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Desrtopa comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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I dunno, that's an interesting case study if nothing else.
Regarding monotheism ... it has emerged independently a few times, if nothing else:
In Greece and India, philosophers noticed that the gods didn't really seem worthy of worship / multiple omnipotent agents didn't make sense.
In both Egypt and Israel, individual cults grew into henotheistic religions which eventually blurred into monotheism - probably for at least partly political reasons, and Happy Death Spirals were probably also involved.
Interestingly, Christianity appears to have partly reverted to polytheism during the dark ages - and there are many syncretic minor religions/cults that are polytheistic while retaining a largely Christian framework.
It seems to me that polytheism is easier to grasp, and so tends to be popular by default, while monotheism is easier to defend, and so tends to emerge when it needs to be defended (whether from political opponents or your own knowledge about reality) - and the two most popular religions both started out monotheist (give or take a trinity.)
More ontopic, it's arguable whether using such a common term to mean such a specific concept is privileging the hypothesis, but it's pretty common these days, and most "converts" to atheism came from Christian backgrounds. [citation needed]
I'm not so sure about that. We have much more exposure to attempts to defend monotheism from polytheism or atheism, so it may appear easier, because there's a glut of arguments coming from that direction. That could just be a historical accident though. Maybe we could have ended up quite easily in a world where the most popular religions were offshoots of Chinese syncretism, and we'd be much more familiar with arguments defending polytheism.
Monotheism has sprung up in polytheistic cultures, but in some cases we've also reinterpreted the work of old philosophers through monotheistic lenses. A lot of classical Greek philosophers framed their arguments in terms of "the gods," who're now interpreted as talking about "god," and the idea of omnipotence wasn't really in popular circulation. The closest I know of any Greek philosopher coming to monotheism was Aristotle with his Prime Mover, but it was Aquinas who reinterpreted this as being about God. To Aristotle, the Prime Mover was more like a basic energy principle behind everything. The gods came from it, but it wasn't a being so much as The Stuff that Makes Stuff Happen.
The Science of the Discworld II provides a substantiation for the claim that monotheism produces better science than polytheism; when a monotheist wants to know why thunderstorms happen, he has no trouble with the idea that there's a single, consistent set of rules to be applied, if he can but find out what they are (while the polytheist is still trying to work out which gods are having an argument).
I never found that argument very compelling. The Classical Greeks did a whole lot better than the Christians at developing scientific knowledge, before the Renaissance. Both monotheistic and polytheistic tradtions can foster either strong or weak scientific progress. Islam is a good example of a monotheistic tradition moving from high to low scientific productivity by the shifting of ideas within that tradition (see The Incoherence of the Philosophers.)
A polytheist can perfectly easily see the world as functioning according to a single, consistent set of rules, that all the various gods operate within, while a monotheist can just as well see the world as completely tied to the whims of an ontologically basic mental entity which is outside our conception of logic, such that the most basic reason we can ever explain anything with is "because that's what God wants" (which is the idea that essentially led to the atrophy of Islamic science.)
Well, I can hardly prove I'm not biased by overexposure to such arguments. Still, I think disproving Monoteism requires greater, well, skill than disproving polytheism.