#monolater

[yidquotes]

The disaster of monotheism is its use by any nation to impose its hegemony on other peoples, which misuse easily mutates into monolatry, and from thence into virulent prejudice. The monolater, awash in self-congratulation—the worshiped god thus serving merely as a reflection of the worshiper’s own toxic narcissism—thus denies the possibility that other human beings could forge an authentic relationship with the one God once they have added this or that thing to the purity of “true” monotheism.  Indeed, monolatry denies monotheism because it denies humankind its diversity and is thus not much more than theological totalitarianism. For the soul awash in monolatry, the world of God is irreducibly a binary one in which one is either a son of light or a son of darkness.  But that, in turn, is little more than paranoia: finding tolerance sinful, the monolater reacts to the slightest eccentricity, perceived offense, or unfamiliar doctrine to justify a violent reaction and to proclaim the kind of state of emergency necessary to justify repression or, in the extreme case, an all-out holy war. The fanatic, in his frenzy, is always dehumanizing himself.  The irony is that fanaticism always self-justifies by undertaking to demonize infidels, and by dehumanizing then precisely in order to justify their destruction as an act of piety.

Rabbi Rivon Krygier