The Judeo-Christian-Islamic Deity Is

[Hekate]

18. The error of monotheists was to abandon the Goddess. If we are "created in his image," God is Two...

Raised as a strict monotheist by a Deist mother, I have a hard time abandoning monotheism as a habitual way of thinking, but as a student of mythology who was also a member of a Moon Circle for 20 years, I have to say that polytheism goes a long way toward extricating us from the mess we are in.

For instance, I used to feel as tho I might be struck by lightning for saying I do not believe in Joel Osteen's smug self-serving god or Mike Pence's self-righteous woman-hating god. Really getting how much gods are created by men in men's image (read: humans, for men) has allowed me to declare definitively that I do not believe in the mean, small, nasty god of Pat Robertson. Or, perhaps, it may exist in the pantheon, but being a mean small nasty god it certainly is not going to get my devotion. Just because they claim to be related to Jesus of Nazareth doesn't mean they are.

Look to the world's great living polytheistic pantheons, and the past ones that live on in our psyches. We don't have to swallow them whole or recreate the cultures they were/are embedded in -- which in my mind is much the point. But they have much to teach us about liberating ourselves from too narrow a definition of god(s), and how to recognize when others are trying to impose a straitjacket of belief on all the rest of us.