boobmaster

That is certainly an argument that makes sense from a psychological point of view. It is true that we create explanations for things we fear and we fear nothing more in this world than death.

I have studied folklore and mythology in my graduate studies and the creation and development of certain myths are directly the result of our need to have something to hold on to in hard times. One such example is the vampire myth, which evolved during the plague years in the middle ages. People saw neighbors dying around them in village after village and had no explanation for it, nor did they have any way of doing something about it. It was much easier for them to believe that the first person who died in each village was a vampire. That way you could go into the graveyard at night and 'do something about it.'

Many psychologists have argued that the evolution of the belief in God was for the most part parallel. This is certainly true in polytheistic religious systems, where certain gods existed governing certain crucial elements in nature (sun god, rain god, etc.). However, the development of monotheism is quite different and seems to have come out of nowhere.

Judaism was the world's first true monotheistic religious system, which later gave rise to Christianity and Islam. One thing that put the Jews at odds with the rest of the world was that they believed in a single God while everyone else had a pantheon of gods, each serving different a different function (generally fertility related).

The important thing to note is that in culture after culture, indigenous religious system are always polytheistic. This suggests that when man creates God, his tendency is to create a system of many gods. It is unnatural for man to create a religious system that is based on a single god. The ONLY one known to exist is Judaism. I would suggest to you that this system is not polytheistic because it was not created by man.