (Sep 19, 2020)

This would become a lot more complicated if those polytheist pantheons were 'real' and interacted with people.


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## Gurkhal (Sep 20, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> Historical monotheistic religions have all been pretty intolerant of polytheism, so just on that side alone I'd say there's no help on that front. Speaking *very* broadly, and restricting to pre-modern eras, monotheistic religions will tolerate a fair amount of divergence in beliefs and practices, but will insist that you honor the one god and not try to preach more than one god. That seems to be a line that cannot be crossed.



I agree. The whole notion of monotheism kind of falls if you allow or promote the worship of more than the one true god (excluding saints, ikons, angels and stuff directly connected to the one true god but not being gods themselves). Hence the importance of drawing a line there.



skip.knox said:


> Polytheistic religions have a more complicated history. They can absorb a great many "new" gods but at the same time won't hesitate to draw their own uncrossable lines. You'd have to look at specifics for more.



I also agree with this. Someone once explained it to me that in polytheism there's a relation between two communities, gods and mortals, which needs to work for everyone's benefit. And from this I think that in terms of monotheism its more of a relation between the community of mortals to a distant mentor and leader. While in polytheism its more about a huge community with both mortals, spirits, gods etc. and we try to keep that society harmonious while understanding that some people have more power than others and everyone wants both the same and very different things.



skip.knox said:


> But there's some gray here. What do you mean by "beyond ... individual level?" You're probably envisioning how the Roman Empire was tolerant of Christians (and others) so long as those people observed Roman religious traditions publicly while keeping their weird monotheism private. Someone else will have to lay out why Rome tolerated Judaism for generations before abruptly turning on them in the first century AD. But when religion gets to the institutional level, things get more difficult.



I mean that a monotheist and a polytheist can reasonably be friends and hang out, as two individuals. But relations between groups of monotheists and polytheists are usually not so friendly with each other. I am thinking of several instances where monotheists and polytheists have either been able to live together or not. Both in cases which have been celebrated and condemned.



skip.knox said:


> I'll turn the question around. How do you picture co-existence working, regardless of historical precedent?



As a general live and let live attitude and finding a common ground in values to focus on.



Ban said:


> Henotheism is the belief in multiple gods, but veneration of one above all. Monolatry expands on it by claiming only one god is worthy of worship, while still accepting the existence of other gods.



Being interested in religion I am aware of these concepts. Yet to me it seems like these are twists on a polytheistic framework and not actual monotheism. So I am was more looking for co-existance between an Abrahamitic religion and polytheism than say between Mithraism and general polytheism.



Svrtnsse said:


> In the setting I've created, there are multiple gods. The pantheon is vast, and most of it hasn't been fleshed out.



I love it! I love messy settings with a ton of characters and stuff in them. Lean settings where nothing is added that won't be directly relevant in the story bores me and I grow detached as opposed to attracted to them. Hence my love for Westeros and Tolkien. 



CupofJoe said:


> India springs to mind.
> Not an easy peace to be sure, but Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism and probably a dozen others rub along together. And have done for a very long time. There has to be a political [big P and small p] and societal will for it to happen.



I fear I know to little of India's history to comment on this. 



Insolent Lad said:


> This would become a lot more complicated if those polytheist pantheons were 'real' and interacted with people.



So it would. But I am afraid that's not the story I want to write. Religion being active in people's lives is something I like, if religion is added to the world, but gods actually walking around is something I don't like. I like to read about flawed people and actual active gods don't add much to this dimension in my opinion.


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## skip.knox (Sep 20, 2020)

I'm not a fan of Walking Gods (sequel to Walking Dead), either, but I know there are lots of people who love that. All are welcome.

There's no co-existence in Altearth, but I've flipped it. Since I have the Roman Empire survive, I have Roman culture survive, which includes polytheism. This gets stretched in various directions but the old state religion of Rome is still there. The Abrahamic faiths never got off the ground in Altearth. Were you to go there, you'd find minor cults but that's all. 

