The Creation of Adam

messengers communicated to mankind that there is only one God worthy of being worshipped, and they should shun the worship of any other being. However, since God was unseen, the majority did not pay any heed to these messengers. Veneration or worshipping God meant to worship a being which was unobservable. Man, who wanted to revere some visible object, made nature his god by virtue of its visibility. Polytheism is another name for worshipping nature. Despite the coming of the prophets in succession, man failed to pay heed to their teachings. He chose to misuse his freedom. This practice persisted from one generation to the next until polytheism became the dominant culture: it came to be a continuum in human history. Given the general dominance of polytheistic culture, polytheism came to enjoy the patronage of political power almost all over the world. It was accorded the position of a state religion. In its initial stages, polytheism was merely a doctrinal evil, but later, with the kings’ patronage, it became so powerful that its eradication was next to impossible. The polytheism culture continued to grow breeding the evil described as “absolute imperialism” by Henri Pirenne, the wellknown French historian. The phenomenon of political