We will discover in this chapter that not only is religious intolerance tightly intertwined with monotheism, but, before the emergence of monotheism, it simply didn't exist. Religious intolerance, as we will see, may indeed be the predictable by-product of monotheistic belief, which, by definition, posits that there is only one true explanation of the cosmos, and, consequently, any other interpretation is necessarily false and at odds with the sole source of spiritual meaning.3
