The genius of monotheism is its ability to focus on both the necessary cultural framework for a society and an ethical philosophy for that society. That isn't to say that other belief systems don't have both those aspects as well, but they rarely emphasize both to the same degree as monotheism does.
I don't quite get the link between one God and it's efficacy in the building of cultural and ethical edifices for a society. Would you care to elaborate? What having the one all powerful God out there may facilitate is a certain militancy about cultural and ethical edifices perhaps, as opposed to it being particularly more facile as to their creation. Just musing here. I am not in my comfort zone on this one.
Without multiple gods, you need something other than one or more of them is bad to explain the presence of evil, and that explanation inherently leads to the incorporation of ethics into the belief system. In theory, one could start with an ethical system as in Confucianism and incorporate mythic elements into it, but that mixture has never worked all that well as humans are more willing to adapt their ethics than their myths.
But what if a monotheism loses its myth? We're seeing the result of that now with Christianity in the materialistic West. In Europe, large segments of the populace no longer subscribe to the myth in any form, literal or figurative. Conversely, here in America, in an effort to defend that same faith, large segments of the populace cling to the idea of the myth as literal truth despite the evidence of science to the contrary.
So compared to other belief systems, monotheism requires both an origin myth and an ethical system to function. A stable society needs a common mythos and a common ethos. So you get a virtuous cycle in which monotheism helps create a stable society and that society in turn supports the monotheism.
The crisis that Christianity faces now is how to refashion its mythos to be compatible with what modern science has revealed of the universe. I've found an approach, Christian Universalism, that works for me. In the long run, I fail to see how the Fundamentalist approach of worshiping the Bible will work.
