Hank Green argues that he prefers the theology of the Warrior Cats children’s books over that of monotheism:

It’s a neat video, but I think he’s very wrong about many of the things he says. I have three objections.

If you’re not familiar with the series, Warrior Cats features ancestor worship. When cats die they join StarClan as spirits. They get glimpses of the future and can visit cats in their dreams, but otherwise are very limited in their influence on the world.

Green points out that StarClan is a good metaphor for what it’s like to be a real person. Our tools and institutions were passed down by our ancestors and still serve us. Their impact on our life is real and tangible, but limited. There are also malevolent ancestor-spirits, who stand for the prejudices and sins of the past.

He says that monotheism, on the other hand, is a bad metaphor. What does God stand for? It’s not a good reflection of reality. According to him, early societies worshiped ancestors because they were more clear-eyes about how societies actually function, how the dead shape the living, and how the past persists. However, once societies grow past a certain size — with millions of strangers cooperating, following laws, paying taxes, and not cheating each other — you need an all-powerful God who sees everything and enforces moral rules, and this is how you get monotheism.

Since monotheism isn’t a good metaphor for life, and because it does a terrible job of being self-consistent (problem of evil etc.), StarClan wins between the two theologies. It is a better reflection of reality and lacks the logical holes of monotheism.

Objection the first:

The biggest thing I take umbrage with is the ahistorical arc he draws:

Ancestor theology governing an empire. Like you can’t really imagine it. It’s like not there. And so like it makes sense as we moved to different forms of society, we would lose certain theologies. And the question for me is what’s the next one? What’s the next tool that we use? What’s the better tool for dealing with like the psychological horror of reality? And then on top of that, how do we have a tool that also doesn’t cause society to crumble? Clearly, monotheism had something to do with their being able to be these large scale societies. So, if we remove it, does that mean that we can no longer have them?

Really? So many empires had ancestor worshop! The Romans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Incans, etc. If anything, the monotheistic Empires he is thinking of (British? Spanish?) are weird outliers in this regard.

Objection the second:

What’s even stranger is he praises the aspect of StarClan where ancestor-spirits depend on the memory of the living to persist, and specifically names this “Coco rules,” before saying that:

[Warrior cats] remember them by telling stories and they honor their ancestors and the living keep the dead alive. And this reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead is something that ancestor theologies around the world actually share. It’s and it’s something that monotheism largely lacks. In monotheism, God doesn’t like need you to remember him. And the dead people don’t need you to remember them.

Does he … think that Coco came up with Día de los Muertos? It’s a part of Latin American Catholicism! It’s literally monotheistic! And many monotheistic systems also have traditions that are understood to directly help the dead: Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism with purgatory doctrine, Judaism with Kaddish, Yizkor, and Yahrzeit; and Islam with Sadaqah Jariyah.

Objection the third:

My final issue is with the overall framing of the video. He’s approaching this comparison from a very atheistic perspective, and a literary one, where religion has to be “honest” — it has to be an accurate and useful metaphor, a self-consistent poetic framework for existence. He talks about it like it’s a magic system, and the harder the better.

I’m not religious myself, but I was, and that’s not what religion is. It’s not a poetic metaphor; it’s not a magic system. It’s not “directionally correct.” That these totalizing monotheistic systems insisting on an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God have been so successful despite their logical inconsistencies ought to be evidence that they speak to something beyond reason, to a different part of the human soul. Faith, even in the absurd — especially in the absurd — is much more honest than a good metaphor. Poetry is for the godless.