How to create non-abrahamic monotheistic religions?

>We had this thread just like a week ago, didn't we? Even with the same bloody OP image. There was plenty of good advice in it, and I'm pretty sure it went well over 200 posts.
Yes we did. It even got on suptg.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?searchall=non-abrahamic monotheistic religion worldbuilding

Reposting what I said to OP the first time.
Just write what you think and there you have it.
Lalap the ancient eye cried onto this world and from it's mystical tears life began. Simple.

Listen to this guy OP. Simple, straightforward and creative. Good stuff. No need to overthink it. Just asspull something and then expound on it until you've got enough to work with. Hell, steal from this dude and brainstorm it from there, that singing God sounds interesting.

Take an interesting polytheistic religion.

Combine the aspects of the creator and the head of the pantheon, if not already the same.

Turn all other Gods into saints and angels of various significance and import.

Establish a basic guideline for morality, re Ten Commandments, and have it include specific Do's and Don'ts associated with the history of the area the religion sprouted up in. (Ostrich meat used to make people sick, one of the commandments is don't eat ostrich)

Not OP, but I wonder which part of
>How to create a monotheistic religion that isn't a rehashed version of chrisrianism (with a few jewish elements)?
was lost on you?

The King in Red. Monotheistic deity that requires a yearly sacrifice when the red moon rises, or else he sends plagues and monsters to all the people who didn't sacrifice to him. He is the father of monsters.

He gives many of things sacrificed, like gold and gems and grain and animals, to his monsters. This explains why dungeons with monsters have treasure in them.

Steal the shit they didnt. You can make anything monotheistic.

How is that monotheistic? Is that literally all they worship? An asshole who sends monsters if you don't pay him off annually? Is that literally all these people worship.

There is no other aspect of life than explaining the treasures in dungeons that these people might want to tackle through religious beliefs, or any other aspect of your world that you might want to embody through a divine being?

Now don't get me wrong, the idea for the King in Red is actually kinda cool. It's a neat little diety and the explanation of treasures in dungeons is fine too.
It just makes zero sense that this would be monotheistic religion. Would make perfect sense as a part of a larger pantheon.

But as a monothestic religion, it's kinda like if Old Slavs worshiped ONLY Hors - the god of Winter Sun. He basically represents the vaguely pleasant feeling you get when sun rays warm you up on a sunny day in the middle of winter. Hell, it's even worse because even Hors is at least THE FUCKING SUN even if only for a quarter of the year.

There is a bit of a religious vacuum there, don't you think?

No, you actually really can't. See above. Also, OP specifically asked for an idea that does not steal from Christianity or Judaic traditions. So immediately recommending him "do exactly what Christianity did" is just stupid and waste of everyone's time.

There is always the sun. The sun who trapped everything in its glow so that it could grow. The sun who cares little for right and wrong but only about survival. The sun is harsh and will burn away slackers and anoint the hard working with bounties of the land.

Nah. There are interesting religions Christianity, etc didnt steal from and incorporate into Abrahamic scipture. Those are fair game. Converting different polytheistic beliefs into a single monotheistic faith isn't inherently Christianity just because they followed that blueprint. It depends on what you incorporate, you pedantic bitch.

Make the god indifferent or aggressive to humanity.

Maybe the God is an ascended magician. Maybe it's a mortal that got a lucky wish. Maybe it's the animated voice of the cosmos. Either way, it doesn't like humanity. If it created them, it did so by accident.
People don't worship it out of adoration, or for promises of other-world rewards, but they know that by invoking it, they can parasite some of it's power. The God aware of this, causes misery in the land of mortal, hoping to shrug off this infection upon himself.

Don't expand on other world cosmology. The world is about the current plane of existence and mortal's place is in it. No heaven, no hell, no angels, no demons.

In fact, morality shouldn't factor in. This God doesn't guide mortals. Mortals do what they want. The God does what he wants. Good dynamic. The God is simply the end result of a Will to Power, and mortals emulate that, or take advantage by following in its wake.

