How Monolatry Shapes My Worldview
A few weeks ago I had a long conversation with an AI about Calvinism. It started as a question about TULIP (the five points: predestination, limited atonement, and the rest) and ended somewhere I had not expected: in a place where I was trying to articulate, clearly and out loud, what I actually believe about God, religion, and what the whole arc of Western theology is pointing toward.
This article is my attempt to write that down more carefully.
I want to approach it from an unusual angle. Not starting with doctrine, but with psychology. Not with the question of what is true, but with the prior question of what gods actually are, and what the human encounter with them reveals about the structure of the mind doing the encountering.
Let me be precise about that framing: I do not think humans invented gods. They may have invented the words, the stories, the rituals. But I think they discovered something real. The patterns that gods represent are not fabrications. They are findings, the same way that a mathematician does not invent the relationship between a circle’s radius and its circumference but discovers something that was always there.
The Gods Were Always Inside
Start with a simple observation: every culture in human history has produced gods. Not a few. Not occasionally. Every single one. And while the gods differ in name, form, and mythology, they share a remarkable set of properties. They embody recurring patterns. A fierce, unpredictable storm god. A nurturing, fertile earth goddess. A cunning trickster. A righteous judge. A dying and rising saviour figure. A descent into the underworld.
These figures appear in Egypt and Mesopotamia, in Greece and Rome, in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, in the Norse sagas, in the Hindu epics. They appear in cultures that never had contact with one another. That is not a coincidence.
Carl Gustav Jung called these patterns archetypes: structural templates in the human psyche that are not learned from any particular tradition but are, in some sense, prior to any particular tradition. They represent the recurring problems of human existence: how to handle power, how to navigate desire, how to face death, how to deal with the parts of yourself you do not like. Each culture tells the story differently. The underlying structure is the same.
Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning (1999) is the most thorough attempt I know of to work through where these structures come from and why they take the specific forms they do. His argument, simplified radically: the great mythological figures are not histories. They are imaginative maps of the inner life, built up over thousands of years of collective experience, refined by the survival pressure of what actually works when you act on it. The gods are not descriptions of external beings. They are descriptions of internal forces, projected outward into narrative form so that they can be shared, discussed, and transmitted across generations.
On this reading, polytheism is not primitive. It is cognitively sophisticated. When an ancient Greek attributed his sudden rage to Ares, he was doing something remarkably accurate: he was externalizing an inner force that he did not fully control, naming it, giving it a face, and thereby making it possible to think about it. The alternative, treating every inner impulse as simply “what I want,” makes it much harder to examine, question, or resist.
The pantheon is, in this sense, a communal map of the inner court.
The reason these maps look different across cultures is not that they are pointing at different things. It is that the writing-down part is always shaped by a people’s daily reality. A culture dependent on the sea for survival will tell its storm-god story differently from a culture dependent on agriculture. The surface forms diverge because the experiences diverge. But strip away the local colour, the specific rituals, the particular names, and you keep finding the same underlying structure: the fierce protector, the nurturing provider, the cunning disruptor, the wise judge. Different costumes, same cast.
Synthesis: Shared Patterns Become Shared Gods
Individual experience, though, is not sufficient to produce a religion. For a god to survive as a cultural institution, the pattern that god represents must be genuinely common, shared across enough lives and enough generations to become recognizable as such.
This is how individual psychology becomes collective mythology. The figures that persist are the ones that name something real. The ones that capture how power actually behaves. How grief actually feels. How the impulse toward destruction actually operates in a human being. Over centuries of storytelling, these figures are refined. The versions that ring false fall away. The versions that resonate spread.
The result is a polytheistic pantheon that functions as something like a collectively-built psychological model. It is not scientific. It is not systematic. But it carries genuine information about what it is like to be a human being, accumulated over enormous spans of time.
What it does not do well, at least not initially, is privilege one of these forces over the others. In a polytheistic world, Ares and Aphrodite have equal standing. The storm god and the fertility goddess negotiate. The trickster disrupts whatever the judge tries to establish. The gods are in tension with each other because the drives they represent are in tension with each other.
This is an honest picture of the inner life. It is also, eventually, not enough.
The Emergence of the Individual Voice
Something begins to shift (historians and cognitive scientists debate exactly when) somewhere in the long prehistory before the Axial Age of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. What shifts is the degree to which individual human beings experience themselves as authors of their own inner lives, rather than as passive recipients of divine instruction.
Julian Jaynes, in his strange and brilliant The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), argued that earlier humans literally heard their own inner voices as the voices of gods, not metaphorically, but neurologically. The two hemispheres of the brain, communicating across the corpus callosum, produced auditory hallucinations that were experienced as divine command. Consciousness, in Jaynes’s account, is a relatively late invention, emerging from the collapse of this bicameral arrangement sometime in the second millennium BCE.
