and @Mister_Geocon was telling me not even the people who practiced it in roman times really thought the gods were real, just archetypes of masculinity or femininity or courage and honor

the reason you must be attracted to "paganism" is because you like the aesthetic, you like the history and culture of it

thats fine, but really it shouldint be a reason to be "torn between paganism and Christianity" i dont know how you can be a pagan in the modern day. most neo pagans today are basically atheists but worship their race and return to paganism as a proxy to their race. even varg, the turbo sped of paganism,afaik, admitted that he didint believe in thor or any of the other gods

and the rest of the pagans are like wiccans and other gay shit which is just built on progressivism and opposition to evil mean patriarchal Christianity

and thats really the thing about modern day paganism is that its built upon opposition to Christianity

i dont see why there is a reason to follow a religion or spirituality unless you literally believe it is true

i dont want to hear about archetypes or whatever

the truth is the god of christianity is real, Jesus died and ressurected, and someday there will be judgement.

if you really like pagan stories and aesthetics and learning about European culture that's perfectly fine

but christianity needs to be first

There was a wealth of pagan thinker who wrote about their views. it's just that neoplatonism etc. got burried under christianities eventual ascendancy. It's not that there are no sources, just that it died off as a living tradition within christian countries, whereas hinduism for example kept it
People have put a lot of work into reconstructing paganism using whatever sources are available, however now with the knowledge of common roots in an original Indoeuropean faith.
Varg isn't even a relevant figure. It makes more sense to look at the work of Survive the Jive than that mentally ill person
Either way there are good reasons to reject the idea of a prime mover therefore god and whatnot, nevermind that Yahweh is polytheistic in origin. Not as a volcano demon but as a storm god with another god called Asherah as a wife. He also got conflated with a separate god EL by his jewish adherents. For a while Yahweh basically was worshipped in a monolatric fashion, traces of which can still be found in the bible (Worship no other gods besides me rather than there is no god but god in the ten commandments for example)

Good pagans end up becoming Christian. The vast majority converted because they were shown how whatever was good in their own faith existed in a fuller state within Christianity. Just look at St. Boniface, the conversion of the Rus, Serbs, etc.

This is also the point of the Three Magi

They converted mostly out of political reasons

Just looking at Hungary for example

The king wanted to convert

And this resulted in a huge revolt

Arians dropped Arianism for diplomatic reason

That's certainly a part of it

It's not that ppl were just convinced. It was a mixture of persuasion and other means

Religious Realpolitik so to speak

But to explain it by purely materialist means falls short, it seems

Sure. There's no reason for say Constantine to convert to christianity in particular is an example

He had other options and christians arguably weren't in a majority at that point

And excludes the facts that even among the earliest church fathers the concept of the *Spermatakos Logos* existed. The idea that pagans held "seeds of the Word" that could bloom into fullness in the Church was baked into Christianity.

Idk about that. Sure religions share themes about morality but the pagan view of virtue and the divine is different to the one in monotheism
Gods are seen as flawed and subordinate to things like fate and in Hinduism basically everything is subordinate to Dharma

There certainly were monotheistic and monolatric analogues though

The cult of Sol Invictus, Mithraism and the way Jupiter/Zeus was elevated above other gods. Zeus was rarely a patron deity of cities but rather somethign to swear an oth on

There's an older example in Egypt with a monotheistic sun cult

Yes, the Aten

Interestingly enough, I learned that the disc and ray of light used to symbolize the Holy Spirit on Orthodox iconography is based off of the disc Atenaten used to symbolize the Aten.

Didn't know that, very interesting

Again, this reflects the fact that the early Church recognized that even unenlightened pagans could grasp glimpses of Christian Truth.

Yeah, I was surprised too, when I heard it

It's very fascinating

Afaik it might've inspired the jews in Egypt

Regardless there's also an interesting thing about Zeus and the like because tracing back the name to the original Indo-European head deity you get Dyeus Phter which just means sky father or god father

Yeah

There's also a very interesting parallel between the Chinese *Tao* and the Greek *Logos*

And, as you mentioned yourself, there was this idea that even pagan gods were "flawed beings...governed by fate."

Fate implies an overall structure and Telos to the Cosmos. Even if not personified as God, it does point the way to Him.