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bogus comments on My Kind of Moral Responsibility - Less Wrong Discussion
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Who says that they didn't? Chinese folk religion acknowledged Shang-di (also called Tian, 'Heaven') as the primordial, universal deity, which is essentially a kind of henotheism and quite close historically to monotheism. This is especially true since other deities, while worthy of veneration and sacrifice, were largely conflated with "spirits". Of course, the later ideology of Confucianism tended to supplant these ancestral beliefs as a genuine foundation for ethics and philosophy/general worldview, although it did encourage the practice of rituals as a way of maintaining social harmony and a tightly-knit community.
I do. If you squint hard enough you can detect monotheism in any religious system at which point the term "monotheism" loses any meaning.
I'm using the conventional approach where religions like Judaism and Christianity (in spite of the Trinity!) are monotheistic and religions like Hinduism and Shinto are not.
But the point is, the ancestral version of what would later evolve into Judaism was far from monotheistic; much like Chinese folk religion. As with almost anything else in history, monotheism was a gradual development.
Sure. But let's go a bit upthread and look at my original sentence:
Note the word "develop".
Christianity not only has the trinity but also a bunch of saints towards whom you can pray and who then supposedly intervene. Additionally there are a bunch of angels. There's the devil and demons.