TLDR -> Abrahamic God exists to judge souls. So, take out the morality. Your God is just an independent entity with its own agenda. To mortals, it's a power source. No more.

How do you define a religion then, without morality? Morality is given by Code of Law - Man makes law, and determines right and wrong. God is just power. Adventure is about Man using Power to advance, within, or without the Law.

>etc didnt steal from and incorporate into Abrahamic scipture.
Not many of those, actually. Christianity has managed to assimilate - temporarily or permanently - just about every religion it ever came across - from Celtic druidism past Shinto to Mesoamerican Cults of Death.

>Those are fair game.
I think you are missing the point so fucking hard you could call yourself Harmatia.

Also, you literally said "turn them into Angels and Saints". Because those are not typical fucking traits and models of the abrahamic religions, right?

>Converting different polytheistic beliefs into a single monotheistic faith isn't inherently Christianity
No, it's also how Judaism was created. And the problem here is that the same blueprint will lead to very similar fucking result. You can make any fucking excuses you want but if your religion is functionally nearly identical to abrahamic religions in terms of how it works and how it builds it's world and it's God and his posy you failed utterly what OP asked you to provide.

Didnt the first egyptian god create the world by making itself pregnant via Autofellatio?

You could base it off Sun worship, but make it something another people might see more often or be influenced more.

Northern lights, maybe were they live seeing the sun is like and eclipse and for brief times each year it is revealed how ugly they are and they interpret it as a lie told be the cruel skin burning fire ball.

Maybe make a religion were the people think no the god or gods are benevolent and are actively seeking to wage war vs god.

A race of robots colonizing the moon, they have evolving ai and their initial programming feels so old and crude it's like trying to read a dusty tome. They believe they need to resurrect their gods, other robots believe they shouldn't resurrect their creators as they will bring ruin to the robot people.

A monotheistic religion would be based in a conquering empire that wishes to remove all other faiths.

Adaptable Paganism. Voodoo, for an example.

How is that fucking monotheism - do you people even know what that word means?

Because it can graft itself onto almost any religion it comes across.
Creating a monotheistic religion is, to say the least, difficult, considering schismatic elements within the religion divide and split the original faith into different sects.

Anyway, good luck OP. Sorry for wasting you time.

*your

Isn't monotheism just having only one god? is that incomptatible wih all form of animism?

Idea: Humanity (or whatever races you have) is/are one of many, many projects, and mortals need to prove themselves to God, not the other way around.

There is no hell, just cessation of existence- if you're not going to prove useful or interesting, why keep you around?

>How is that monotheistic?

I meant there were other religions in the setting, but the only "God" was a nasty tyrant. The other 'gods', lowercase are nature spirits and helpful ghosts, but this guy is worshiped by all cultures by force.

He lives in the moon. It's a mega dungeon.

>Because it can graft itself onto almost any religion it comes across.
All religion has that capacity. It's just that Christianity in particular has motivation and ambition to do that, which isn't common thing among religions. Very few religions in the world have the inherent drive to spread themselves as "aggressively" as Christianity does. Otherwise, if you look into how say, Hindu or Shinto incredibly effectively merged with other religions, you'll see that this is actually just a completely natural process possible in every religion.

>Creating a monotheistic religion is, to say the least, difficult,
True, but I think it's hard for a different reason than you think. Schism and mergings and divides are not exclusive to monotheism either, and (to me at least), they are actually the most fun aspect of it. It's not an obstacle, it's just more space to cover, more options to play around.

The problem really is that the very concept of monotheistic religion just kinda stretches religious symbolism and imagination to it's limits. It's a very clever and very, very sophisticated idea. Recreating that kind of sophistication, creating monotheism that actually makes sense - that is just a tall order because you have to actually explain why and how can people make do with a singular diety.

>Isn't monotheism just having only one god? is that incomptatible wih all form of animism?
Because animism is worship of countless spirits inhabiting objects in physical world as gods? The anima in animism is the subject of worship: it's the god of that religion.
It's literally the most polytheistic religious model imaginable.

I'm not even sure what to say. It does not make any sense to me what so ever, but maybe I'm just weird, old fashioned and dull.

