The common point of view of atheism towards religions can be shown very easily in memes.
Like this one or one of its many variations:
or this video a very respected friend of mine loved to post on facebook:
I think this is a good point of view to get people thinking outside the box of their common frame of reference. But a friend of mine who is Christian and myself as a Bahá'í don't see this as very convincing. Because if you adhere to a certain cosmology, you have to place the origin of all religion and non-religion in there. However many religions and non-religions there are, it all must fit inside one reality. Why do we get all fussed up about religion? Because they all claim a unique truth, and we grow up to defend that truth, ignoring the teachings of love for all human beings that our teachings provide too. I have a huge respect for the atheist who is atheist because he believes religion causes war. I don't believe so much in his religion if he finds that all must convert to atheism to gain the salvation of non-religion.
But I digress. One of the big issues brought up is that there are so many kinds of religions, some monotheistic, some polytheistic, and then there is the concept of pantheism. The Bahá'í faith tries to teach mankind that this is all superficial, and all religions, including the religious appearances of atheism and science, are there to provide a part of the truth and should be considered for what they are. All religions came at their time and place because of the necessities of that time and place. A new era has new challenges and as such needs new teachings to successfully deal with the challenges we face. The problem we face now is that we are divided on many issues, and the Bahá'í teachings show us that the division is not in the facts, but in our perspective of the facts. By consultation, that is communication based on accepting each contribution as a part of the path to the truth, instead of defending the absolute truth of your point of view against the heresy of others, we can bridge the seemingly unsolvable differences we have and really be one world community.
So what is the answer to this question about the many gods in all the different religions? Is there polytheism in monotheistic religions? Is there monotheism in polytheistic religions?
The answer is yes.
Let's start with the grandfather of Abrahamic monotheism, Judaism. The words used in the Bible are el which means force, power, spirit or God, elohim which is its plural, and el elohim, the God of Gods, or the force of forces. This model comes back in basically all religions. They are all usually translated as God, which is correct but hides the wisdom hidden in the words.
el has an arabic equivalent in ilah and el elohim in Alláh, a form in Arabic using a definite article expressing the absoluteness expressed with the idiomatic expression in Hebrew.
This same distinction should be very familiar to those who know about the Hindu pantheon. Hinduism knows the Brahman, which indicates the concept of the all-compassing God, the earlier mentioned el elohim and Alláh, and the common Hindu understanding is that all Hindu gods are manifestations of the Brahman.
In any religion we can make this mapping to the gods we know in atheism/science as forces of nature, the elohim part of the story, and the all-compassing God, the origin behind everything, something science is still looking for as seen in movies like the theory of everything.
As such we can see that monotheism, polytheism, pantheism and atheism all describe various perspectives on the same world. Monotheism indicates the unified nature and origin of everything, polytheism was useful in the early stages of human development to understand forces of nature pre-physics, pantheism is the understanding that everything is connected and that what we do to God is in the end what we do for ourselves, and atheism is the understanding that we shouldn't see the forces of nature as something intangible, but we should sincerely study them and get to know them better.
As such atheism is a really important and admirable religion.