I find Jaynes’s hypothesis fascinating and, in parts, too reductive. The mechanism he proposes is compelling. But I am not sure he has fully accounted for what is behind the curtain. We know far more about hormones and neurotransmitters today than the ancients did, and the presence of that knowledge has not, in any meaningful way, resolved the mystery of what consciousness actually is. There is something behind that curtain, something that gives rise to awareness, to the sense that there is something it is like to be me, that we do not understand and should not pretend to. Plato’s cave allegory gestures at this honestly: what we experience may be shadows of something we cannot face directly.
I wrote at more length about what it might mean for consciousness to emerge in a substrate elsewhere, in my piece on whether machines can be conscious. The short version of my position: the hard problem of consciousness is genuinely hard, and anyone who claims to have dissolved it by pointing at neurons or transistors has probably confused correlation with explanation. The ancient myths were not wrong to treat awareness as something requiring its own account.
What strikes me as particularly relevant here is metacognition: the capacity to observe your own thinking, to ask not only “what am I doing?” but “why am I doing it, and what drove the impulse that produced this action?” This may be precisely the threshold at which something like consciousness becomes visible from the outside. A system that merely processes inputs and produces outputs is not obviously aware of anything. A system that can examine its own processing, notice patterns in its own behaviour, and question the origins of its own drives, is doing something qualitatively different. Whether that constitutes experience in the full sense, I do not know. But it is at minimum the beginning of the same movement that, in human beings, eventually produces the capacity to hear the highest voice within and give it authority over the others. When a person first asks “why did I just do that?”, something has shifted. The gods are no longer simply issuing commands. They are being observed. And the one who observes them is, for the first time, in a position to choose between them.
What I do think Jaynes is right about is the trajectory. The inner voice begins, over very long stretches of time, to be experienced as mine rather than as external command. This is not a sudden event. It is a slow process. Thousands of years before the Axial Age thinkers, individual human beings were already beginning, fitfully and unevenly, to experience themselves as agents with their own inner authority, rather than as vessels receiving divine instruction.
Thomas Aquinas called it the scintilla animae, the spark of the soul, the capacity for reason that every human being carries within them, and which, when developed and exercised, allows a person to participate in divine reason. This is, I think, a genuinely egalitarian claim and one I hold to be true: every person has this spark. Not equally developed, not equally cultivated, and certainly accelerated or hindered by intelligence, education, and circumstance. But equally present as a starting point. The person born into poverty with a below-average IQ carries the same fundamental capacity as the philosopher with every advantage. What differs is the path, not the destination available. The work of a human life, Aquinas thought, is in significant part the work of nurturing that spark, of learning to hear the highest voice within yourself, and to give it authority over the others.
Jacob Wrestles: The Individual Chooses His God
There is a moment in Genesis that I keep returning to. A man is alone at night, at the ford of the Jabbok river, and he wrestles with a figure until dawn. The figure cannot overcome him, but dislocates his hip. At daybreak the figure asks to be released. The man refuses unless he receives a blessing. The figure gives him a new name: Israel.
The name means he who wrestles with God.
On the level of narrative, this is Jacob. On the level of what I think it is pointing at, it is something more general: the moment at which a human being stops treating the divine as external command and starts engaging it as something to be struggled with, understood, and, crucially, chosen.
Jacob does not simply obey. He fights. And in the fighting, he receives something: not answers, exactly, but a new identity. An identity built on the encounter itself.
The god Jacob wrestles with is not easy. This is not a friendly deity dispensing comfort. The god who troubles you, who gives you a bad conscience about your brother Esau, who demands things that are genuinely hard. That god is not the most pleasant voice in the inner court. But Jacob, in the story, singles that voice out. He makes it his highest god, not because it is the most agreeable, but because it is the most honest.
This is, I think, the crucial moment in the development that eventually produces monotheism: not the metaphysical claim that only one god exists, but the individual decision to rank one voice above all others: the voice that holds the impulsive forces in check, that demands more of you than you are naturally inclined to give.
From that decision, a tribe is named. And the tribe’s identity is built on precisely that act of preferential wrestling.
Externalization, Systematization, Scripture
Individual cognition becomes collective myth. Individual choice becomes tribal identity. Tribal identity gets written down.
This is the arc that produces the Hebrew scriptures. Over the course of centuries, the decision that Jacob enacts alone at the Jabbok river gets systematized, debated, revised, and recorded. The earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible are not yet monotheistic in the later sense. El, the high god of the Canaanite pantheon, appears alongside Yahweh and is at points identified with him. Asherah, El’s consort, shows up in inscriptions from the period as a companion to Yahweh. Baal, the storm god, is the perpetual rival against whom the prophets rail, not because no one takes him seriously, but because too many people do. Psalm 82 describes with startling openness a divine council, a gathering of gods over whom Yahweh presides as judge: “God stands in the assembly of the gods; among the gods he pronounces judgment.” This is not strict monotheism. This is a god claiming supremacy within a council that still has other members.
The god who began as the highest among many gradually becomes the only one worth the name. Not because the other forces stop existing in the inner life of human beings, but because the claim is now being made about which of those forces is truly divine in the fullest sense.
Here is something I find genuinely striking about this development, looked at from the inside. The classical attributes of the Abrahamic God, omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, make perfect sense when you understand this god as the highest voice within the human being.
