Could anyone pls correct my essay!

Could anyone please correct my history Essay. on spelling and perhaps give some comments and advise...

FS

How (and why) did Polytheism develop into Monotheism?

We are all familiar with religion. We all know Christianity, the Islam, Buddhism and Judaism.
But as we also know, the Greek believed in something totally different. Maybe you can see the difference yourself. As we know Christians believe in God, the Islam in Allah, Buddhists have Buddha as their maser and the Jews believe in their God (it is quite familiar though to the Christians). This belief in just one God, we call monotheism. This is the most recent form of religion. On the other hand, an older form of religion: the religion of the Greek. Greek people believed in more than one God. They had a God for every important side of their life. Aphrodite, Goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Zeus, supreme god of the Olympians and his wife Hera, the Goddess of marriage. A religion based on more then one God is called polytheism. But what is the cause of the fact that polytheism evolved into monotheism? This is what I’m going to explain to you in the next paragraphs.

Around 600 B.C.E. there lived a Persian man called Zoroaster. Zoroaster wanted to purify the traditional religion of the Persian tribes. They believed in polytheism, magic and also animal sacrifice, although they worshiped more in an ethical way than a ritualistic way. This means that the Persians more thought in a philosophical way than in a way of rituals. Ethics are a more philocophical way which covers the analysis of concepts such as right and wrong, good and evil and responsibility. This you can find quite simular to Buddhism because it has a lot to do whith dualism as well. Dualism is the view in which you think that two very different concepts exist coming from the Latin word dualis which means "two" as an ajactive. These two concepts are often opposites of each other such as good and evil, light and dark, male and female. You can see that even during that period, there were already small similarities between polytheism and monotheism.

When Zoroaster continued developing this religion of himself, he taught that there was one supreme god which he called Ahura-Mazda. He was the god which you can compare to the Christian God. He was wise, associated with light, truth and justice. You couldn’t find any hatred or evril in him. Ahura-Mazda was there for every tribe, his light shone everywhere, every tribe got covered with his light. Since we know that Zoroaster also believed in a religion with dualism and because there was nothing wrong to be seen in Ahura-Mazda, there had to be an opposite. Zoroaster called himAhriman and he was the great force of darkness and evil. Eventually, Ahura-Mazda seemed stronger than Ahriman, so we can compare them to the truth and a lie. "The truth always winns." This form of dualism we can’t find in monotheism, there are no more than one god, but there are simmilarities. Zoroastrianism told people to be truthful, loving and you had to help on another and take care of the poor. Also Zoroaster taught there was an after life, but still these religions didn’t copy "rules" from each other. Still the belief of the people in the near East was polytheistic, while this was way different to the Western civilizations…

In the western countries, monotheism was developing. The Hebrews were mostly associated with this, but there was a huge story around this. The Hebrews haven’t always been monotheïsts, although they did believe in one God, Yahweh so we might call them Yahwists. At first, it wasn’t such a problem to believe in more gods, there waseven written that Yahweh said: "have no other gods before me" while he seemed to know that there weer indeed other who got warshiped by some Hebrews. Later, Hebrewn kings kept on tolerating people who weren’t Yahwists living in Jerusalem, so by the beginning of the first millenium, people didn’t have to deny that there exist more then one god. The real trouble started around the time of the Levites, a tribe who were a religious elite within Hebrew society. They saw Yaweh as a higher god then any other god claimed to exist. The priests thought that Yahweh wasn’t part of nature, but a total outsider of this and that is why he was associated with intellectual power, at least away from the world he had created. They also believed that Yahweh was appointing humans to rule nature. You can compare this to Adam and Eve, the first humand "God" set on earth. At a sertain point, the Hebrews honored Yahweh this much that they started to write more rituals (and rules) such as rules against murder, being a false witness and having fugetives for example. The Hebrews reached a point in which it wasn’t accepted to kill a Hebrew believing in Yahweh, but you were allowed to kill someone who wasn’t a Hebrew, which sounds a little unfair to me. They started killing tribes which didn’t believe in Yahweh such as people in Canaän. They destroyed them, but didn’t feel regret. The Yahwists believed that they had been serving their own God.

After some years, a new group of people showed up, the Assyrians who served King Sargon II and they went to Jerusalem where they deported nearly 28 000 Hebrews to the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians believed in their god Assur and wanted to live in Jerussalem, but their threat was that the Hebrews wanted exclusively monotheism so they taught they had to wipe out the one thing that kept them from the rest of the regions which was the religion of Yahweh. Those two groups of people couldn’t agree, the Yahwists still taught that there shouldn’t be a case in which you believed in an other god then Yahweh.

After this you might have seen that there is this great difference between the Western religions and the things people believe in, in the Near East. Polytheism developed in the Near East, but when this was going to happen in the Western countries, it immediately got taken over by monotheism, apparently by the Hebrews. Nowadays here in Europe you can’t see so many polytheistic religions. For as far as I have seen, there are non. The Hebrews left a great part in history, an influentional part. Although the Hebrews claimed that Yahweh was a jealous god who would not permit his followers to worship any other God. Both of the ideas, polytheism and monotheism, played a great role before the first millenium. Both were very happening, but only monotheism lasted in most of the cases. Most of these effects now concern the Jewss and the Arabs (Islamictic), who now have the relationship whicht the Yahwists and the Assyrians had. They are still fighting over Jerussalem…