(This is actually a backhanded way of apologizing for the fact that, even if I tried to switch and use your definitions, I'm too old and thickheaded to do it consistently. I'd create more confusion rather than less. Again, my apologies but I'm going to use words according to their definitions and try to be clear by context.) >Pantheism is a worship of all gods > > Incorrect. I'm picking nits now but, for the record: Pantheism: 2. the worship of all gods. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1983 This is significant only in that, because of this, polytheism IS NOT the opposite of Monotheism. If a culture believes either (a) all gods are an aspect of One God (such as the Eerith), or (b) there is only one god (nuances of omnipresence), then they are both mono- and polytheistic. Polytheism, by its very definition (Webster again), is the opposite of Monotheism. These are tiny matters and I certianly do not wish to incite an agument about them. If it helps the rest of the list to agree on alternative definitions, I say use them and I'll do what I can to keep up. As another alternative, we can not use any of the confusing words and take an extra sentence to be very specific about what we mean. Frazer used specific phrases in his work; things like: known named dieties, known implied dieties, theoretical pantheon, applied pantheon, etc. Would it be that hard to do something similar? For example, actually just say: Mir believes there are multiple gods. They do not condemn worship of any god which they would deem 'good'. Mir knows of the following six gods...Mir also knows that there are gods for...Of the gods which Mir acknowledges, this one might be the same as that one from this culture...Even though Mir has knowledge of all these gods, only the following three actually recieve any kind of attention...and so on. I just can't shake the feeling that we are needlessly complicating the discussion (and I know I'm one of the worst for doing it). What are we actually after at the end of the day? Using a narrowed definition of Polytheism, we still actually only end up with a list of gods for the website (per society). If that's all we need, I don't care if we call it pantheon, polytheon, or Doug--it's just a list. If we need something other than that, then the definitions don't help us anyway. I don't have a good answer but I can't shake the feeling that we've overanalyzed the issue into a bigger matter than it needs to be. MK ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send mail to celandra-off@phoenyx.net.
