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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5541260" data-attributes="member: 4937">Truly pious polytheism has at least one great disadvantage over monotheism - it takes up far more of your day to deal with its rituals and superstitions than monotheism does.   This is I think one of the reasons you don't see many polytheistic practices persist, and even fewer of them persisting with true piety.  I suspect that in day to day life, truly pious polytheism simply can't exist along side scientific progress if only because all those rituals of sacrifice and the like end up eating to much in to your productivity.  It was not by chance that I think Greco-Roman polytheism beat out the Etruscan variaty, or why polytheism itself universally overthrew the animistic religions that preceded it.   If polytheism were to reappear as a strong spiritual force, I think it would be of the softer sort like I described that most strongly echoes intellectual Hinduism (just about the only polytheistic belief system that has survived to the present day).   On the other hand, I feel soft belief systems (by which I mean those that make few concrete demands of their believers) are inherently unstable for socio-economic reasons.  If a religion is not at least somewhat hard and demanding, people will find few reasons to believe in it because (materially speaking) one of the primary social values of religion is that it is useful for establishing trust between unrelated social/famial groups.   However, if the practice of the religion requires little tangible effort and sacrifice, then it is unuseful as a means of evaluating the trustworthyness of the believer.   Too long of a period of soft belief tends to create a society markedly lacking in trust, with the result like in the novel Dune of creating a social movement toward religious upheaval as preferable to the continuance of uncertainty and mistrust.The belief system I described is probably too soft to persist for long, but you could probably reconcile this by having it undergo period of religious fervor where society rewarded public displays of sincerity and piety.   So, backing out for a longer view, the history of the religion would probably alternate between what I described and periods where the faithful tended to believe in the literal truth of Father Space and Mother Earth as personified and aware beings, capable of responding to prayers and being pleased by acts worship and devotion.   During each period, the adherents of the previous period would continue to exist as a minority (possibly an oppressed minority) within the religion.   Eventually though each side would jump the shark, becoming either so blaise in their belief that the social fabric started to fall apart, or so pious in their belief that it became a heavy social and economic burden (particular when the acts of piety became more and more divorsed from acts of charity and/or colonial/communal investment).</blockquote>

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