The Annihilationist Instinct of Monotheism

Monotheism begins with an act of erasure. Its first breath is a curse against plurality. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is not an invitation to faith but a declaration of war on diversity. The one God demands that all others die. From that moment, the human mind was divided between those who submit and those who must be silenced. Every civilization touched by Abrahamic revelation—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—was taught that to tolerate another truth is to betray the only one worth knowing.

To be a faithful monotheist is to inherit an ethical paradox: compassion for one’s neighbor, contempt for his gods. The structure of the belief forbids coexistence at the level of truth. The Christian may love the pagan’s soul but must hate his symbols. The Muslim may respect the People of the Book but must still condemn their books as corrupted. The Jew may revere the Torah but must reject every revelation beyond Sinai. The theology is absolute. The believer who doubts it becomes heretic; the outsider who resists it becomes enemy. Monotheism creates its own battlefield.

History is littered with the ruins of the many under the banner of the one. The gods of Greece and Rome were not defeated by logic but outlawed by decree. Temples were stripped, oracles silenced, philosophies mutilated to fit a creed that could not bear rivals. Europe’s polytheistic imagination—the theater, the festival, the sacred grove—was burned out of its memory. The monastic replaced the philosopher, and the confessional replaced the symposium. The cross did not redeem Europe; it amputated it.

Islam repeated the same gesture with theological precision. The Kaaba, once a pantheon of tribal gods, was emptied to house a single name. The Persian fire temples were extinguished; Buddhist monasteries in Gandhara fell silent beneath the sword. Every dome that rose proclaimed the fall of another deity. What could not be converted was destroyed, what could not be destroyed was forgotten. Monotheism perfected the art of annihilation by calling it salvation.

Even within its own house, the instinct to erase never stopped. Judaism denounced Christianity as blasphemy. Christianity returned the favor by declaring Judaism obsolete. Islam closed the circle by labeling both corrupted. The heretic is always the nearest cousin. The logic is geometric: one God, one truth, one church, one caliphate. Every deviation becomes treason against the Absolute. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Sunni–Shia wars, the blood of believers has flowed more freely than that of unbelievers. The One cannot coexist with itself.

When God began to fade, His shadow remained. Europe secularized, but it did not detoxify. The metaphysics of oneness migrated from religion to ideology. The same monotheistic architecture—one truth, one history, one destiny—became the skeleton of modern totalitarianism. Marxism preached salvation through class purity, Nazism through racial purity, liberal universalism through moral purity. The crusader became commissar, the missionary became bureaucrat, the confessional became the classroom. The gods were gone, but the grammar of exclusivity endured.

The moral literature of the Abrahamic world is therefore double-edged. Its saints preach love while its institutions enforce obedience. Its architects build cathedrals of awe on foundations of theft. The beauty of its art was extracted from the agony of those it conquered. Augustine’s theology rests on African soil; Aquinas writes on Greek bones; Al-Ghazali wields the sword that killed philosophy in Baghdad. Even the splendor of Europe’s cathedrals and Islamic mosques is built from the stones of razed temples. Their magnificence is the aesthetic residue of plunder.

The conquered polytheists themselves became the builders of their conquerors’ symbols. In medieval Europe, the craftsmen who once carved Jupiter and Diana were forced to chisel saints and angels. The cathedrals of Chartres, Cologne, and Canterbury rose where pagan shrines once stood, their foundations laid with the labor of the newly baptized who no longer dared remember their own gods. In the East, the pattern repeated with Islam’s advance: the Grand Mosque of Damascus was erected over a Roman temple of Jupiter; Delhi’s Qutb Mosque incorporated the columns and carvings of twenty-seven demolished Hindu and Jain temples; in Varanasi, Aurangzeb’s Gyanvapi Mosque was built upon the debris of Vishwanath’s shrine. From Spain to Sindh, wherever the crescent or the cross appeared, the stones of earlier civilizations were refashioned into monuments of conquest. The conquered did not merely lose their gods—they built the architecture of their own erasure.

The material rewards of belief were immense. To convert was to live; to resist was to pay. Under Christian rule, baptism granted citizenship. Under Islam, the Shahada erased the jizya. The believer rose in rank; the unbeliever paid for his own humiliation. In every colonized society, conversion became the passport to survival. In the New World, the native who knelt before the cross was spared the whip; in South Asia, the convert gained education and access to the colonial bureaucracy. Monotheism disguised economic coercion as divine mercy.

Its language of conquest remains unmatched in cruelty. Heathen. Idolater. Gentile. Infidel. Kaffir. Each word turns difference into moral disease. The polytheist is not simply wrong; he is diseased. He must be cured or removed. This vocabulary justified centuries of massacre and missionary zeal. The conquistador could slaughter and call it baptism. The missionary could erase languages and call it enlightenment. The colonizer could steal continents and call it civilization. The theology of one God sanctified every theft by labeling it progress.

Monotheism’s genius was to turn empire into virtue. When European ships reached Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they carried Bibles and ledgers side by side. The priest blessed the voyage; the crown financed it; the theologian rationalized it. The God who owned the heavens now owned the earth. “In His name” became the legal title for continents. The conversion of souls and the extraction of resources became indistinguishable acts of worship. The wealth of Christian Europe and the glory of Islamic caliphates were built upon sanctified plunder.

