If you accept the existence of a deity, then how do you know there is only one?

[struggle4progress]

48. I mean an obligation that one should try to honor with extraordinary seriousness

Anyone, for example, believing in a deity, who created the universe and who will judge us all at the end of time, should regard the obligation to love one's neighbor as seriously as belief in that deity

But, of course, not everyone believes in such a deity. Those, who do not, still have (in my opinion) an option to choose to love one's neighbor, as an extraordinarily serious obligation. In this case, my view resembles the very striking language Regis Debray used to describe Che Guevara: "a mystic without a transcendent belief, a saint without a God." I do not mean that one must admire Guevara or approve of his aims or methods: I simply mean that we might make the decision, to really love our neighbors, with a fervor that resembles religious mysticism or a desire to serve some ultimate God, although absolutely no religious infra-structure remains to support the decision. I suspect that your objection to such a stance might remain unaltered --- namely, there is no logical foundation to the decision --- and I recognize that objection as "valid," so far as it goes, except that I do not think it actually goes very far

I do not think the objection goes far, because I agree with Kierkegaard's opening passage in Works of Love:

If it were true --- as conceited shrewdness, proud of not being deceived, thinks --- that one should believe nothing which he cannot see by means of his physical eyes, then first and foremost one ought to give up believing in love. If one did this, and did it out of fear of being deceived, would not one then be deceived?

Since I largely abandoned Christianity in my teen years, and then (largely as a result of reading Marxist biblical criticisms) returned to it in my thirties --- without any willingness to abandon the very social and materialist criticisms that had driven me away from the religion in the first place --- this "mystic without transcendent belief, saint without God" view has a certain allure to me, though I seem to find few other Americans who like the view