Essay on Egypt: Polytheism and Monotheistic Religions

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Religion has changed for as long as man has been on earth, producing many different religions and beliefs. In today’s world most religions that are still in practice are monotheistic religions, meaning they worship only one god. Polytheistic religions can be traced back to ancient days; the worship of many gods was the order of the ancient days. Difference in people who practiced monotheistic religions and people that practiced polytheistic religions are very apparent throughout history. Polytheism doesn’t occur in many of the dominant modern religions which include Christianity, Islam and the like. One can tell a lot about societies by looking at their religion. Civilizations that have been polytheistic tend to have more violent with hash, less forgivable laws. For example the civilization of Egypt, Greece and ancient Mesopotamia that developed between two rivers , the Euphrates and Tigris, in the area of land known as the fertile crescent which occupies the modern countries Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, west and south western Iran and south eastern Turkey. Ancient Mesopotamia practiced the first known religion which was polytheistic. These gods were not like the loving and forgiven God we think of nowadays. These gods had quick and unchangeable temperament and moody often, often punishing people for no apparent reason. Because there were multiple gods all with different personalities, there was often conflict among them as they had many of the same bad traits that humans do. In reality the multiple gods in polytheistic religions were exactly like humans but only that they had the power to rule the earth. They resented the existence of humans and once they even sent a great flood to wipe out all man. This flood idea may sound may sound familiar but it was not because mankind was corrupt and evil as it is monotheistic versions but because humans were too noisy and annoyed the gods. So when one couldn’t trust their own gods to protect them how could lowly human beings be trusted? Because their gods were deceitful, people didn’t trust others to be good, so when crimes were committed, they punishment were very harsh as we can remember from the first written law by the Mesopotamia called the Hammurabi’s code. The most conversant part of this code was “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, if by accident you hurt someone that person was allowed revenge by doing the same to you. If you killed a woman, the father of that woman could kill your daughter;
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