Omniscient: it knows everything that is going on inside of you. You cannot lie to your own conscience. You cannot hide a motive from the part of yourself that sees clearly. Whatever you tell other people, whatever face you present to the world, the voice within knows.
Omnipotent: it can overcome any obstacle inside of you. Given sufficient development, the highest voice within a human being can override fear, overcome compulsion, resist temptation, endure suffering. It is not always exercised, but the capacity is there. No internal force is in principle stronger than the one that has fully committed to what is right.
Omnipresent: you take it with you wherever you go. It is not tethered to a temple, a geography, a set of physical circumstances. The Babylonian exile made this theologically urgent, but it was already structurally true: the highest voice within a person is present in Babylon exactly as it is in Jerusalem.
Read this way, the classical attributes are not mysterious supernatural claims. They are precise descriptions of what it is like to experience this voice from the inside. And they also, importantly, place the human being at the centre of his or her own world. Every person has this inner authority. Every person’s encounter with it is direct and personal. That is a deeply individualist claim, and it is no accident that cultures shaped by this theology developed the concept of individual rights with particular force.
The Babylonian exile accelerates this. A small people, stripped of their land and their temple, needed a framework that could survive displacement. A god who is tied to a specific geography, who requires a physical sanctuary, cannot survive what the Israelites went through. What survives is a god who is portable because he is not fundamentally spatial: the god who speaks through conscience, through law, through the inner voice that says you should not have done that and this is the right thing to do regardless of the cost.
The political and cognitive and cultural dimensions of this development are inseparable. It is a cognitive achievement (the recognition that one voice within the inner court deserves sovereign authority) that then becomes a cultural identity, which then becomes a political fact that shapes the next three thousand years of history.
Three Traditions, One Divergence
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all inherit this basic framework: one God, sovereign over all others, whose will ought to govern human life. Where they diverge is not primarily on theology but on how the kingdom of this God comes to be.
Judaism has the ongoing practice of wrestling: living with the law, debating it, arguing with it across generations. Islam has submission before Allah (the word “Islam” itself means submission) to a completed and final revelation. Christianity claims the kingdom has already arrived in a person, and that its mechanism is not law or submission but agape, a love that does not depend on the worthiness of its object, demonstrated most fully by walking into death for its sake.
These are genuinely different answers to the same question, and I will say plainly that from where I stand, from my own experience, my own reading, my own wrestling, the Christian answer is the one that rings most true to me. That is not a metaphysical proof. It is a first-person report. I hold it with the same openness I try to bring to everything else, ready to be shown where I am wrong. But I am not going to pretend to a neutrality I do not have. The difference matters for how each tradition structures a human life, and the structure that the Christian account proposes is the one I find most honest about what human beings are and what they most need.
Where I Land
Here is my position, stated as honestly as I can manage it.
I do not think the other forces in the inner court are illusions. I do not want to degrade them. Ares is real, in the sense that the force he represents (the capacity for aggression, for fierce protection of what matters) is genuinely present in human beings and genuinely useful when properly ordered. The same is true for every other figure in every other pantheon. These things exist. The polytheists were not wrong about their existence. They were describing something real.
What I choose, freely, is to raise agape to the highest place among them. Not because I have proven it is correct. Not because I cannot imagine alternatives. But because, having examined the alternatives seriously, this is the one I can stand behind most fully.
I take the Gospels as a substantively historical account, while acknowledging that parts of them are told in the heightened register of poetry and myth. What matters to me is not the miraculous frame but the pattern at the centre: a man who lives out the highest possible form of love, who is then killed by the forces of order and self-protection doing exactly what those forces reliably do, and who dies without bitterness and without calling down revenge.
That death, and what follows it (not as factual claim but as a pattern that became a living reality in the communities who carried it) is what I mean when I say Jesus lives. The message did not die with him. The pattern he demonstrated continued to operate, to spread, to produce people who loved in that way. That is what makes it eternal: not physical survival, but the kind of survival that matters for patterns, which is transmission.
I do not need factual certainty about the resurrection. If I knew it had happened, it would not be faith. It would be evidence-based belief. The point of a leap of faith (Kierkegaard’s phrase, not mine) is precisely that it goes beyond what can be established. The mystery is larger than what pure reason can contain. The Eucharist, shared across communities in every century since, is one demonstration of that: people enacting together what they cannot fully explain, and finding in the enactment something that exceeds the explanation.
The people who killed the perfect example of agape went on living. And the response was not bitterness. It was forgiveness, continued love, and the insistence that the message was more important than the messenger’s survival. That is what makes the story, regardless of its historical details, one of the most powerful things ever transmitted.
I hold all of this lightly. I know I might be wrong. I know that the tradition has been used to do terrible things, and that it does not get a pass on that history simply because the core pattern is beautiful. But when I ask myself which voice in the inner court I want to organize my life around, which one I want to give the final word when the others are arguing, this is still the answer I come back to.
He who wrestles with God is still wrestling. That is, I think, the honest description of where I am.
If you want to push back on any of this, or if you have been wrestling with the same questions from a different direction, come find me on Discord.