Have you really become so hateful against religion that simply the mention of god in a joke triggers you? I understand that you have become absolutely sick of the American brand of evangelical Christianity but remember religious people are approximately 84% of the entire world population. You can't lump them all together. The immigrants that evangelical christians want to stop are also majority religious. By hating religious people I think you are hating a larger share of the population than the religious people you hate for hating people.
No. I know lots of people who worship the Rainbow Serpent and none of them are like that. In fact, tolerance and open mindedness are important traditional values in My corner of Australia.
It seems like you don't hate religion, you just hate Abrahamism. And you've bought into the cultural erasure of every religion that isn't Abrahamic.
People have trauma. They're going to hate the thing that traumatized them.
I feel bad for the immigrants who were brainwashed into their colonizer's religion. I don't hold it against them. They're also not super pushy about coming here and making me believe, so that helps.
Religion sucks. Religious people are people and people can be ok. But their choices suck.
To be fair I'm religious, and I also hate it when people use "god" as a proper noun. It's exclusionary. There are tons of gods, and the history of monotheist persecution of paganism means that you can't have a god named god in good faith anymore. It's like the swastika, it's been ruined. Call your dog something else. Like Yahweh, or Elohim, or Quetzalcoatl, or Vishnu.
Monotheism is their actual religious belief though. If one says "I believe there is only one god and we call him god" that's their religious belief. If we are all to be tolerant of each other's religious beliefs a simple statement of one's belief shouldn't be offensive. You should then be able to reply with your own beliefs and both can be like "cool" and move on.
Nah. Monotheists are assholes. Rome genocided nearly all the European religions in service of their monotheism. We don't have any druids anymore, because of monotheism. Hellenism died out and had to be revived from scratch, with so many traditions lost forever, because of monotheism. We only have two sources on Norse mythology, because of monotheism. And then the monotheists started colonising the other continents!!
Abrahamism isn't even originally monotheist. It used to be henotheist, which is when you worship one god, but believe in everyone else's gods. The Bible is still henotheist. When Moses uses Elohim's power to turn a staff into a snake, the Egyptian priests pray to the Egyptian gods and do the same thing! Any Christian who believes in only one god is a heretic who denies the Bible.
Before Rome, the norm was to worship your own culture's gods, and to passively believe in other gods. Odin is real, he just lives all the way up north, so we don't have anything to do with him. Hopefully the Tuatha Dé Danaan can protect us from those Vikings with their blessings from Odin! That's the original polytheism. That's what we lost. Before Rome, denying other cultures' gods was a thing weird cults did for no reason. Like the Zoroastrians. Normal people didn't pull that nonsense!
It's the paradox of tolerance. You can't be tolerant of intolerance, or the pricks will win and change the world. Which they did! But I'm fighting back by believing in every god, of every religion. And I don't respect any monotheist.
If you wanna take up thousand year old history I can as well.
The pagan Roman Empire brutally suppressed Christians for 250 years before they converted.
The pagan vikings regularly went to Christian Europe to rape and abduct women, pillage villages and burn down monastries.
The pagan mongols conquered and raped half the world leading to 30-60 million deaths, consequences include the collapse of the Islamic golden age that they haven't been able to recover from even to this day.
The shinto-buddhist japanese crucified and killed most of their native japanese Christians in the 1600s.
That's just some I remember on top of my head. However two wrongs don't make one right. In today's world we should tolerate each other no matter pagan, monotheist or atheist. That's at least my belief. By the way. I suggest you look up the Christian concept of territorial spirits. I find it's a good explanation to explain the parts of the Bible that seem to be henotheistic.
Christians haven't exactly been saints either. Let's not forget the thirty year war, the European wars of religion, or the crusades just to name a few.
I agree that Rome sucks. In fact, I remember saying earlier that Rome sucked! One of the big reasons that Rome sucked is because they had this technique for colonisation, called syncretism.
Normally when you conquer a people, they retain their own culture and religion. And this sets them apart from you, so they're more likely to rebel. But the Romans liked to pressure conquered peoples to convert over to Roman culture. If the oppressed native people identify as Romans, they won't want to rebel against Rome. And they used syncretism to convert people of other pagan religions to Romanism.
Syncretism is the idea that different cultural myths are just interpretations of some deeper, shared truth. So this is like the idea that Ares and Mars are the same guy, just in two different languages. The Romans adopt all of the Ares lore into Mars and tell the Greeks that they can continue to worship Ares, and still be cultural and religious Romans. Now the Greeks don't want to fight Rome, because they're the same people.
But syncretism doesn't work on heno/monotheists, like the Christians. So the Romans are saying "Can't you just make your yearly tax offering to Jupiter? It would be really convenient for us if your kids saw you following the laws that say to worship our gods." And the Christians are replying with "No, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Jupiter is a fake god, probably secretly a demon, and Yahweh is gonna burn you in hell." So everyone here sucks and is just awful to each other.
And when you put the might and manipulation of Rome together with the intolerance and self-righteousness of Christianity... you get a colonial force strong enough to destroy most of the religions of the world forever.
Those other guys you mentioned are shitheads too, but it wasn't because of their religion, and they didn't use their religion as a tool for evil (as far as I know). The Romans used religion for evil, and the monotheist Christians were evil because of their religion. Put those two forces together and you get the worst imperial culture in history.
In the case of my own country Sweden and the Vikings I think it's clear that Norse paganism not only allowed the plundering and rape in foreign nations, it even encouraged it with the concept of Valhalla and the mortality system it had which saw war and dying in war as a positive thing. Now I absolutely know Christians have committed horrible acts in other cases. But in this specific case Christianity was a huge force for good because after christening the plundering stopped, the holding of slaves stopped, the public sacrifice of human beings stopped and society became better and more moral in several ways.
But that's far away from my point. My point is that monotheism isn't always bad and paganism isn't always good. It's more nuanced than that.
I find it wondrous how oblivious you’re being to the fact that your words make you seem just as bad as the kind of extremism you’re describing.
Zeal needs no religion to breed extremist views, just the hubris of a self-righteous person who thinks they know enough to judge all. Then religion becomes a tool to justify whatever opinion they’re trying to impose and whatever acts they choose to commit. Violence included.
So I don’t think being a militant atheist gives you superpowers. Nearly been there, almost done that. Stopped and did a U turn at some point. Sought answers. Then found my peace and own dogma. I encourage you to try and do the same.
Scientific version of what I’m trying to say if you’re interested (contributions welcome if you’re a neuroscientist or have access to an LLM with access to journals).
Hello, I'm religious. I'm also trans, nonbinary, autistic, otherkin, gay, anarcho-communist, vegan, and all-around woke. This is possible due to paganism.
33 Comments
tanisnikana@lemmy.world · 33 pts · 21d
🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢
boobookittyfrick@lemmy.zip · 12 pts · 21d
jballs@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 20d
Ah shit that reminds me, is Mitch McConnell still alive?
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 21d
I love the "extremely grand articulation" jokes. It's like a subgenre of absurdist humour that just hits the spot.
voodooattack@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 21d
Especially when it makes you shiver all the way up and down. 🐢
Salvo@aussie.zone · 1 pts · 21d
<Insert Terry #Pratchet Small Gods reference>.
#discworld
mrmisses@lemmy.world · -8 pts · 21d
I know it's trying to be cute but I just can't with religious people anymore. They've got to go
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz · 27 pts · 21d
Have you really become so hateful against religion that simply the mention of god in a joke triggers you? I understand that you have become absolutely sick of the American brand of evangelical Christianity but remember religious people are approximately 84% of the entire world population. You can't lump them all together. The immigrants that evangelical christians want to stop are also majority religious. By hating religious people I think you are hating a larger share of the population than the religious people you hate for hating people.
Mac@mander.xyz · 9 pts · 21d
Yes, next question
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 4 pts · 21d
Do you also hate people who believe in Indigenous religions like the Rainbow Serpent or the Tuatha Dé Danaan?
Mac@mander.xyz · 2 pts · 21d
Are they hateful bigots hellbent on ruining the lives of anyone they deem lesser-than, in the name of their god?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 3 pts · 21d
No. I know lots of people who worship the Rainbow Serpent and none of them are like that. In fact, tolerance and open mindedness are important traditional values in My corner of Australia.
It seems like you don't hate religion, you just hate Abrahamism. And you've bought into the cultural erasure of every religion that isn't Abrahamic.
Mac@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 20d
Okay, then no. It's that simple.
?
TIL i can't comment on the religion local to my area?
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 1 pts · 20d
You can comment on the local religion. But you shouldn't make the mistake of equating that one religion with all religion.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 21d
People have trauma. They're going to hate the thing that traumatized them.
I feel bad for the immigrants who were brainwashed into their colonizer's religion. I don't hold it against them. They're also not super pushy about coming here and making me believe, so that helps.
Religion sucks. Religious people are people and people can be ok. But their choices suck.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · -4 pts · 21d
To be fair I'm religious, and I also hate it when people use "god" as a proper noun. It's exclusionary. There are tons of gods, and the history of monotheist persecution of paganism means that you can't have a god named god in good faith anymore. It's like the swastika, it's been ruined. Call your dog something else. Like Yahweh, or Elohim, or Quetzalcoatl, or Vishnu.
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 21d
Monotheism is their actual religious belief though. If one says "I believe there is only one god and we call him god" that's their religious belief. If we are all to be tolerant of each other's religious beliefs a simple statement of one's belief shouldn't be offensive. You should then be able to reply with your own beliefs and both can be like "cool" and move on.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 0 pts · 21d
Nah. Monotheists are assholes. Rome genocided nearly all the European religions in service of their monotheism. We don't have any druids anymore, because of monotheism. Hellenism died out and had to be revived from scratch, with so many traditions lost forever, because of monotheism. We only have two sources on Norse mythology, because of monotheism. And then the monotheists started colonising the other continents!!
Abrahamism isn't even originally monotheist. It used to be henotheist, which is when you worship one god, but believe in everyone else's gods. The Bible is still henotheist. When Moses uses Elohim's power to turn a staff into a snake, the Egyptian priests pray to the Egyptian gods and do the same thing! Any Christian who believes in only one god is a heretic who denies the Bible.
Before Rome, the norm was to worship your own culture's gods, and to passively believe in other gods. Odin is real, he just lives all the way up north, so we don't have anything to do with him. Hopefully the Tuatha Dé Danaan can protect us from those Vikings with their blessings from Odin! That's the original polytheism. That's what we lost. Before Rome, denying other cultures' gods was a thing weird cults did for no reason. Like the Zoroastrians. Normal people didn't pull that nonsense!
It's the paradox of tolerance. You can't be tolerant of intolerance, or the pricks will win and change the world. Which they did! But I'm fighting back by believing in every god, of every religion. And I don't respect any monotheist.
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz · 4 pts · 21d
If you wanna take up thousand year old history I can as well.
The pagan Roman Empire brutally suppressed Christians for 250 years before they converted.
The pagan vikings regularly went to Christian Europe to rape and abduct women, pillage villages and burn down monastries.
The pagan mongols conquered and raped half the world leading to 30-60 million deaths, consequences include the collapse of the Islamic golden age that they haven't been able to recover from even to this day.
The shinto-buddhist japanese crucified and killed most of their native japanese Christians in the 1600s.
That's just some I remember on top of my head. However two wrongs don't make one right. In today's world we should tolerate each other no matter pagan, monotheist or atheist. That's at least my belief. By the way. I suggest you look up the Christian concept of territorial spirits. I find it's a good explanation to explain the parts of the Bible that seem to be henotheistic.
VonReposti@feddit.dk · 0 pts · 21d
Christians haven't exactly been saints either. Let's not forget the thirty year war, the European wars of religion, or the crusades just to name a few.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · 0 pts · 21d
I agree that Rome sucks. In fact, I remember saying earlier that Rome sucked! One of the big reasons that Rome sucked is because they had this technique for colonisation, called syncretism.
Normally when you conquer a people, they retain their own culture and religion. And this sets them apart from you, so they're more likely to rebel. But the Romans liked to pressure conquered peoples to convert over to Roman culture. If the oppressed native people identify as Romans, they won't want to rebel against Rome. And they used syncretism to convert people of other pagan religions to Romanism.
Syncretism is the idea that different cultural myths are just interpretations of some deeper, shared truth. So this is like the idea that Ares and Mars are the same guy, just in two different languages. The Romans adopt all of the Ares lore into Mars and tell the Greeks that they can continue to worship Ares, and still be cultural and religious Romans. Now the Greeks don't want to fight Rome, because they're the same people.
But syncretism doesn't work on heno/monotheists, like the Christians. So the Romans are saying "Can't you just make your yearly tax offering to Jupiter? It would be really convenient for us if your kids saw you following the laws that say to worship our gods." And the Christians are replying with "No, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Jupiter is a fake god, probably secretly a demon, and Yahweh is gonna burn you in hell." So everyone here sucks and is just awful to each other.
And when you put the might and manipulation of Rome together with the intolerance and self-righteousness of Christianity... you get a colonial force strong enough to destroy most of the religions of the world forever.
Those other guys you mentioned are shitheads too, but it wasn't because of their religion, and they didn't use their religion as a tool for evil (as far as I know). The Romans used religion for evil, and the monotheist Christians were evil because of their religion. Put those two forces together and you get the worst imperial culture in history.
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz · 2 pts · 21d
In the case of my own country Sweden and the Vikings I think it's clear that Norse paganism not only allowed the plundering and rape in foreign nations, it even encouraged it with the concept of Valhalla and the mortality system it had which saw war and dying in war as a positive thing. Now I absolutely know Christians have committed horrible acts in other cases. But in this specific case Christianity was a huge force for good because after christening the plundering stopped, the holding of slaves stopped, the public sacrifice of human beings stopped and society became better and more moral in several ways.
But that's far away from my point. My point is that monotheism isn't always bad and paganism isn't always good. It's more nuanced than that.
jaybone@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 21d
What makes you think this person is religious? That could easily be a punchline from a non religious person. Also check the username.
chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 5 pts · 21d
Isn't singing creation part of LOTR lore?
pachrist@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 21d
Yeah, the deities of the world sing together, not just creating the world, but all of history as well, then they go and live it out what they sang.
voodooattack@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 21d
I find it wondrous how oblivious you’re being to the fact that your words make you seem just as bad as the kind of extremism you’re describing.
Zeal needs no religion to breed extremist views, just the hubris of a self-righteous person who thinks they know enough to judge all. Then religion becomes a tool to justify whatever opinion they’re trying to impose and whatever acts they choose to commit. Violence included.
So I don’t think being a militant atheist gives you superpowers. Nearly been there, almost done that. Stopped and did a U turn at some point. Sought answers. Then found my peace and own dogma. I encourage you to try and do the same.
Scientific version of what I’m trying to say if you’re interested (contributions welcome if you’re a neuroscientist or have access to an LLM with access to journals).
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · -2 pts · 21d
Hello, I'm religious. I'm also trans, nonbinary, autistic, otherkin, gay, anarcho-communist, vegan, and all-around woke. This is possible due to paganism.