Do you think Pagans lost to Christianity because they didn't bother to write any holy scripture?

>>40781467 (OP)
I feel like neo-Pagans have to guess what their pre-Christian European ancestors actually believed in

What did pagans lost?
I find these /pol/ threads quite funny.

That's definitely part of it, but, in fairness, many pagan texts were destroyed by Christians, so they may have had Scriptures we don't know about. However, the biggest blows to paganism were Theodosius and Charlemagne.

>>40781467 (OP)
Paganism was the original globohomo. Pagans were multicultural who just adopted whatever gods of the people they conquered or got conquered by and added them into the pantheon.

>>40781467 (OP)
No. They had a fucking ENORMOUS war. Wiped out all of the writings.

>>40781467 (OP)
If they had any overarching philosophy or a culture they loved enough to commit to posterity they would have.

Why don’t people write books today? They live in a pagan world where the stories don’t make sense and the culture is degradation

>>40781467 (OP)
They lost because cucks are stronger than warriors, the final redpill by neo-pagans

>>40781467 (OP)
All non-conforming writings were destroyed by the Church, which is when apocrypha like Gnosticism were lost as well

>>40782414
its hard to believe european pagans didnt record their beliefs onto stone tablets like the egyptians, when they predated them by hundreds of years. i just dont buy it was 100% oral history or pictographic over the course of 3000 years and almost nothing survived. theyre hiding stuff

>>40781477
It's the same shit as "viking" music they intentionally ignore if not outright reject historical descriptions of pagan ritual and practice because it doesn't feel unga bunga enough to be prechristian in their minds.

>>40781467 (OP)
Rome was the empire. So the people took the religion of Rome. If the vikings would have been the empire, all people would have praised Odin.
It's a military issue.

>>40782874
You know you can break stone right? We've had the technology for thousands of years.

No, they simply lost to cock.

We have a number of surviving systematic theologies though?

>>40781467 (OP)
>they didn't bother to write any holy scripture
(You) just can't read

>>40782942
2meirl4meirl

>>40781467 (OP)

so there is a ton of pagan "scripture". from the greeks we have ovid and the homeric and orphic material. the egyptians have a lot of material in the pyramid texts and the coffin texts that has been recovered along with the hermetic corpus, the mesopotamians have been harder to get material from as they weren't as concerned about writing their "scripture" down. But we see most cultures influenced by the semetic alphabets (everything downstream of egyptian) has written religious literature.

there's another issue to with the intentional destruction of pagan literature by christians but still happens today with muslims who maintain a kind of incessant need to erase the pagan past in the countries they dominate.

but where we see pagan "scripture" or theology most prevalent is in the philosophic tradition, particularly in regards to metaphysics. greek philosophy is pagan theology. and the influence that greek philosophy has had on everything its touched has implanted pagan beliefs and religion into the abrahamic faiths whether they are aware of it or not.

the reason abrahamism, christianity in particular, stomped out pagan religion is because it was a mode of accessible religion that was in opposition to the complex, expensive, and esoteric nature of pagan religions. in order to practice pagan religion you needed animals to sacrifice, rituals to perform, a multiplicity of deities to supplicate where abrahamic religions required nothing more than a surrender and faith to the religion. this was way more accessible to the common folk than the complexities of pagan worship and religion and so Christianity was a relatively easy sell to the larger population and once the numbers were there the intellectual culture began to develop that was necessary to stomp out the pagan intellectuals.

>>40783053
They mostly just killed pagans if they didn't convert under threat of violence

>>40781467 (OP)
pagans "lost" to christianity because they valued direct experience which is subjective between person to person and while there are certainly consistent milemarkers, cant be consistently reproduced

christianity (and islam for that matter) spread by adopting a "one size fits all" approach. in fact biblical scholars talk about how we have evidence that christian scripture was spread by people who couldnt actually read - they just copied the scriptures letter by letter to "mass produce them".

