Religion is a Mental Illness

There's arguments to be made that Judaism, Xianity and Islam aren't truly monotheistic. (Even all of Hinduism’s various gods can ultimately be traced back to Brahman.) But we'll put that aside for a moment.

I think it's fairly clear that they have been the most dangerous and harmful religions overall, mostly due to their size and influence.

The really big danger and harm that they do is not unique to monotheism, because the really worst thing they're responsible for is the advocacy and ratification of "faith" as a way to know the world. That underpins everything appalling that religion has wreaked on the world.

What monotheism does tend to do is reduce the avenues for dissent. Among a polytheistic pantheon, there's room for the gods to disagree or have opposing functions - the goddess of peace vs the goddess of war, for example - whereas ostensibly monotheistic beliefs offer a single voice. Of course, the issue then becomes one of denomination, as well as interpretation, but everyone claims to be speaking on behalf of a single divinity, with the confidence of absolute certainty, thus granting themselves the ultimate authority to do anything at all.

I don't have a huge amount of experience with Eastern religions, so this is really just my impression, rather than an informed comparative religion thesis.

In short, not really.

Islam is derived from Xianity, Xianity from Judaism, Judaism from earlier Canaanite and Mesopotamian religions.

Ditto the Eastern religions have taken from and been influenced by other Eastern religions. Concepts of karma, reincarnation, dharma, and "everything is one" all seem to be borrowed from each other across Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, Shintoism, etc. While their adherents would disagree, there's not as much daylight in between their core concepts as they might like to think.

Abrahamism is somewhat unique in that it has consolidated all the various gods into a single deity who should be (but somehow is not) held responsible for everything, including all the randomness, inconsistency and unfairness in the world, where Eastern and the predecessors to Judaism, including Hellenism, had a whole pantheon of mercurial gods with their own domains and competing interests, priorities and relationships.

While the mythology of the polytheisms mostly plays out in some inaccessible godly realm, with the exception of the rebellion of Lucifer, Abrahamism plays out in the dusty, dirty, mortal human realm, where we can say that purported actions such as walking on water are idiotic and false.

Being set in our real world rather than Olympus or Takamagahara, and fleshing out the character list with humans - since heaven contains only the Abrahamic god and his remaining angel-slaves - Abrahamists have forgotten that their characters and mythology are fictional. They've confused characters such as Jesus, Moses, Abraham, etc, for literal historical figures. Whereas something like Hinduism is practically its own comic book superhero universe, and I don't think anyone is actually arguing about Historical Ganesh or Historical Inari Ōkami.

Across both Eastern and Western domains you've got a ton of magical thinking about how the world works, a lot of fixation on death and trying to imagine there's something after or beyond it in order to alleviate that fear, and a lot of superstition and unhealthy attitudes around virginity, sexual purity (for both men and women), and menstruation. In more modern times, Hinduism seems to have learned at the feet of Islam, and across the board, all these faith traditions are trying to pretend that their religion was right the whole time.

e.g. Muslims trying to pretend that the quran doesn't say that the Earth is flat and instead acting like "spread out" is a description of the oblate spheroid shape of the Earth; this gets worse when they try to insist it means "spread out" like an "ostrich egg".... which is a prolate spheroid, not oblate.

e.g. Hindus trying to pretend that the poorly-defined, unverifiable and unmeasurable concept of karma is basically the same thing as Newton's well-defined, detectable and measurable Third Law of Motion, or that their vague and poetic "everything is one" is the same as quantum mechanics.

As religiosity across the whole population appears to be dropping, average religiosity among individuals who are left naturally rises, and there's a certain desperation at trying to remain relevant, especially as COVID has shown the futility of these beliefs in gaining protection or relief from it.

I would say so. In a polytheistic belief system, you'd have people with favorites, there'd be politics and agendas and disagreements between the gods, as well as their naturally conflicting natures. Gods of mischief and gods of justice. Gods of war and gods of peace. Look at the Hellenic pantheon (Greek gods) for the godly drama that unfolded that had little if anything to do with the human population, other than as pawns in their games. It would actually make a good CW show.

As far as surviving polytheistic religions, obviously Hinduism is one exception in this, but then they also claim that the central figures - Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, the Trimurti - are basically "one and the same," and represent the Preserver, Creator and Destroyer aspects of the One. Like the Xtian Trinity being separate but the same.

But I also think humans are sufficiently curious that we seek unified, coherent answers. Newtonian physics breaks down at certain scales, and while we can work with this for now, there's a desire for a more consistent, unified explanation. We're able to recognize that what we've figured out may be a subset of a more all-encompassing explanation, and human curiosity seeks to uncover the truth. So I think we also see this in gods and religions. How and why and when does Aethon, the Greek god of famine win out against Demeter, the Greek goddess of farming? How can humans count on Demeter, when it's not really up to her?

In principle, one would expect a monotheistic religion to be more unified and provide more clarity. There's a single consistent message. Except it doesn't turn out that way. Partly because how these gods are manufactured is so fractured that the belief system itself fractures. Catholicism, Protestantism, and all the thousands of sects that can’t figure out what this single god wants.

But also, not only are they not more unified or consistent, but they're also not really monotheistic. In Xtianity, you have the dual gods of Yahweh and Satan, the latter functioning at least as a demigod. Xtians are concerned about "Satan worshippers," who are, necessarily, Xtians because they must believe in both entities. They've just chosen to worship the other one.

More troublingly though, is that, at least in Abrahamic monotheism, believers themselves describe different gods. Perfect and needing worship, just and merciful, known and unknowable, omniscient with a plan and granting free will -- these would have to be different gods, if they existed, because a single god with these properties would refute itself out of existence.

It isn't too hard to figure out why any of this is the case: the universe is inconsistent. Primitive superstitions about divine intent don't actually explain anything. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to bad people. So a god that explains everything is an incoherent god.

If you agree that someone got the punishment they deserve, then god is just. If you agree that someone deserved to be let off, then god is merciful. What if you don't agree? It was Satan! So, Satan is powerful enough to stop god's justness or mercy? Well, god works in mysterious ways! in this case, the believer is agreeing with the non-believer that gods don't provide explanatory power. A "mysterious ways" god we can't know can't be used to explain anything.

What we're possibly seeing with the decline of religion is that we've come to the end of how far we can consolidate our gods - we're now heading towards zero.