I do have monotheists, though. They're orcs. 

The orcs arrive worshipping the one true god, the Sun. I haven't much developed the details, but there are dollops of Mithraism and Zoroastrianism, but the key is that the orc religion is intolerant. All other beliefs are beliefs in demons (not other gods; there are no other gods), emissaries of darkness, which must be eliminated. 

Once they arrived, the orcs looked around for the biggest dude on the block, which was Rome. They proceeded to copy just about everything, so they have formed their army into legions, they have an Imperator, but he rules in conjunction with the chief shaman (need a title for that one). Everything the orcs do is couched in terms of the religious enterprise of bringing light to a world in darkness. 

Polytheism is never so violent as when faced with monotheism. Rome wants all gods to coexist and all practices to coexist, at least so long as those gods and practices don't start calling for an end to Roman practice. When that happens, Rome has no problem squashing such nonsense. The Orc Imperium is the only thing too big for Rome to squash, at least for a good many centuries.


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## Gurkhal (Sep 20, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> I'm not a fan of Walking Gods (sequel to Walking Dead), either, but I know there are lots of people who love that. All are welcome.



I agree with this, in case something got the impression I menat something else.

EDITED: And for the "Rosarian Empire" I am trying to decide if I want a full polytheist setting or a monotheist one (, spiced with additions of angels, saints and so on as part of the monotheist religion with a great many ways to express itself).


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## Gurkhal (Sep 20, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> Once they arrived, the orcs looked around for the biggest dude on the block, which was Rome. They proceeded to copy just about everything, so they have formed their army into legions, they have an Imperator, but he rules in conjunction with the chief shaman (need a title for that one). Everything the orcs do is couched in terms of the religious enterprise of bringing light to a world in darkness.



If you want ideas for titles for a high priest of the sun, here are a few.

Solarch
Solarex
Solarion
Solax


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## skip.knox (Sep 20, 2020)

Solax sounds like a laxative. Solarex sounds like a watch. Solarion sounds like a villain in a 60s SF movie. 

But I like Solarch, for all that it's Greek. <g>


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## Gurkhal (Sep 20, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> Solax sounds like a laxative. Solarex sounds like a watch. Solarion sounds like a villain in a 60s SF movie.
> 
> But I like Solarch, for all that it's Greek. <g>


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## Svrtnsse (Sep 20, 2020)

skip.knox said:


> Solarion sounds like a villain in a 60s SF movie.


...or perhaps a raid boss in World of Warcraft.  
High Astromancer Solarian


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## Prince of Spires (Sep 21, 2020)

There's a few things to dig into I think

Is the god or are the gods real in your world? And if they are, do they directly influence the world or not? I think this will have an impact on how people view religion and their god(s). 

Which is the dominant religion? The impression I get is that peaceful coexistence is possible under a couple of circumstances:
- the polytheistic religion is the dominant one: A polytheistic religion doesn't mind an extra deity too much, as long as they can fit it into their beliefs somewhere
- the monotheistic religion is fairly peaceful: if it preaches intollerance and the subversion of all other religions then coexistence will be more difficult.

How prosperous / stable is the society: what I remember from my history is that as long as countries or regions are prosperous then people are more tolerant of other religions and people will generally be left to their own idea's. However, if things are declining then the other religions are an easy target and things can get intollerant really fast. 

An example of this is early islam. I think for a decent time after the initial expansion the islam was fairly tolerant of other religions. People could go on pilgrimages to the holy land and they could practise whichever religion they wanted, as long as they didn't do it too openly. This changed when the fortunes of the islamic states changed and they had to deal with losses and economic troubles. They became a lot less tollerant of anything not islamic, with them making it harder for pilgrims to reach the holy land one of the causes for the crusades. Though, with skip.knox we have our resident expert on this piece of history, so I'm hesitant to make any claims to the accuracy of my memory regarding this...