Try making the God NOT a judgemental asshole.

>I'm not even sure what to say. It does not make any sense to me what so ever, but maybe I'm just weird, old fashioned and dull.

Sorry, this is a new concept, I'm still working on it and I didn't really explain it well.

I'll switch it around; The humans will be the noble divided pantheists, maybe they like African Vodun which other people in the threads have talked about which I also like, but they also have to worship this asshole even if they don't like him. In fact, it doesn't have to be worship, just sacrifice.

However, the MONSTERS can all be monotheistic. The King in Red is the only God that cares about them, because he created all of them, possibly through disgusting sex with mortal animals and such. Female monsters brand themselves with his mark to become his spirit wives, male monsters crop their hair and practice bloodletting, swearing loyalty and to fight to the death for his cause.

Humans and the other normal mortal races worship nature spirits, kind ghosts, weird old men that live in mountains that make flowers grow when they touch them. These gods are physical, safe, helpful, and usually benign.

Only the King in Red is seemingly omnipresent, though certainly not all knowing or all powerful, just capable of influencing the world. Spreading clouds of miasma or causing natural disasters to those who refuse to give a yearly sacrifice on the night of sacrifice. Sending his monsters (who all get a bonus HD on that night) to destroy towns and cities that mock him or refuse to give to him, but things easily escape his notice.

Hopefully that's a better and more complete job of explaining why it's monotheistic. Or maybe it isn't, and he's just the big bad prime god of a pantheon, that works too.

The god is evil and angry, and the whole shtick is trying to appease or trick him.

>However, the MONSTERS can all be monotheistic.
That actually does make a lot of sense. And it's an interesting idea. I never really played with the idea of creating a god for actual monsters (I automatically associate religion with sentience, civilized species), but now I'm reminded of Islamic Ifrit's and Genies, which were magical or monsterous spirits but they themselves worshiped either Allah or other gods (which made them evil). I'm pretty sure some old slavic myths also featured things like Fairies and Stone Giants who converted to Christianity, and I think some Islandic Huldufólk were tackled to be religious too. I like the idea.

Making him the prime god of the pantheon makes a lot less sense - aside from the fact that a presence of a pantheon itself suggests it's not a monotheist religion to begin with - because why would god with such a "niche" interest and/or appeal would be the leader. Divine hierarchies usually reflect the relevance or significance of the god's association for the worshipers lives: that is why we have so many gods of Sun and Storm at the helm of so many religions (if you ask "why storm?", the answer is - because because storms are a big deal if you rely a lot on seafaring, that is why).

Even if monsters are a big deal in your world, it's kinda weird to think they would matter more to people than the motherfucking Sun would.

I don't think it really matters in that sense. Like he isn't necessarily just the God of monsters and dungeons and stuff, but he's also the 'prime' god because he's powerful. It doesn't matter if he is niche because if he's strong enough to force everyone in the world to give him tribute or else face punishment then it wouldn't matter if he's evil but also the prime deity. I guess I wasn't using the term monotheism correctly, or at least you could think of it as an opposite Christian religion. God is evil, demons are good, that sort of thing, without being fedora about it.

Thanks for the feedback.

Sol Invictus, Mithraism, manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and bahai all immediately come to mind

CHROM LIVE ON MOUNTAIN

HE IS STRONG

HE NOT SAY ANYTHING

HE IS THERE FOR YELL AT

TO HELL WITH YOU CHROM!

IS GOOD TO PRAY

>I don't think it really matters in that sense.
It matters from a symbolic perspective. While people might not be conscious of it, or be able to verbalize, they are actually quite sensitive whenever something feels "right" or "real" (that is reflecting their experiences with real-life concepts that you are using in your fiction) and if your religion contradicts their general broad sentiment or experience with the idea of religion in reality, they will find it... if nothing else then not very gripping. There is a reason why Tolkien's lore or Kirkbrides Godhead have such a great appeal while most generic fantasy mythologies are so god-damn forgetable: it's because those people actually paid attention to the symbolic language of the religious elements they involved, creating them in such a fashion that feels natural and "beliveable" to people.

