Of course. That’s perfectly logical.
.Yes. It’s logically possible. However, I do not see anybody coming up with any evidence for a pantheon of gods any time soon. You can’t use any of the arguments used for monotheism to come to this conclusion.
Any comments on this?
He said this as a goal or intent. Not as a possibility.
If two gods exist, then they stand in relation to existence. Existence is a single, united entity. You can say that two things exist. You can’t say that two things exists. If two gods exist, they they both stand in relation to the same single reference point by which we say they are both real. The existence referenced remains single and united. Of course, the Christian God is identical with this united existence itself- I AM WHO AM.
Is this your opinion, or part of Church Doctrine?
What he means is that a “god” is not “God”. A “god” is a being, an entity, a person. “God”, though, is the very reality of Being, Existence, and Personhood. There can only be One “God” (One Being, One Existence, One Personhood), whereas there can be an infinite number of individual gods.
Can you explain this more?
Just as Hindus, for example, pray to different gods for different benefits etc, Catholicism has encouraged that through an emphasis on saints. There is a saint for about every conceivable vocation, condition and place - St. Fiacre for cab drivers and St. Michael for grocers, St. Vitus for epilepsy and St. Swithbert for angina, St. Hedwig for Silesia and St. Devota for Monaco. I've read there about 10,000 of them altogether, most of them associated with fabulous stories of various miracles: physical cures, levitation, apparitions, etc. And more are being canonized all the time.
Has there been too much emphasis upon saints in the past? Protestants often ask: why go to a 'middleman" (or woman) when God through Christ is so available?You can’t have multiple existences. You can’t say that A is real and B is real without saying that both are real. If both are real, then they both partake in that realness- which is undivided. We cannot posit two totally distinct and separate realities- for if they are are real, then they are necessarily related by that realness.
Can you explain this more?
Hi Roy. It’s a lot easier to know that there have been people before us, just like us, who have finished the race even in their own vocations. We find it comforting to know that people with jobs and lives similar to ours have been able to follow Christ. The difference is that with the pagans, they pray to their gods and the gods themselves are said to have power, wheres saints only have the power to pray for us and hope for God to do the rest. When you call it going to a middleman, then according to that same logic, when we ask others to pray for us we are going to a middle man. According to the Holy Bible, “The prayer of a just man availeth much.” Saint Paul specifically exhorts us to intercede for each other. Best.
Actually, in Hinduism, the “gods” are simply manifestations of the One God; so the individual “gods” themselves do not have ultimate Power.