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## skip.knox (Sep 21, 2020)

Honest disclaimer: I'm not at all an expert on Islam. I know a bit about it because I've studied and taught the Crusades, so learning about Islam is unavoidable, but it's from a certain perspective and over a comparatively limited time period. I do have some knowledge of general history of Islam in the Mediterranean and eastern Europe up to the later 17thc. All this means that a fer-reelz historian of Islam will have more to say than I will venture.

Anyway. In the early phases of Islam, the religion was violently intolerant of paganism, specifically of the animism of the tribes of Arabia and North Africa. With them it was convert or die.

As the faith encountered other powers such as Persia or Byzantium, it fell closer to straight power politics. Islam never, in the areas I know about, contented itself with being the minority subject to a different faith. So, there were lots of wars. Which Islam mostly won, for the first century plus a bit. Then internal splits complicated the steady expansion and I'll stop there.

The tolerance mentioned is very likely the explicit toleration of Islam for Christianity and Judaism, the so-called People of the Book. That tolerance came from the foundation of the faith. Those people were allowed to have churches, practice their religion openly, and sometimes even keep their own laws. In exchange they paid a special tax and refrained from proselytizing. How Christians or Jews were treated in specific cases of course varied with time and circumstance.

Why and how that early medieval tradition changed would take a whole book to discuss!


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## J.W. Golan (Oct 15, 2020)

Gurkhal said:


> Just a question for a topic. Is it possible to have some form of one-god-only worship co-exist with polytheist traditions beyond mere individual level?


I would add a slightly different interpretation to this subject: it’s not so much about whether monotheistic and polytheistic religions can coexist in the same society. They can and do in our modern world, and have done so successfully at various crossroads throughout history. It’s really a question about whether any religion can coexist once it becomes the political or state religion - tied to the keys to political power.

If your ruler or ruling class claims political authority by means of “divine right,” then they cannot tolerate any religion that would deny that divine authority. The Seleucid Empire is a case in point, where a polytheistic state religion saw alternative, monotheistic religions as a threat - and attempted to suppress them.

Tolerance is not about whether a society is monotheistic or polytheistic, so much as it’s about whether a religion holds political power, and whether that state religion sees other religious practices as a threat to its supremacy.


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## pmmg (Oct 15, 2020)

I believe peoples will always find reasons to have friction with each other, and religion is sometimes a means to do so. I think there are plenty of examples where this happens, monotheistic and pantheistic believers getting along together, including in America and in much of western culture (there are also plenty of examples of where it did not....so...). Many humanist religions carry a message that hating on others is bad, and hurts the soul of a believer even if it is against unbelievers. While religion alone may become a cause of friction, there are usually a lot of contributing reasons as well.


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## Rosemary Tea (Mar 10, 2021)

Gurkhal said:


> Just a question for a topic. Is it possible to have some form of one-god-only worship co-exist with polytheist traditions beyond mere individual level?
> 
> I mean a monotheist and a polytheist person can certainly co-exist in peace, but when it comes to general society and institutions it usually does not become so easy.
> 
> ...


Early Judaism was exactly like that. They worshipped El-Yahweh (a combination of two singular gods from cultures that combined early; that's what's translated as "the Lord your God" in the KJV), but that didn't mean they didn't believe any other gods existed. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" is an acknowledgement of the existence, and validity, of other gods. Jews weren't supposed to worship any gods besides El-Yahweh, but that wasn't the same thing as not believing in any of those other gods. Judaism is really a monolatrous religion more than a monotheistic one. Even in modern Judaism, the teaching is that other peoples may have other gods and there's nothing wrong with that, but Jews aren't to worship them. 

And that was what the religious establishment said. What the people themselves did is another story. The Old Testament is full of evidence that worship of other gods was very common practice in ancient Israel. The prophets repeatedly scolded them for it. Sometimes the Bible shows us the people talking back at the prophets, and doesn't necessarily tell us they were wrong, even if the overarching story is "they paid the price, God let them be defeated in war, and now let's all worship this one God." 

Christianity is an even more overt blending of mono- and polytheism, particularly in Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Officially, there's just one God, but the old gods got makeovers and became saints. Praying to Saint So-and-so for help in whatever they're the patron of is fine and dandy, even if at the end of the day it's all supposed to be about God.


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## skip.knox (Mar 10, 2021)

>believing in
A key phrase here. Those raised in a Christian tradition have a very specific notion about what it means to be religious, but faith has a range of nuances in other religions. Indeed, even the very concept of what constitutes a religion varies across cultures and eras. Here is another place where SF has done a much better job of exploring possibilities than has fantasy.


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## Aldarion (Mar 25, 2021)

Gurkhal said:


> Just a question for a topic. Is it possible to have some form of one-god-only worship co-exist with polytheist traditions beyond mere individual level?
> 
> I mean a monotheist and a polytheist person can certainly co-exist in peace, but when it comes to general society and institutions it usually does not become so easy.
> 
> ...



As far as monotheism goes, no. Monotheistic religions tend to be extremely intolerant of any form of polytheism, or indeed any system of belief that is not their own - that is why they are so successful. Christianity was unique in that it attempted to absorb pagan beliefs and give them Christian context - many saints and indeed many Christian traditions started out as pagan dieties and traditions connected to them. In Judaism and Islam, the choice was full conversion or the sword.

However, you can have a situation where people worship only one god but believe in the existence of many gods - and in such a case, coexistence certainly is possible. This is called monolatry, and it is what early (pre-Babylon) Judaism will have been like: Israelites worshipped Yahveh only, but they believed other gods existed as well. Multiple times in the Old Testament is there evidence of existence of other dieties: "mages" of the Pharaoh match Aaron trick for trick, until the last one. Command "You shall not have other gods before me" indicates less that other gods do not exist, and more that Yahveh should be given precendence in worship. Only during Babylonian captivity did Judaism become monotheistic religion.


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## Hybris (Jul 4, 2022)

A simple example I didn't found : the roman Empire, during the first four centuries. Every one knows they were polytheists under César and the first Princeps (Emperors), but strangely, we oftenly forget that at the fall of the Empire, they were totaly monotheist, the christian religion being the State religion. So : during the first century, the christians were persecuted (depending of the location and the date - it wasn't every time), then quite tolerated, then the Princeps religion (Constantin, ~320), and finally the sole State religion, under Theodose, in 392. The rise of a monotheist religion replacing a monotheist one might an interesting concept. Because, of course it wasn't as linear as it look there, and there were a lot of conflicts (did you asked for pacific relations ?), but there was a coexistence, and at a time, a balance, probably.


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## skip.knox (Jul 4, 2022)

And don't forget the influence of certain religions in certain areas of the Empire, both geographic and social. The example of Mithraism comes to mind. And on the other side, the early Christian heresies really did mean there were significantly different Christian experiences depending on when and where you lived.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 5, 2022)

All true guys. 

What I think that I was looking for, and probably is still looking for, is a situation where there's both monotheists and polytheists in strength but they are not at each other's throat in a big struggle. Hence have a world with that but not with religious conflict as one of the main conflicts in the setting.


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## Queshire (Jul 5, 2022)

Hrm... well, depending on if you count Buddhism as monotheistic then you could take a look at Japan. There's a saying I've heard related to it. They're born Shinto, marry Christian and die Buddhist. Though that's more to do with rituals of each than actual belief.


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## Hybris (Jul 5, 2022)

Maybe, still the roman Empire before Jesus, un Judaea (between roman polytheism and the Jews). As said elswhere, the local (jews, here) powers had retained a lot of power (it look for me really similar to a modern protectorate, more than a total annexion), so it could be quite balanced, and the roman administration let them believe what they wanted to believe.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 5, 2022)

Queshire said:


> Hrm... well, depending on if you count Buddhism as monotheistic then you could take a look at Japan. There's a saying I've heard related to it. They're born Shinto, marry Christian and die Buddhist. Though that's more to do with rituals of each than actual belief.



