Since the constituent database systems remain autonomous, a federated database system is a contrastable alternative to the (sometimes daunting) task of merging several disparate databases.

The difficulty with this is that Althusser (and Engels) are convincingly describing a change in problematic, perhaps even a paradigm shift, but it is not clear that what went on before is contrastable as ideology, as non-science.

However, bitheistic and ditheistic principles are not always so easily contrastable, for instance in a system where one god is the representative of summer and drought and the other of winter and rain/fertility (cf. the mythology of Persephone).