"Not spirits, exactly. I'm a monotheist."

"Sort of. 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me,' is the First Commandment."

"...This is not the kind of religion with which I am familiar."

shrug. "Different universes."

"Yeah, I'm getting that. So instead of spirits you have one god. Is it nice? Spirits are mostly kind of orthogonal to human morality but some of them are pretty nice."

"It's pretty nice! They seem to have roughly human-compatible morality, the rest of the Commandments are things like don't steal, don't kill, respect your parents, stuff like that."

"Okay. But if there's only one why does it even need to... you know, bother... telling people not to 'have' any others?"

"There was this incident where a bunch of people got pissed off that they weren't being rescued from slavery conveniently enough and decided to pretend a statue of a golden calf was God instead, it was weird."

"...If rescuing people from slavery is even in this god's repertoire why wasn't it doing so conveniently? And how could a golden calf possibly help?"

"He rescued them from slavery by doing impressive things at the people who were enslaving them, and then led them across a desert to somewhere they didn't have a history of being enslaved. The people were upset about having to cross a desert. I don't know how a golden calf was supposed to help, aside from being a demonstration that they were upset."

"Okay, but why did the golden calf annoy the god, is it allergic to people doing unhelpful things in protest...?"

"I think it was an ego thing?"

"You have a god with an ego thing. That sounds, uh, dangerous."

"I...think he got over it? It hasn't caused a problem in several millenia, anyway."

"Okay. Is he a god of anything or does he have to be kind of all purpose?"

"He's pretty all purpose. Some people will refer to him as a god of Mercy or Love when extolling his benevolence."

"Benevolent all-purpose god who has gotten over his ego thing, I can see why that would appeal."

"There's actually three different major religions that prefer to worship him in different ways, I'm a member of the oldest."

"That I'm more familiar with, there's all different systems of being into this or that spirit."

"That makes sense. Different people have different opinions and spiritual needs and whatnot."

"Yeah. I'm not very spiritual, especially for an Avatar - I'd think it would be more common for a person who is technically also a spirit to consider the spirits more peers than objects of particular admiration, and yet. I mean, I have to be careful, they don't necessarily have ego problems but they have interests and ways of handling those interests that aren't always friendly or reasonable, so treating them with respect and care is important, but I don't go around in a Painted Lady hat or anything."

"That sounds...a lot like people, in some ways."

"Oh?"

"Having interests that aren't always reasonable, but you have to take the time to address them individually and respectfully. Of course, with people the consequences of mishandling things is just that you come across as an asshole. Different stakes."