I'm afraid I know to little about Buddhism to know if its a monotheistic religion although I'm inclined to say "no" in regards to that question.But then again I'm not very informed to know for sure.



Hybris said:


> Maybe, still the roman Empire before Jesus, un Judaea (between roman polytheism and the Jews). As said elswhere, the local (jews, here) powers had retained a lot of power (it look for me really similar to a modern protectorate, more than a total annexion), so it could be quite balanced, and the roman administration let them believe what they wanted to believe.



Also the relation between the polytheist Romans and the monotheistic Jews is in my opinion a very complicated affair. 

Although I suppose that making the monotheistic religion be a communal or ethnic as opposed to a universalist one is a solution.


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## Rosemary Tea (Jul 5, 2022)

Gurkhal said:


> I'm afraid I know to little about Buddhism to know if its a monotheistic religion although I'm inclined to say "no" in regards to that question.But then again I'm not very informed to know for sure.


 Technically, Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. There is no God/gods. Buddha himself isn't divine, just a great teacher.

What complicates matters is that Buddhism has been mixed and matched with several other religions, which do include deities. Since Buddhism is, at its core, a philosophy more than a religion, it can easily be mixed. 

Culturally, the approach to religion in most of Asia is a mix and match one. Unlike in the West, where people identify as Christian to the exclusion of anything else, Muslim to the exclusion of anything else, Jewish to the exclusion of anything else, etc., religion in most of Asia isn't seen as an identity. People simply follow the beliefs and practices that make sense to them, and add gods or great teachers as they encounter them. 

Your original question is based on the assumption that that Western view of religion, as an identity that excludes all other religions, is _the_ view of religion. But that's actually a minority view, when all the world's traditional cultures are added together. If that view of religion were out of the picture, peaceful co-existence between monotheists and polytheists would much more easily happen, unless they had something else to fight over. If the monotheists belonged to one ethnicity and the polytheists to another, and there were ethnic tension between them, that would lead to fighting, and probably to persecution of whichever one was the minority by whichever one was the majority, but it wouldn't really be about religion. For a contemporary real life example, see what's been happening to the Uighurs in China.



Gurkhal said:


> Also the relation between the polytheist Romans and the monotheistic Jews is in my opinion a very complicated affair.


 And it was much more about imperialism and ethnicity than about religion. And it didn't get any less complicated when the Romans became monotheistic Christians.


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## ThinkerX (Jul 5, 2022)

Worth pointing out that some monotheistic religions, at least, are inclined to 'adopt' pagan concepts in a revamped form.

The 'life-death-life' of Jesus, for example, bears at least some resemblance to the 'dying/reborn' deities of the pagan pantheons (and might have been influenced by such, as the concept is mostly absent in Judaism.) Likewise, a few pagan deities might have been theologically remade into Christian saints. 

Solaria, the principal nation of my principal world, is vehemently monotheistic - but the adherents of the True God worship at cathedrals and churches dedicated to a large number of saints, a few of whom predate the churches origin - though the priests don't like to talk about such matters.


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## skip.knox (Jul 5, 2022)

All you need do is to make the monotheists will to let polytheism exist. If it's an area where polytheism is dominant, then you can follow models already suggested. If it's an area where the monotheists are dominant, you can use the medieval Islam model, with polytheists substituting for Jews and Christians. They pay a special tax, have their own temples, are forbidden to prostletyze. Everyone gets along, save for the occasional religious riot at the popular level.

And if there's parity, I look to the example of Reformation towns in the 16thc and 17thc. There aren't many examples, but one I happen to know is that of Augsburg, where there was an equal number of Catholics and Protestants on the City Council (of course, Protestant here excluded Anabaptists and other dangerous types <g>). I can't say it worked very well, nor did it last more than a couple of generations, but the example is there.