From in-lore point of you of course you can simply say "well he is the arbitrarily strongest god so he heads the pantheon", but it's not going feel right. Because in reality, divine hierarchies always worked the opposite way: in traditional religion, gods were not important because of their strenght: they were strong because they were important (represented important aspect of real world). That is why time-gods tend to be so god damn powerful they stand outside of the hiearchy, gods of thins as vital to existence as Sunlight were high, followed usually by gods that represented key aspects of the society's survival: Sea for naval cultures, war for war-accustomed societies, etc... It's not a fool-proof scheme, of course (I'm simplifying a lot): but the point is: it's just weird and off if your pantheon is lead by a god whose main attribute is something as Niche and non-central to existence as being the patron of monsters. And it will feel weird even if you make a in-universe explanation.

Well he could be a God of ambition, evil, the unknown, family/lineage, fire or blood, passion, strength, magic, the sky or stars, and any number of those things based on how we've described him thus far.

I thought your description of King in Red was actually pretty non-ambiguous and none of those attributes seem to be very compatible with that image. Also, I don't see why would you want to do that: it's actually diluting what was originally a fairly interesting proposition. I'm not sure why are you trying to "salvage" the idea of him being the head of the pantheon (for non-monsters) rather than focusing on salvaging the idea of him being the King of the Monsters, the guy holding the sword above everyone's head: secondary god to non-monsters, but still a pretty damn terrifying one.

It makes way more sense to me to just keep the original idea, make him "that spooky thing that comes around once a year and you better be ready" to humans (hell, the idea of the Red Moon Sacrifice makes for some pretty fun twisted parallels to Halloween), and only being the supreme being to the monsters. Yeah, he only becomes really relevant during the Red Moon event, but that makes his sudden "show-time" all the more interesting and sinister, and makes him a more memorable diety.

I don't know why you want him to be high in the hierarchy so much. Being higher in the hierarchy does not make the god better or more interesting. On the contrary: Loki is more fun that Thor, Hades is more fun than Zeus, Kali is more fun than Brahma and Vishnu. Play to his strengths.

I just wanted him to be the bad guy, I wasn't planning on having as traditional boring fantasy pantheon except for this one indulgence.

But hey, you've convinced me. I love the Halloween parallel with the Red Moon, and the God of monsters is always fun. I like it. Now I just need to make an attached pantheon that isn't too shitty.

>I just wanted him to be the bad guy,
Not only you can still do that, I think it's actually more fun if the big bad guy is one of those less prominent dudes. Evil head of pantheon or a sole but evil god is kinda hard to explain without world going full on edge anyway.

As for the rest of the pantheon: if you want a shorthand and don't want to particularly invest into it, the easiest way to do it is to nick one of those classical heathen pantheons.

Look up these for reference:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Canaanite_religion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mesopotamian_deities
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Slavic_mythological_figures
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Celtic_deities
You notice that the patterns actually repeat quite heavily (basically the same hierarchy, basically the same divine attribute groups etc...), it seems to be kind of a "default deal" for non-monotheist religions. If you just nick the structure, make a few adjustments (you can sneak in some other bizzare dieties if you want) and bam, you have a serviceable pantheon. Not particularly memorable, not bad either. You can then draw the attention towords the King in Red within the campaign itself.

And yeah, I think Red Moon festival where people sacrifice gold and dress up like monsters because the King is watching and if he is pissed, bored or horny, he might open the floodgates and let the monsters out of their dungeons to change the pace could be pretty bad ass.

>Evil head of pantheon or a sole but evil god is kinda hard to explain without world going full on edge anyway.

I personally think that would be cool. A sort of Grim bright setting.