But the deepest colonization was psychological. Monotheism invented the perfect form of domination: to make the conquered hate themselves. The newly baptized native learned to despise his ancestors. The convert from Hinduism or Buddhism was taught to mock his own gods as demons. The African Christian learned to read the story of Noah and find his own color cursed. A thousand years of spiritual genocide produced not rebels but believers who celebrated their own erasure. That is the final triumph of the One God—when His victims sing hymns in their chains.

Even in secular form, this mental hierarchy survives. The post-colonial elite of Asia and Africa still seeks legitimacy in Abrahamic terms. They quote Marx and Milton but forget Nāgārjuna and Confucius. They speak of rationality as though it were imported from Europe, forgetting that India’s Nyāya Sūtra analyzed logic before Aristotle wrote a line. They measure progress by Western metrics, worship technology as if it were the new Messiah, and equate pluralism with weakness. The colonizer’s theology has become the post-colonial mind’s reason.

This is not hatred of the believer. It is analysis of the belief. The ordinary Jew, Christian, or Muslim is no more guilty than the slave who speaks his master’s tongue. What must be confronted is the metaphysical architecture itself—the idea that truth can belong to one tribe, that salvation must have a monopoly. Monotheism is not evil because it believes in one God; it is dangerous because it cannot imagine more than one truth. A system that begins with “There is no god but mine” will end with “There is no life but mine.”

The antidote is not another faith but another logic. The dharmic and East-Asian traditions never demanded conversion because they never feared contradiction. A Buddhist could debate a Hindu, a Shinto priest could coexist with a Zen monk, and no one thought the cosmos would collapse. Polytheism is not the worship of many gods; it is the recognition that reality speaks in many dialects. Truth, like language, is plural by nature. To understand it, one must listen, not conquer.

Humanity must now decide whether it will continue worshiping oneness or rediscover the sanity of multiplicity. Every war of religion, every ideological purge, every colonial project is an echo of that first commandment. The crusades were fought to erase rival gods; the inquisitions to erase rival ideas; the modern wars of ideology to erase rival systems. The disease of absolutism mutates but never dies. It will live as long as we mistake unity for virtue.

The ethical response is not revenge but rebellion of reason. The task of the modern mind is to expose theology’s disguises—in pulpits, in politics, in economics, in science. Logical empiricism dismantles the claim of revelation; dialectical materialism reveals the human causes behind divine decrees. Compassion, stripped of superstition, becomes the only sacred law. The goal is not to destroy the believer but to free him from the need to destroy.

The so-called moral superiority of the Abrahamic world collapses under scrutiny. Its humanism was born from the spoils of colonization. Its art was financed by theft. Its philosophy was distilled from the ashes of those it silenced. Even its declarations of universal rights were proclaimed by empires that owned slaves. The West’s conscience is built upon selective amnesia. To this day, it confuses remorse with moral progress. It apologizes for the crusades while repeating their logic through global evangelism of markets and ideologies.

What the world needs is not a return to ancient gods but a resurrection of the ancient spirit—the capacity to see truth as infinite and reason as sacred. The East must recover the confidence it lost under the shadow of revelation. The West must confront the tyranny it inherited from its own theology. The future belongs to no prophet but to the mind that refuses prophecy. The measure of civilization is not faith but doubt, not obedience but curiosity.

Every human being, believer or not, now faces the same moral choice: to remain a child of revelation or to become an adult of reason. The universe no longer tolerates our theological adolescence. The age of divine monopolies must end. The task is immense but necessary—to decolonize the mind, to restore plurality to thought, to rescue compassion from ideology. Reason must become the new rebellion, and empathy its ethics.

Let the oppressed, the unbeliever, the heathen, the gentile, the so-called kaffir answer annihilation not with vengeance but with vision. Let them turn the tools of philosophy against the machinery of faith. Let them study the laws of history, the logic of matter, the evolution of consciousness, and build a morality that asks for no permission from heaven. The truest revolution is intellectual clarity joined with compassion. The world does not need another revelation; it needs recovery from revelation.

When humanity finally learns to think without fear, to question without guilt, and to love without doctrine, it will have achieved what no prophet ever promised: peace without submission. The last prayer worth uttering is inquiry itself. To reason is to redeem. And to redeem rationally is to love universally.

Citations

1. Exodus 20:3, Hebrew Bible.
2. John 14:6, New Testament.
3. Shahada, Qur’an 3:18.
4. Theodosius I, Decree of Thessalonica (380 CE).
5. Al-Biruni, Chronology of Ancient Nations (11th c.).
6. Ibn al-Athir, al-Kāmil fi al-Tārīkh, vol. 9.
7. Augustine, City of God; Aquinas, Summa Theologica; Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
8. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845).
9. Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552).
10. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
11. B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936).
12. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927).
13. D.D. Kosambi, Myth and Reality (1962).
14. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1939).
15. Archaeological Survey of India reports on Qutb Minar complex and Gyanvapi Mosque (ASI Bulletin vols. 23–27).
16. E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).
17. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006).