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## Rosemary Tea (Jul 5, 2022)

skip.knox said:


> They pay a special tax, have their own temples, are forbidden to prostletyze.


The "special" tax was the equivalent of a non-resident tax, paid because non-Muslims were exempt from the tithing requirement. Muslims had to give ten percent of their income to the religious establishment, to use for support of the poor and other essential services (zagat). Which meant they had to keep careful records of their income and calculate that ten percent. Non-Muslims were exempt from zagat, so they just paid a flat amount. 

A very prosperous Christian or Jewish businessman in a Muslim country might very well end up paying less than his Muslim counterparts. A not so prosperous Christian or Jew could be stuck paying more.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 6, 2022)

Sorry for the short replies. I appecitate your posts but I find that I'm not well versed in the details of the examples to really engage with them.



Rosemary Tea said:


> Culturally, the approach to religion in most of Asia is a mix and match one. Unlike in the West, where people identify as Christian to the exclusion of anything else, Muslim to the exclusion of anything else, Jewish to the exclusion of anything else, etc., religion in most of Asia isn't seen as an identity. People simply follow the beliefs and practices that make sense to them, and add gods or great teachers as they encounter them.



I am not Asian but a Westerner so it makes perfect sense to me to use my own cultural perception as a basis as opposed to try and use a perception for which I have had a rather limited exposure. But I shall make an effort to look into this and see where it leads me. 



Rosemary Tea said:


> Your original question is based on the assumption that that Western view of religion, as an identity that excludes all other religions, is _the_ view of religion. But that's actually a minority view, when all the world's traditional cultures are added together. If that view of religion were out of the picture, peaceful co-existence between monotheists and polytheists would much more easily happen, unless they had something else to fight over. If the monotheists belonged to one ethnicity and the polytheists to another, and there were ethnic tension between them, that would lead to fighting, and probably to persecution of whichever one was the minority by whichever one was the majority, but it wouldn't really be about religion.



At the moment I know to little about universalist religions outside of, well, I know to little at all at this moment. So I can't really answer this.



Rosemary Tea said:


> And it was much more about imperialism and ethnicity than about religion. And it didn't get any less complicated when the Romans became monotheistic Christians.



I am well aware. The question however wasn't between two groups of monotheists but between polytheists and a monotheists.



ThinkerX said:


> Worth pointing out that some monotheistic religions, at least, are inclined to 'adopt' pagan concepts in a revamped form.



I am aware of this but it don't say anything for how they actually get along.  



ThinkerX said:


> The 'life-death-life' of Jesus, for example, bears at least some resemblance to the 'dying/reborn' deities of the pagan pantheons (and might have been influenced by such, as the concept is mostly absent in Judaism.) Likewise, a few pagan deities might have been theologically remade into Christian saints.



I am aware of this but it don't say anything for how they actually get along. 



ThinkerX said:


> Solaria, the principal nation of my principal world, is vehemently monotheistic - but the adherents of the True God worship at cathedrals and churches dedicated to a large number of saints, a few of whom predate the churches origin - though the priests don't like to talk about such matters.



It don't say anything for how they actually get along.



skip.knox said:


> All you need do is to make the monotheists will to let polytheism exist. If it's an area where polytheism is dominant, then you can follow models already suggested. If it's an area where the monotheists are dominant, you can use the medieval Islam model, with polytheists substituting for Jews and Christians. They pay a special tax, have their own temples, are forbidden to prostletyze. Everyone gets along, save for the occasional religious riot at the popular level.



This might be a possible view of it, yes. I think that I'll go with East Asian view of religion and do some research on that first and then we'll see where I end up.


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## Rosemary Tea (Jul 6, 2022)

If you're just looking for a way for monotheists and polytheists to get along, look no further than the large cities in North America today. In New York or Toronto or San Francisco or LA or Chicago, and that's not an exhaustive list, different religions co-exist, people of different religions are friends, and no big fuss is made about it. 

