"Polytheistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others are subordinate. In this latter case God is not necessarily responsible ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... to admit some measure of toleration. And Socrates, when he avowed that he must obey God rather than the Athenians, and the Stoics, when they set the wise man above the law, were very near giving utterance to the principle. But it was first proclaimed and established by enactment, not in polytheistic and philosophical Greece, but in India, by Asoka, the earliest of the Buddhist kings, two hundred and fifty years ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Egyptians, almost the only exception to polytheistic tolerance, seem to have been rendered intolerant by the number of antagonistic animal-gods worshipped in different parts of the country, enumerated by Juvenal, who describes the effects of religious ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... imbibed from the great teacher Ghazali. His main principle was a rigid unitarianism which denied the independent existence of the attributes of God, as being incompatible with his unity, and therefore a polytheistic idea. Mahommed in fact represented a revolt against the anthropomorphism of commonplace Mahommedan orthodoxy, but he was a rigid predestinarian and a strict observer of the law. After his return to Morocco at the age ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions, and they had to make it a ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... at this temple is the most important of all the religious observances of the empire, and constitutes a most interesting remnant of the ancient monotheistic cultus which prevailed in China before the rationalism of Confucius and the polytheistic superstition of Buddhism predominated among the people. While the ceremonies of the sacrifices are very complicated, they are kept with the strictest severity. The chief of these is at the winter solstice. On December ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... imagination. In other words, the scriptural explanation of heathenism is found in an original ancestral sin, in which the human race departed from the true God and gave itself up to the worship, first, of impersonal nature-powers, and then, of the polytheistic personifications of ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... very first evening as to whether it meant that there was more than one God. And Clytie's view—that God called himself "Us" in the same sense that kings and editors of newspapers do—at length prevailed over the polytheistic ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... alive to the dangers connected with that kind of asceticism which is based on theories of the impurity of the body—the typical Oriental form of world-renunciation. But he does not appear to have foreseen the unethical and polytheistic developments of sacramental institutionalism. In this particular his Judaising opponents had a little more justification than he is willing ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Babylonian account may have had some foundation in fact, from a tradition of a prior revelation, it plainly bears the marks of error. "The Babylonian stories of creation are full of grotesque and polytheistic ideas, while those of the Bible speak only of the one living and true God." "All things," the Babylonian legend says, "were produced at the first from Tiamat." "The gods came into being in long succession, but, at length, enmity arose between them and Tiamat, who created monsters to oppose them. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... part of the accepted Hindu orthodoxy. For, whatever its origin, an observer finds the pantheistic idea emerge all over educated India. The late Sir M. Monier Williams speaks of pantheism as a main root of the original Indo-Aryan creed, which has "branched out into an endless variety of polytheistic superstitions." Whether that be so, or whether, as is now more generally believed, the polytheism is the aboriginal Indian plant into which the pantheistic idea has been grafted as communities have become brahmanised, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races, the Semitic have maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Rig Veda the latter should be called, if by any new term, rather by a name like pantheistic polytheism, than by the somewhat misleading word henotheism. What is novel in it is that it represents the fading of pure polytheism and the engrafting, upon a polytheistic stock, of a speculative homoiousian tendency soon to bud out ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... and idealistic, has found many congenial minds. Indeed, it is not rash to say that in the thought of New Japan the distinguishing Oriental metaphysical conceptions of the universe have been entirely displaced by those of the West. Christians, in particular, have entirely abandoned the old polytheistic, pantheistic, and fatalistic metaphysics ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick |
