The God Who Eats Himself: The Self-Devouring Madness Of Monotheism

No idea has done more damage to the human mind than the invention of one jealous god. The desert’s greatest export was not faith but fever — a monotheistic fever that for three thousand years has turned humanity against itself. What began as a cry for unity became a perpetual civil war of the spirit. The Jews split into Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. The Christians into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. The Muslims into Sunni, Shia, and a dozen smaller sects. Each claims to be the only light, yet each burns in the same darkness. Monotheism promised one truth and produced a thousand heresies.

These rival faiths call themselves siblings, but their family tree is a crime scene. Every limb bleeds from its own wound. They curse one another by different names — goyim, heathen, infidel, kafir — and then gather for “interfaith dialogue,” that polite theatre of hypocrisy where centuries of hatred are momentarily buried under buffet tables and photo ops. They pose as peacemakers while their scriptures still drip with conquest. It is a circus of clerics, a choreography of sanctimony, selling reconciliation while muttering damnation.

The root of this insanity lies in the very notion of the One. The moment a people invent a single, exclusive deity, the logic of monopoly replaces the logic of multiplicity. If there is only one God, there can be only one truth, one church, one ruler, one ideology. The structure of heaven becomes the structure of empire. The cry of the prophet becomes the decree of the king. The worship of unity becomes the worship of obedience. A theology of totalitarianism is born, and its name is monotheism.

Its moral foundation was built on obedience to the unthinkable. Abraham’s willingness to kill his son at God’s command is celebrated as faith’s supreme virtue. That gesture — the suspension of conscience in favor of submission — became the prototype for all later horrors. From that moment onward, holiness meant obedience without question, and virtue meant loyalty to authority. Humanity’s moral evolution was derailed by a single knife raised in the name of love.

Once obedience is glorified, thinking becomes treason. Monotheism turned curiosity into sin and skepticism into blasphemy. It rewarded ignorance as humility and punished doubt as arrogance. It replaced the freedom to ask with the duty to obey. The result was not enlightenment but infantilization. The faithful were told to be children forever, terrified of their own reason, waiting for divine permission to breathe. A civilization that could have matured into wisdom remained trapped in theological adolescence.

The cost of this arrested development has been measured in blood. Every century bears the same scriptural fingerprints: crusades, jihads, inquisitions, pogroms. Every holy war is merely a sibling quarrel inside one dysfunctional family of desert myths. Europe’s wars of religion, the endless Sunni-Shia bloodletting, the Jewish-Arab conflict — all are quarrels over who owns the father’s name. The Middle Eastern God does not unite; he divides, devours, and breeds replicas of himself in every sect. He is the cannibal deity of civilization, eating his own children to prove his omnipotence.

Even when these religions cross continents, they carry their disease with them. Europe, once polytheistic and creative, became a burned continent after baptism by monotheism. America inherited the same fever, calling itself a “nation under God” while arming itself for Armageddon. The idea of a chosen people and a promised land metastasized into nationalism, colonialism, and empire. When theology merged with technology, revelation gained nuclear weapons. Each faith now dreams of the end of the world as its final victory parade. Every bomb is secretly a prayer.

The only antidote is reason — not polite reason, but militant reason. Logical Empiricism and Dialectical Materialism are the twin vaccines against revelation. The first demands that belief submit to evidence; the second demands that truth remain open to correction. Together they restore what monotheism destroyed: the dignity of doubt. Truth is not delivered from above; it is discovered, tested, and revised. Progress is not revelation; it is contradiction. These are not merely scientific methods — they are moral revolutions.

For the rational mind, the sacred is not what cannot be questioned; it is what survives questioning. The universe needs no prophets to defend it. It reveals itself in equations, in evolution, in the quiet honesty of observation. The real miracle is not that something was created from nothing, but that intelligence arose from matter and dared to ask why. The act of thinking is itself a sacrament; it sanctifies life without kneeling to it.

Monotheists claim that without God there is no morality. History proves the opposite. The age of faith gave us persecution; the age of reason gave us abolition, science, democracy, and human rights. Morality was never the monopoly of revelation; it was the achievement of empathy and understanding. The polytheists, the skeptics, and the atheists — all accused of blasphemy — built the very civilization that believers now exploit to preach tolerance. The irony is cosmic: the infidels saved the faithful from themselves.

What the world now needs is not another religion but a new conscience. The conscience of evidence. The conscience of honesty. The conscience that refuses to call ignorance humility or murder holiness. Humanity must graduate from theology to philosophy, from worship to wonder. The only real temple is the mind; the only authentic prayer is clarity.

To rebuild civilization, we must dethrone revelation and enthrone reality. We must replace commandments with comprehension, faith with inquiry, myth with meaning. This is not blasphemy — it is recovery. The gods of the desert were our childhood imaginations; the time has come to grow up. A mature species does not beg for salvation; it takes responsibility for its own survival.

The final tragedy of monotheism is that it cannot coexist even with itself. Each branch calls the other apostate while claiming descent from the same source. It is a self-consuming fire that mistakes its own smoke for divine glory. What it calls faith is collective psychosis — a shared hallucination of certainty. The task of our time is not to reconcile these illusions but to cure them. Humanity must learn to think as a single species or perish as competing revelations.

The choice is stark and simple. Either we continue worshipping the God who eats Himself, or we evolve into the species that finally learned to think. Between those two destinies stands one fragile line — the courage of reason.