I've spoken up on this issue many times here.
Religion is instinctive in humans--an "archetype" in our collective unconscious, it occurs in all cultures in all eras. Yet it is polytheistic religion that is the true instinct.
Religion is an externalized model of the human spirit, which is complex. From the pantheons of the earliest civilizations who wrote their beliefs down, through the formalized Egyptian, Hindu and Greco-Roman religions, in the dramatis personae of Shakespeare's plays, up through the popularized anthropology of Joseph Campbell; priests, scholars, artists and common folk have all found a rather consistent set of 23 components to our spirit. (Forgive me if I've got that number slightly wrong. It's difficult to google but no one has yet corrected me. I can't even name all 7 dwarfs, much less all 23 gods and goddesses.)
The Hunter, the Healer, the King, the Warrior, the Lover, the Reveler, etc., we recognize those as the demystified English names of the gods and goddesses of the ancients and as the stock characters in traditional drama. We also resonate to them because each one of them resides inside us.
Think of them as components of a vector that defines our personality. Some have larger magnitudes than others; that varies from person to person and explains why some of us, if we "follow our bliss," end up being the Healer--doctors, nurses, EMTs, veterinarians, etc.--while others end up being the King--managers, politicians, military leaders, etc. The magnitudes also vary from day to day. Sometimes we just need to loosen up and be the Reveler, other times someone special walks into our life and the Lover takes charge for a while, and if Wal-Mart wants to build a store in our town the Warrior will come out in many of us, not all taking the same side in the war.
Wait for it... What happens if you're extremely disciplined and never let your weaker spirits have their day? What if you believe that a good Healer must never hunt, or that a good King can never let his guard down and revel? We've all seen what happens when spirits are suppressed. They fester and turn into something dark. One day we get angry, threatened, exhausted, bereaved, or simply drunk. We turn into a "differen person," and do terrible, crazy stuff. Our friends say, "I can't believe it, he's not like that," because we've been careful to never let anyone see that part of us until that part of us got so frustrated that the only way it could gain the freedom to express itself was to do it by dishonorable means.
This elegant 23-dimensional model of the human spirit explains so much about us. It tells us why we are different ways on different days, why sometimes we must do things that most of the time we think are ill-advised or downright wrong, but are in fact normal for everyone. We don't just make peace with all of those spirits, we come to regard them as resources. We have 23 different ways to look at problems. We forgive ourselves--and just as importantly each other--for lapses when we let the wrong spirit handle the wrong situation. Only human, screwed up, next time I'll try it differently, sorry!
Along came montheism. This 23-dimensional paradigm was squashed into a one-dimensional scale. Everything is either good or evil. You're with god or you're with the devil. It's a rigid binary model of the human spirit that looks like it was invented by an old-fashioned computer programmer of my day who seldom ventured out of his cozy cubicle in his pizza-stained t-shirt to experience real life. It's a pathetic attempt by people who can't stand difficult problems--such as those of situational ethics--to simplify morality so it could be handed down on stone tablets that never require an update. It's an easy way for people to decide whether anything is right or wrong without having to work very hard at it. It's a foolproof guide to rewarding the right and exterminating the wrong for people who don't want to ever have to explain and defend their judgments.
Kind of sounds like the stereotypical masculine way of dealing with the world, doesn't it? The frat-boy, soldier-boy, good-ol'-boy morality that is so simple to follow that all it takes to do it right is a gun and a belly full of booze.
And what a coincidence: the one god of the monotheistic churches and, until almost yesterday, all of their priests were males.
Monotheism exacerbated the trend toward patriarchal societies. "God the father."
So the answer to this question is that monotheism has changed a lot. It has changed human philosophy from a rich one into an impoverished one that is virtually useless in sorting out real life problems. And it has made those problems worse by suppressing the feminine and creating a dangerously unbalanced civilization.