Those cities are pretty diverse, and the overall culture largely secular.


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## skip.knox (Jul 6, 2022)

>the overall culture largely secular.
This is key. If the culture is fundamentally tied to one religion or another, even a polytheistic one, there will be issues. There will, for example, be feast days that are legally recognized while the non-state religion feast days are not. There may well be legal exemptions, tax privileges, and so on. All those create potential for conflict. The world-building might want to identify some and figure out ways they might be resolved, or might decide just to paper over them. With pages. Hah!

To me, it's interesting to explore how not just different religions but different *approaches* to religious practices--formal and informal--would affect a fictional world. Maybe my interest comes in part from teaching the Reformation all those years. For sure it makes me stay well away from the topic until I've developed all the Altearth religions in more depth.


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## Aldarion (Jul 7, 2022)

Rosemary Tea said:


> Those cities are pretty diverse, and the overall culture largely secular.



Problem is that, historically, culture is highly tied to religion. One could even say that secular society is a sign of overall decay in culture, and is definitely tied to modernism.


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## Queshire (Jul 7, 2022)

Sure, one could say that. One could also say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.


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## skip.knox (Jul 7, 2022)

Could say that and have, except for the part about decline. I prefer to say change. Not only because it's more useful to the historian, I also prefer it as a writer.

I agree that the soft from religion to the secular is one of the most fundamental shifts in human history.


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## Rosemary Tea (Jul 7, 2022)

Aldarion said:


> One could even say that secular society is a sign of overall decay in culture, and is definitely tied to modernism.


There have been ones saying that for thousands of years. 

To the Romans, early Christians were atheists: they didn't worship the recognized gods. Cultural decay! Decline of religion!

That wasn't the first instance of that, either. As I recall, atheism (and thereby promoting cultural decay) was one of the charges against Socrates.

And the definition of secular is fluid. To us, coming from a definition of religious based on a modern Christian norm, many of the polytheistic societies of the past would seem secular. Even the ostensibly Christian medieval peasants would be, to us, mostly secular: those who lived remotely, and there were many, might rarely if ever see a priest or a church in their lifetimes. Daily life was not religious at all. Religion was, in some cases, even less on their radar than it is for non-religious people living today.

But they weren't coming in contact with people of diverse religions, either. That's a hallmark of modern secular society.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 8, 2022)

Aldarion said:


> Problem is that, historically, culture is highly tied to religion. One could even say that secular society is a sign of overall decay in culture, and is definitely tied to modernism.



I wouldn't go that far. Secularism has been a part of, at least Europe, since the end of the Thirty Years' War unless I'm mistaken. Still it remains to see how it will play out in the long run with the more total secular state of society in parts of the world. 



Rosemary Tea said:


> There have been ones saying that for thousands of years.



No. There have been a discussion however at no point in our history has secularism been so through in society as in parts of today's world. 



Rosemary Tea said:


> To the Romans, early Christians were atheists: they didn't worship the recognized gods. Cultural decay! Decline of religion!



Not really. More like traitors who won't publically give their loyalty to the Roman Empire and representing a path of development that means the destruction of the polytheists traditions and way of life in the Roman Empire. The first one proved to be false as I've yet to see that Christians were less or more loyal to the Roman Empire than the polytheists. On the second however the polytheists did correctly identify that Christianity represented the end of the Greco-Roman polytheististic way of life. For good and ill.



Rosemary Tea said:


> And the definition of secular is fluid. To us, coming from a definition of religious based on a modern Christian norm, many of the polytheistic societies of the past would seem secular. Even the ostensibly Christian medieval peasants would be, to us, mostly secular: those who lived remotely, and there were many, might rarely if ever see a priest or a church in their lifetimes. Daily life was not religious at all. Religion was, in some cases, even less on their radar than it is for non-religious people living today.



This is plain wrong. Only a very shallow view of historical polytheist socities would manage to paint them as secular in any sort of way.