This is probably a professional deformation on my side, but to me it really sounds stupid. It makes sense to have a cruel god - I mean fuck, look at Elohym or the gods of Aztec civilizations, but that is something else than having a ruling god that is just evil. It's basically equivalent of saying "well this word sucks and is really awful and nothing good ever happens". The majority of the world is never evil (outside of bad fiction): it may be harsh, cruel at times, difficult, demanding, but there needs to be a point to it, some form of solace or hope. Hell, in real-world religions, gods are rarely flat-out evil. Even some of the most terrifying ones usually had some kind of positive role or function: truly evil gods are a rarity and most of them are actually a product of several different cults clashing and eventually the winner depicting the loser in a negative light (for an example famous egyptian Set, the evil god who killed his brother, Osiris, and then repeatedly raped his son Horus during their many confrontations was actually originally a one of the patrons of Upper Egypt until Lower, Horus-worshiping Egypt conquered it and demonized it's patrons. Same thing happened with gods like Baal or Moloch after their splinter religion - Judaism - culturally conquered them).

The sole/ruling god is evil trope feels super cheap to me.

Maybe at some point he was good, or could be the world creator that succumbed to degenerate behavior. Maybe the other Gods were better, but he beat them and kicked them out. Or maybe the people believe that the afterlife is a far nicer, better place but their souls must be forged in this much darker world first.

Maybe he's the God of blood or passion, and without him everyone would be a listless, sexless, hopeless, worthless cog in the machine. I've always kind of liked the idea of the world being 'naturally' very orderly, like the animal kingdom as a LITERAL kingdom, and the queens and kings of the world bred for their jobs by default with no moving between ranks, not by merit or chance or blessing. But The King in Red might have shook that up by bleeding for the first time, or by spilling blood, which allowed people to break free from their set castes.

I mean the Norse believed that when Ragnarok would happen the bad guys would WIN. That sounds pretty evil, but they were supposed to go on anyway.

I don't really want it to feel cheap, just interesting.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urmonotheismus

tl;dr: Make a shamanistic religion with one big super-god and a lot of weaker spirits. Done.

In ancient Transylvania, known as Dacia, they worshipped one God.

Though they were henotheistic, they were developing monotheistic ideas.

Their god was Zalmoxis a prophet deity who entombed himself beneath the earth and returned 3 years later to teach his people of the paradise after death. The Romans and Greeks disliked fighting the Dacians as they were fanatics who did not fear death.

They believed they would go to their god beneath the earth to a paradise. They did not believe in icons or symbols, much like Muslims and early Judaism.

They built large open air temples with dark underground passages that represented their journey to the underworld in search of knowledge.

Their great adversary was the Sky god. During lightening storms the Dacians fired arrows at the heavens to show they did not fear it.

They also prayed to their god in a very unusual way. They would elect a messenger, tell them all of their prayers to carry to their god and impale them by throwing them onto spears held by soldiers standing below.

Its an unusual faith but definitely not Abrahamic.

It's not hard. Just do as it works historically. Get the whole cosmology of some ancient religion and attribute the work of all deities to a single one.

That is really, really, really fucking cool user.

History is still full of really good ideas, you just have to look hard enough.

Innit?
Dis nigga is my boy, I've decided. I mean, all I had last thread was Tengriism, and this guy comes out of nowhere with an ancient religion that is quite a bit aways from the Levant and Middle East in general that's Monotheistic.

Like, I would suck user's dick with full eye contact and ball fondling involved I'm so damn impressed

>Do you have any good ideas or approachs to a single-god religion
Sure. You could approach in two main ways, really. The first is that you simply create a religion with a single god as the creator and ruler of the world. This is likely the preferred route if you're making a world where the gods are real and in some way involved in the world. Though it doesn't mean that he needs to be the only god that actually exists, it just means that the faiths that acknowledge him as a god don't acknowledge any other beside him.

The other would be a naturalistic approach where you first create a pantheon of gods and then evolve it until one of the gods absorbs the roles of the others and becomes the lone deity. Remnants of those other gods may still appear in the religion. For example, there may be stories where the supreme deity is clearly filling the role of someone else as he acts way out of character, or he may have a group of servants who in certain stories do things that they shouldn't have the power to do unless they were gods themselves, and so on.