In a way, Christianity and Islam spread with the larger global zeitgeist around industrialization and mass production. This is good in the sense that you can spread a religious practice fairly consistently across the world (and what % of the world is of abrahamic faith? a whole fucking lot), but the downside is that its not really open to the more subjective spiritual matters.

what's interesting is that things are kind of swinging the other way, even in christian podcasts i see them talking about communicating with the holy spirit, being more open to "divine revelation", and other practices that seem downright pagan/"new age".

unfortunately, a whole lot of pagans had to be brutally murdered to get to this point, so honestly fuck the christcucks and the dicks they rode in on

but it was the turning of the age, i do believe

>>40783078

yes but that happened after it was adopted by rome as the state religion. the conversion of the northern europeans was largely in part of the efforts of Ufilas. And once the goths sacked Rome they began to convert to Nicene Christianity as a way to win over the populations of christian peasants they were now grabbing power over. The persecution of pagans under Christianity was largely against mediterranean/near eastern pagans from the period in between Constantine and the fall of Rome and this was a state effort to stomp out mystery cults. The narrative that neopagans run around with that their ancestors were assblasted by Christians and forcibly converted wasnt as bloody and dark as the crusades or insquisition. The northern Europeans especially were willing converts. The pagan martyrs were mostly hellenes and philosophers that weren't necessarily being killed because of a forced conversion campaign (like spanish colonization) but because of the danger of the heresies they were propagating in the intellectual culture and even this was a rather brief period of time.

i'm no christian sympathizer but im just interested in what happened to the hellenic world and the reality of the situation is that the real story isn't the pop culture narrative of christians rounding up pagans and genociding them. especially when it comes to the conversion of the northern europeans who did it as a political move to rule the old roman empire.

>>40783137
>state effort to stomp out mystery cults
i think thats the juicy bit right there

>>40781673
interesting point except the catholic church (literally meaning "universal church") is the well funded imperial institution synthesized together from a bunch of different greco-roman mystery and philosophy schools, hellenized judaism, and a little zoroastrianism thrown in, most of which were already derivatives and syntheses of older pagan traditions.

christianity was literally the new age (aries -> pisces) universalist religion of the roman empire, turning a bunch of different gnostic jesus cults into a full fledged one world religion, more or less an internationalist corporation and intelligence agency, it took root in the urban areas while the conservatives in the country side (pagans) held on to their ancestral beliefs.

they even had legions of homosexuals and slaves going around smashing people's statues and historical monuments and stirring up rebellion or corrupting the children of wealthy elites, much like the progressive movements of today, calling the ancestors and ancestral gods they worshiped demons (very congruent with progressives calling cultural heroes in europe, australia, and america le evil racist slaveowner nazis)

>>40782924
ackschuly yes, i realize that. its just a feeling i have theyre withholding some key artifacts that would explain the details of their religious practices. its difficult to explain how theres absolutely no trace of a written account besides viking manuscripts imo

>>40782874
>>40782896
>>40783356
there's def a hidden history, and it goes back a long ways
Greeks called barbarians that because they thought non-Greek languages sounded like "bar bar bar".
The Tartars (of Tartarian fame) was a name that described a broad range of people
Basically, anything outside of Greece and Rome (because Rome co-opted a lot of Greek culture) was painted with a huge "barbarian" brush
And then when the Catholic church rose, anything non-Christian became, well, "pagan"
Along with that I totally believe they either destroyed, confiscated, or co-opted things they found useful from the pagans they were conquering

>>40783137
there were literally northern crusades against pagans for which the pope promised all the same religious benefits as participating in the crusades against islam.

it was largely a process of divide and conquer, hard to understand for people of today but it was largely political, giving access to finance, military support, education, technology, etc. often it was only a "conversion" in name only, usually to get back at enemy tribes or clans or support your claim to the throne, but it ultimately gave political authority to christian operatives to gradually alter the culture.

the native americans did the same thing, lots of them converted and/or allied with the whites just because they had beef with some other tribe going back further than anybody can remember.

but if a few peasants or slaves converted it didn't really mean shit, usually it was the nobility that converted the tribe for political gain. this was all done for the same old shit, money and power, which the institution of christianity had a lot of. and often, yes, it was forcible, many nations had a policy of "convert or die."

>>40781651
>many pagan texts were destroyed by Christians
Idk what you mean by many, but not really
A lot of pagan scriptures were closely kept secrets that were only available to the initiated, like the Chaldean and mithraic rites. When Christians did destroy pagan scriptures, it was usually their own copies that they destroyed after converting.

>>40781477
Not guess, but intuit. It's hard to assert shit that's basically >'it came to me in a dream' against loud obnoxious people, but it doesn't matter; that which works, will be selected for and proceed, no matter how slowly it grows.

>>40783477
bet he was involved?

bump