Peasants in the Middle Ages didn't need to see a priest or a church to be religious. That religion is something which is only done at separate and special times at special places seems like a very modern idea to me. 



Rosemary Tea said:


> But they weren't coming in contact with people of diverse religions, either. That's a hallmark of modern secular society.



Just no. The most obvious example of coming into contact with people of diverse religions before the modern era is the Roman Empire and both before and after that, as well as in other parts of the world, people of different religions have been comingling.


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## Queshire (Jul 8, 2022)

Oh yeah, the Romans had a habit of writing about other countries and saying that, no, no, they're really just worshiping the Roman gods under another name. It's actually kinda funny. They equate Odin with Mercury.


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## skip.knox (Jul 8, 2022)

Secularism is, like all -isms, a slippery concept all the more tricky because it's one of those things that most people think they all agree upon. If pressed, they'll pose it in a negative: secularism is absence of religion or even anti-religion. This, without clearly defining what they mean by religion. Both those terms are wide open for discussion and disagreement.

As an early modern historian (yeah, I know, but with an MA in medieval and a PhD in early modern, I get to claim both!), the whole topic fascinates me. As a writer, it fascinates me all the more, as I remain convinced there's a novel or two in there for me (get in line buddy), as I find the topic is handled superficially in most fantasy novels. That's another thread.

I do think there are at least three models for the OP to look at, just drawing from the West. I leave to others recommendations from other cultures.

One model is the Greco-Roman model, which drew a fairly useful and effective line between practice and belief. So long as you behaved yourself, and performed any necessary reverences--respected the state religion--then what you did on your own time was more or less your own business. This rapprochement was put to the test when prostletyzing religions came along. It wasn't the monotheism so much as it was the insistence that the Romans were wrong and should convert, and that the monotheists shouldn't have to perform any of those external ceremonies. There just wasn't a place within the legal system to accommodate that.

A second model is the early medieval Christian Church (I know the Latin right better than the Greek). For centuries the Church showed tolerance toward pagans in a couple of ways. One, all were first to hear the Word of God preached and be given the opportunity to convert. The key act there was baptism, with a close second being the halting of pagan practices. Others followed on; one of these was tithing, which was a very sore point among many tribes recently converted. Once converted--and at times this was little more than the baptism of a clan chief or tribal king--if the people returned to paganism, then all bets were off. A "return to paganism" wasn't just some continued practice of seeing omens in birds, but was most seriously open rebellion. Not paying those tithes was a handy flash point, and rebellion could easily run to slaughtering priests, looting monasteries, and raiding into more Christian lands (which might well be an old tribal enemy). While the overall goal was the conversion of all peoples, the actual process could take generations, even centuries, and involve all manner of interesting compromises meanwhile. The most noticeable of these was the re-purposing of local sacred sites into Christian churches, and associating local spirits and gods with Christian saints.

The third model comes from the Reformation. Once Europeans wore themselves out with religious wars, they managed to find ways to allow multiple religions to exist within their own political boundaries. In some ways it was a return to the Roman model. Conformism externally, official neglect of what was internal. Or at least hidden. But here again, there were numerous exceptions and breakdowns in that approach, each of which makes for rich story-telling.

Short version: it can be done. Don't try imitate, just use other models for inspiration, then go create what works for your story.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 21, 2022)

I've been looking around a little and I think that perhaps one of the solutions to this problem, which may or may not be harder than what it does not do, is to break out from my European comfort zone and look towards the east for how polytheists and monotheists have, or have not, managed to co-exist as well as successful co-existance between different monotheist traditions. 

I am thinking here of Imperial Russia, of India and East Asia. 

In addition to topics I already know, or at least think that I know, about like the Greco-Roman and Old Norse approaches.


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## Gurkhal (Jul 24, 2022)

For continued research a phrase from the video game intro to the classic Diablo II comes to mind which I can't resist to share, even at the cost of a double posting.

"We travelled east. Always. Into the east."


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