I think the easiest way is to look at how monotheistic religions generally appear to form. Polytheistic, then polytheistic with a patron god, to monolatric (the only god worthy of worship is the patron god). to monotheistic. With the god acquiring the portfolios of the other gods along the way, but maintaining some of its original character. (In the case of the Abrahamic religions, the main traits seem to be of a sky father type creator and a god of war.)

I think you can probably get something that feels quite different by just doing this process from a different starting point.

Alternatively you could follow threads similar to what you find in gnositicism and some forms of hinduism where you have multiple gods all as aspects of a single godhead. In this case you could have a setup where the upper class is largely monotheistic, while the folk religion tends to focus on the worship of individual aspects rather than the whole.

If it's a fantasy setting, then the one god probably talks to people and makes other explicit signs of his existence. And the odds are that he would not randomly choose one small group of people to endorse and say fuck it to everyone else in the classic Abrahamic style. He would talk to all intelligent beings, each in their own languages and customs, and either try to get them to unify into one culture or engineer fights between them for his own amusement.

How about a religion that doesn't reject the existence of other gods, it just claims that its god is the strongest and will consume all lesser deities.

To assist their god, they wage holy war against followers of lesser gods both to deprive their enemy gods of followers and to feed sacrifices to their own god

During his reign, the Phaeroh Akhenaten tore down all relgious symbols and killed the priest covens, declaring himself as a single Sun God and his wife Nefertiti as his messenger.

It's certainly a neato idea, however, because Aki-boy committed grand heresy, when he died, they completely stripped all mention of his reign from history, so we really don't have much to work with.

There's a pantheon, each seat being filled with a paragon of their domain. Mortals who feel that they embody a domain better than the current God can challenge them for their place as deity.

>declaring himself as a single Sun God
Ehh. Aten was the sun, and it was considered the only god. However, Akhenaten was the only person allowed to worship it, Normal people had to worship Akhenaten so he could pass it along to Aten.

The people of the setting live in a centralized enough environment so the culture (humanwise at least) is utterly homogeneous and the concept of differing religions is entirely alien to them. 'Heresies' die with the individual who invented them and there isn't an external population to influence their culture. The rest of the world is savage beasts and monsters not sapient enough to create their own religions.

Further the singular deity has origins as some ethereal force that first protected man from the beasts of the world, and his grace is considered to be the primary defense against the wild. Not an aggressive 'what makes us better than animals' type of thing but a 'beacon to protect us from the wild'.

Funnily enough, I'm reading Small Gods at the moment. Though I have to admit that Omnianism shares a good bit with Abrahamic religions.

>How about a religion that doesn't reject the existence of other gods, it just claims that its god is the strongest and will consume all lesser deities.
That is just about every damn religion in the world. But it's not monotheism. Though many can argue that many religions that we recognize as monotheistic nowdays kinda do this too (Christianity, can be argued to be such a case), conventionally it is assumed that a religion that recognizes multiplicity of divine being (even if there is a strong hierarchy among them) just does not constitute monotheism.

I'm pretty sure Akhenaten did not actually declare himself a god (well, not anymore than he already was by the virtue of being Pharaoh): in fact the name Akhenaten literally means "The one Serving Aten". Aten was the god, not Akhenaten.
He also did not actually kill any priests (he did disband the heads of several major temples though) and wasn't very successful in tearing down the religious symbols. Instead, he actually opted for escaping the influence of the older religions (particularly the cult of Amen - the most popular god in his capital - by moving his office and building an entire new city specifically dedicated to worship of Aten. From what we know, he was a bit sickly and relatively meek ruler, actually - in fact it's possible that his wife, Nefertiti, had bigger influence than he himself did. He was a devout worshiper of Aten though, seemed to push for very personal, internal type of faith. The introduction of the cult of Aten was also fairly slow and gradual.

And his main sin wasn't committing heresy. It was just actually threatening power and wealth to major political players of his time.

Ever thought about picking up a pantheon, say nordic, turn Odin into The God and the rest of them into saints?

In terms of archetypical significance, Saint George is like Thor, they have the role of dragon-slayers and warriors.

Also:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikhism

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waaq

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tian

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atenism

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukuru

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdi