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The Future of Paganism and Christianity / Lost Gods

anon_voko said in #3498 2d ago: received

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EQAseSM7XY

I want to try a new book club. We begin with this documentary featuring Tom Rowsell that pairs nicely with our recent "true religion of the coming civilization" thread: https://sofiechan.com/p/3110

That thread asked: what does Christianity have to teach us, even if we do not believe in Christ?

So I open this thread with a similar question. What does paganism have to teach us? The documentary focuses on Germanic paganism, which we discuss less often than the Greek pagan world.

Explicitly identifying as any kind of pagan, celebrating solstice festivals and whatnot, is most likely a dead end. But is there something in the aesthetics, narratives, and practices of paganism that we can usefully draw from?

referenced by: >>3524

I want to try a new received

anon_pygw said in #3504 2d ago: received

This is a cool provocation. I actually like festivals and stuff, but I find the whole concept of reconstructive heathenry to be stupid. Really the answer to post-Christian moral insanity is to revert to pre-philosophic superstition? I'll admit though there is something closer between my own philosophical worldview and the pre-abrahamic shinto-style of "faith". Something like "the gods are to be honored, but not taken seriously".

The abrahamic traditions, including our modern progressive universalism, have this overwhelming ponderous demand for total submission to their infinite codes of moralistic-legalistic bullshit that amount to "you must give up your soul, your integrity, and all earthly hopes and physical existence (we're going to wipe out your whole civilization and you're going to thank us for it) in exchange for the abstract contentless fiat of what we call God or Progress or Justice". No thanks I'd rather take my mortal doom straight up.

The hardass max-autism skeptical philosophy that admits no superstition appeals to me. Truth and wisdom are masters I feel the pull of. Likewise the project of the ubermensch. There is something worth living and dying for. There is a deep rhyming with the Way of nature there, at least. And where I must take a leap of faith to connect the higher truths to practical action, the gods are there to give me courage. I don't mind all the little spirits and gods that live in the mysterious places at the edge of the map and don't ask much but to be honored, and don't claim to be much more than our own overactive imaginations. I think there is a formal duality between skeptical philosophy and animism. One deals in the serious rational realities, the other in the rationally inaccessible mysteries. They complement and don't threaten each other, like different ways of seeing the same thing, "dual" in mathematical terms.

But there's something I can't take seriously about crossing the streams. The Christians obviously make these enormous claims about reality against natural reason on the basis of faith. The modern progressives do the same on even flimsier grounds. The occultists take the mysteries far too seriously if they had their own rational reality, and end up huffing their own farts. And the heathens just seem to be larping or missing the point, having psyopped themselves into something that doesn't make sense on the basis of bad arguments they have since forgotten.

But I'll watch this documentary and see how Rowsell handles these matters.

referenced by: >>3509 >>3524

This is a cool provo received

anon_tivi said in #3509 21h ago: received

>>3504
>pre-philosophic superstition
That's a very Whiggish view of human ideas. It's also wrong (to an extent) since there were plenty of pre-Christian pagan philosophers. Hellenist polytheists invented philosophy as a concept, although many of the ancient Greek influential philosophers did have a heterodox view of their native faith, granted.

Rowsell himself has cited Platonist philosophers in his discussions of heathenry and I think he offers some of the most complete theological and philosophical justifications for his faith out there.

referenced by: >>3511

That's a very Whiggi received

anon_pygw said in #3511 16h ago: received

>>3509
By “pre-philosophic superstition” i obviously did not mean platonic philosophy. I mean the other parts of christianity, like God being a flesh and blood man, rising from the dead, miracles, legalistic morality that grounds itself in tribal prophecies, and placing supernatural authority in the riddles of jesus. As for whiggishness, i’m no whig but that’s also not an argument.

By “pre-philosophic received

anon_sihi said in #3524 1h ago: received

>>3498
The 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.

The tenor of this OP received

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