>>3498The tenor of this OP is great. Questions of the form 'what does X have to teach us?' where X is a religious tradition have been floating around here for quite a while, e.g.
>>1748 >>881 and
>>1181. Unfortunately this slopumentary that I had to watch on 5x speed to not self-immolate mostly amounts to a rehashing of the same shit we've heard thousands of times. There is almost zero discussion of what Germanic paganism is or what a Germanic pagan believes. I don't want to throw Rowsell under the bus because he seems like serious guy, but I also only want the real stuff. We must limit ourselves to actually reading Beowulf, Snorri Sturlson, and Saxo Grammaticus.
On a meta level, I think that answers to OP's question should be of the form shown in the first of those referenced posts:
> My general strategy amounts to using This Idea plus the unity of God with the transcendentals (h/t CCC) to OODA. In other words, pursuit of Beauty, Truth, or Goodness will result in Abrahamic rewards. If you try for a while and you're not getting any, you're either (a) misunderstanding whatever transcendental you're focused on or (b) caught up in some small turbulence in the order of things and 'this too shall pass'.We need this level of explicit synthesis and syllogistic reasoning-with-hammer. The lack of such seriousness in the slopumentary is what I think
>>3504 is frustrated by. I note that the inclusion of OODA in the quote as a conceptual tool probably should be thought of as an inclusion of Baconian Magic as X, so that post is really like {Christianity OR Baconian Magic} as X. In the limit, our project here is to OR in everything that has ever existed. For the sake of giving this thread some life, I will hazard a guess about 'Germanic paganism as X', but heavily caveated by the fact that I have not read the sagas.
It seems a core belief of Germanic pagans is the valuation of one's ethnos above others. This is done by encoding virtue through stories about people who are 'like us'. Christianity notoriously struggles with ethnic narrowing, despite it being set out in no uncertain terms in the commandments. This is especially apparent with actually existing Unitarianism, One World, One Love. The literary virtue approach of Germanic paganism perhaps offers a way to combat that inherent tendency of monism to be interpreted in an 'inclusive' way. Make it about the in-group.