Message from @Mr. Nessel
Discord ID: 673946147408183319
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
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.
Now this is not to make the Perennialist/New Age claim that somehow all religions are the same and "believe the same things" or some nonsense. A Norse pagans goal in life is very different from a Christians, or a Hindu's or even an Egyptian pagan.
The Christian belief is just that mankind cannot help but notice God and recognize Him when they sincerely seek Truth.
I don't view it as a natural result, though I'll agree there's a tendency or at least was within religions to sometimes develop into monotheism
I don't like inevitabilisms like the idea that dialectics will inevitably usher in communism or whatever
I'm certainly biased because I'm not a christian though and don't share the same view of god
Well it's certainly not inevitable
It's not like some pagan religion will suddenly give up on their beliefs and a adopt Christianity out of nowhere, and certainly the reasons you listed above are part of it.
It's not an inevitable process like Marx claimed was true for Communism or Nick Land's Hyper-racist Gigaccelerationist Techo-dystopian Anarcho-Archist Capitalist Helladise.
It's just that the seeds are there- they just need to be nurtured by the Church to bloom into truly enlightened knowledge.