The One v the Many

 As Peter Jones reminds us (see his articles on TruthXchange and podcasts on Spotify from 1998), there are but two religions: the worship of the Creator, and the worship of the creature.

He springs from Paul's words in Romans 1:25: For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

Thus there are but two world views.

The worship of the creature which reduces to monism (Jones calls it 'Oneism' for simplicity), where there is but one thing, a unity without diversity, or true differentiation, and

'The worship of the creator, (Jones calls it 'Twoism'); which shows us who we are. We might term this dualism of a kind: there is a creator, who reveals himself as personal, communicating and the one who is love, and there is the creature, created to know the creator, and enjoy him forever, as the Westminster Catechism puts it.

Oneism is perplexed by difference and all 'identity' is absorbed into a vague unity with no basis for differentiation. However, people are in reality not that kind of unity, there is difference within humanity; it is repleted with both similarity and difference, yet cut off from the creator, ungrounded, people search for identity. Not finding it, some manufacture it as the current fashion to declare their 'gender' in a hopeless grasp for 'identity'.

On the other hand, we do have a real 'identity' being in the image of the Triune God, in home is exhibited the reality of unity and differentiation, were love is real, committed and open (those loved are loved as they are, not conditionally).

The Trinity shows us that difference in unity is true, but does not destroy real communication, real being, or the significance of the individual.

Paganism -- Oneism -- destroys all of these things as the individual is really but an indistinguisable component of the all, at best. The example of this is the hopelessness of materialist monism captured in the notion of (Darwinian) evolution: no one is anything but a local assembly of molecules which were previously some other assembly, and in the future will re-arrange through decay, back into worm dung. And that's all it offers!