Monotheism and Polytheism

What does a monocle have to do with studying religion?!

Today we talked about the differences between monotheism and polytheism.

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Theism is the belief in the existence of god or gods. There is more than one type of theism:

• Monotheism is the specific belief in one god.
• Polytheism is the specific belief in many gods.

Some religions are monotheistic, whereas other religions are polytheistic.

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We talked about the prefixes "mono" (one) and "poly" (many), and we discussed other words that can help us remember the definitions of monotheism and polytheism:

• Monocle (a single eyeglass)
• Monopoly (a single person or business that controls an entire industry)
• Monotonous (a single toned style of speech (often considered boring))
• Monopod (a single-legged support for a camera (thanks very much to Cole for introducing this word to all of us!)


• Polygon (a many-sided shape)
• Polyglot (a person who speaks more than one language)

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Several students pointed out that the civilizations that we have studied so far (in particular, Egypt and Greece) had polytheistic belief systems. We haven't yet studied a civilization with a monotheistic religion.