I only have a familiarity with Christianity and the “no other gods before me” thing. I am curious what other religions have to say about it.
I only have a familiarity with Christianity and the “no other gods before me” thing. I am curious what other religions have to say about it.
Asking seriously: “ no gods before me”, does that mean it’s ok to have gods after that god?
Before as in order of priority, not chronologically
Ok, so him first, Zeus or some other god second?
Yes. Pavel Datsyuk is not God, but when he stepped on that ice, he was no longer a man, but a god.
Some Christians in India worship Jesus as their top god, and local deities as secondary gods. I’m guessing this is common in places where Christianity spread peacefully into a culture with a polytheistic (and preferably decentralised) pantheon.
It means “before” as in “in front of”, not “occurring previously to”
Okay, so, what about after? Meaning he’s #1, can you have a bunch of others behind him?
I guess like the Catholics do, with Mary and saints and such?
You are supposed to never have any other god before the Christian god at any moment. That means that if you pray to the Christian god every day of the year except for one day where you suddenly pray to another. Then during that day you put another god before the Christian god. Think of it like cheating in a relationship. Even if you are exclusive to your partner 99% of the time that 1% still counts as cheating.
But what if I pray to the Christian Catholic God thing first, and then pray to other Christian Catholic Saints, or whatever they’re called, isn’t that putting their God first and then other people / gods second? Which means pray to him first and not last.
So I would pray to this Catholic god, then something else, therefore he is “first” and not “before”.
Know what I mean?
Indoctrinated I mean raised catholic so I got this one. To them, praying to saints is just a way to pray to God. You ask the saints to intercede for you. Basically pass them a note to pass to the big G personally.
How’s that not putting someone or something before god?
It doesn’t make sense.
Not before literally, but above. Catholics only worship God, but they venerate other figures. Like imagine you want to send a message to the ceo of your company, but you’re a lowly wage slave. Do you snap off an email to the big guy himself, or do you ask your manager to pass the message along? Probably the latter. But even though you’re going through a middleman, the ceo is still the big boss. Same thing with God and saints.
With catholicism you’re pretty much allowed to make up anything. We just have one god. But that’s obviously not enough so we made up the holy trinity, so he/she is one… But also three. And we’ve incorporated pagan holidays and beliefs. There it fairies, monsters etc, we just call them angels and deamons and such. And you can pray to god… Or saints or whatever you like. There is a process to it. It has to by accepted by the pope and the vatican. And it takes some time. But they’re not opposed to contradicting dogma. And don’t believe in logic in the first place. So I’d say go ahead… You can simultaneously have gods before and after and at the same time have it the other way around. It doesn’t need to make sense. If you’re catholic, talk to the pope. He’s infallible. Just don’t introduce “making sense” to anything. We can’t have that with religion.
It’s just a few very old books with how people tried to make sense of the world back then, plus a few thousands of years of extra lore added on top, varying politics during the times and a few old men running the business.