My perspective as an atheist: the only religion I am interested in is Catholicism. I am severely skeptical. I try to be Catholic and often fail to believe in God. So what is crucial for me in a religion is plausibility, and I perhaps entertain the idea of becoming Catholic because I find Catholicism to be the most plausible religion.
Now, one could certainly dispute whether Catholicism is the most plausible religion. (Many thinkers, for instance, take issue with the idea of a personal God.) I believe that it is. For instance, an example relevant to this discussion about polytheism is the Catholic argument that a God that created the world would have to be omnipotent and singular. For two gods to be discrete, their wills would have to be separate. They could not both be omnipotent and opposed. This would seem to complicate any act of creation.
Even Catholicism is fairly complicated, though. For one thing, you have a significant “other will” in the universe, which is the devil. Whereas the gnostics invoked two Gods to explain why existence is both so beautiful and so cruel, Catholics largely invoke the influence of the devil (it’s never really clear as to how metaphorical the devil is, but the consensus seems to be that the devil is something real). God is omnipotent, yet respects the free will of the devil, even though the devil is more powerful than human beings… From a non-Catholic perspective – and, perhaps, from a Catholic one – this is more complicated than simply positing God as the One. Though the devil is not itself a Creator, it was created by God, and has a “will” more powerful than that of human beings.
Also, you have the Trinity – One God in Three Persons. Would there be a difference, conceptually, between one God in Three Person and one God…in One
Thousand Persons? Their ability to harmonize and reconcile with each other could be beyond human comprehension (as, indeed, the notion of one God in three Persons is).
Frankly, it
could be very beautiful, 1,000 aspects of the Godhead – or 1,000,000 aspects of the Godhead – harmonizing like rays emanating from a single celestial body.
Granted, this would still be monotheism, however elusive – just as a Trinitarian Christianity is, from a non-Christian perspective, an elusive form of monotheism. I could imagine one God in a thousand manifestations (not just 3), which is essentially what some argue Hinduism is, precisely – that is, some argue that Hinduism is ultimately monotheistic (one Divine Being, Brahman, with countless manifestations).
There are other possible debates, of course – such as whether reincarnation is more “tidy” a concept than only living once (conceptually, I’m troubled by the seeming “untidiness” of a full life of 80 years, in comparison with a life that never made it past infancy, or one that ended in young adulthood); or whether karma (kind of like purgatory in “real time”) is more tidy a concept than an eternity in hell; but I think there’s plenty to discuss (of course) as regards the Christian conception of God, for starters.
For example, what help is it, semantically, to refer to God as a “He”? Why not “She”? Surely, we’re not speaking literally, but metaphorically. What is lost in a change of pronoun?.. And how do we conceptualize God as a person, without anthropomorphizing that God (as we’ve already been in danger of doing, as regards gender).
