Monotheism stands or falls with Supergod

Rank a-the-ists put a for the
and spell me with a little g,
for their conceit is to refer
to Great I Am as if I were
but an almighty, nothing more
than Pan, Poseidon, Thoth, or Thor.
Jehovah's one with Jove or Zeus--
so they'd imply with this their use
of a and an, but they blaspheme -- a
curse upon their an/a thema!

-- Yes and No

As everyone knows, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are monotheists, while pagans are polytheists. So when, in Book V of the Odyssey, Zeus sends Hermes to convey a message to Calypso, all three of these characters are gods. When Calypso asks Hermes why he has come, he replies (in A. T. Murray's translation)

Thou, a goddess, dost question me, a god, upon my coming, and I will speak my word truly, since thou biddest me. It was Zeus who bade me come hither against my will. Who of his own will would speed over so great space of salt sea-water, great past telling? . . . But it is in no wise possible for any other god to evade or make void the will of Zeus, who bears the aegis.

In Luke 1, when the God of the Hebrews wishes to convey messages to Zacharias and to Mary, he also sends an immortal heavenly messenger to carry out his will.

I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew thee these glad tidings.

Gabriel, though, is not a god; nor, despite the cult that would later grow up around her, is Mary a goddess. Monotheism is widely considered to be extremely important, and entirely different from polytheism -- so what is this essential and fundamental difference between, say, Hermes and Gabriel that makes the one a god and the other a mere saint and angel?

Is it that Gabriel is entirely subordinate to God? But Hermes, as he explains to Calypso, is entirely subordinate to Zeus and is, no less than Gabriel, playing the role of an angelos -- that is, a messenger or envoy. And anyway, even beings that are not subordinate to God are still considered to be "angels"; Set and Loki are gods, but Satan is not.

Is Hermes considered a god because, unlike Gabriel, he was worshiped? Well, first of all, this is a difference in the religious behavior of human beings, not an intrinsic difference between Hermes and Gabriel themselves. (It may reflect some such difference, of course, but cannot be the difference.) Secondly, the supposed distinction between the "worship" of Hermes and the mere "veneration" of Gabriel is by no means an obvious one. If there were Temples of Hermes, hymns to Hermes, and so on, it is also true that there are prayers to St. Gabriel the Archangel and several houses of worship called St. Gabriel's Church. Catholicism considers the dulia due to Gabriel (and the hyperdulia paid to the Virgin) to be entirely different from the latria proper to God alone -- but for all the talk of how that difference is "infinite and immeasurable," "one of kind and not merely of degree," no one seems to be able to say clearly in what this supposedly infinite difference consists. What specific behaviors are proper when directed toward God but not when directed toward the Virgin, Gabriel, or any of the other saints? Every explanation I've read simply states that the objects of the different forms of servitus are infinitely different and seems to take it for granted that the two forms of servitus must therefore themselves be (in some unspecified way) infinitely different.

Suppose we leave Hermes out of the picture and simply ask why God is a god but Gabriel is not. If we accept the Supergod premise (that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent and created everything out of nothing; see The Supergod delusion for details), obviously there can only be one Supergod, and he is qualitatively different from everything and everyone else. If being a god means being Supergod, then of course Gabriel is not a god. But then neither is Calypso, or Hermes, or even Zeus before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers -- or, for that matter, Yahweh before he was reconceptualized by the philosophers. If nothing short of Supergod can be called a "god," then polytheism has never existed. Some post-Platonic pagans -- those who adopted the "Superzeus" conception -- were monotheists in precisely the same way that Supergod-believing Christians are, but most forms of paganism were, by this definition, atheistic; they believed in "angels" but not in God.

⁂

If Supergod is rejected, monotheism loses its meaning. There is a continuum of increasingly godlike beings, from ordinary men and women all the way up to God the Father, and deciding where along that continuum to draw the line between gods and mere saints is as arbitrary as the paleontological convention that separates the mammal-like reptiles from the reptile-like mammals.