Hegel looked at human history
as developing through dialectics resolved at a more advanced point in a
trajectory of expanding human freedom. It may be in the history of religion
that less superstition evinces an evolution of a different sort. The monotheism
of the Abrahamic religions came out of a polytheistic context, but it is a more
difficult matter to claim that monotheism represents a development of human
religion historically because polytheism has continued. Even though some contemporary
interpreters of Hinduism’s main text, the Bhagavad-Gita, claim erroneously
that the god Krishna being the supreme deity in that text means that it is
monotheist even though in that text, Krishna himself acknowledges that people
pray to other gods and goddesses that exist. Rather than maintain that monotheism
is an advancement on polytheism, I submit that conceptual contradictions
between contending religious claims in any religion can be surmounted, as transcended,
though with the caveat that in polytheism, contradictions have a firmer
grounding even though they too are to be transcended if religion itself is permitted
to evolve.
The full essay is at "Renunciation vs. Dutiful Action in Hinduism."
