Remove ads

What's the most Cringeworthy take on Actual History/Archeology you've ever read?

Balmung1 said:
well for one thing a good chunk of modern philosophy and theological thought is pretty heavily entangled with christian theology.In addition christianity was useful in preserving the old Roman knowledge of the classical ages and modern european pagans tend to rely on accounts by christian authors talking about said pagan pasts so a large amount of their views are extrapolated from the observations of christian authors.I'm not saying there aren't pagan authors but still a overwhelming amount of our knowledge comes from christian sources.And it would be wrong for me to simply say christianity had positive benefits since all the Abrahamic faiths have benefits from the mathematical advancements of Islam to Jewish philosophy and teachings also influencing western Europe and Christianity as a whole.The Abrahamic faiths play a far more important role in our modern thought thanour ideas of what the pagans were.


I'm a Catholic so I feel your pain whenever it's lent
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean, this is complete nonsense. Nobody in the modern day should feel indebted to fucking Christianity, and nobody's beliefs should be determined by which religion "contributed more" to civilization, holy christ, yo.

I'm an atheist who has grown up in a mainly-Christian society, obviously I'm spitting on Thomas Aquinas by my existence.

(What nonsense.)

People can't help what societies they grow up in, and crediting extant religions with developments centuries ago in this way is cringeworthy indeed.
 
Last edited:
The Laurent said:
The... good stuff that came with Christianity?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Like the conservation of texts from antiquity, keeping some continuity in institutions between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, limiting slavery, giving at least some way for women to have a bit of power (nunneries), tending to the poors, trying to limit conflicts between nobles, funding science? Christians in the Middle Ages did pretty awful things (like literally everyone else) but saying that Christianity never did good things is wrong.

notbirdofprey said:
Do you mean genocide and mass murder? That was how most conversions came about.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
…No? At least not at the beginning. The Christianisation of the Roman Empire was largely peaceful, just like those of the German tribes, Irish, British, and a lot of Eastern Christians like the Nestorians.

There were plenty of forced conversions (like the Baltic area and the various colonies of the modern period), but not every Christianisation attempts where violent.
 
K von Carstein said:
Like the conservation of texts from antiquity, keeping some continuity in institutions between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, limiting slavery, giving at least some way for women to have a bit of power (nunneries), tending to the poors, trying to limit conflicts between nobles, funding science? Christians in the Middle Ages did pretty awful things (like literally everyone else) but saying that Christianity never did good things is wrong.


…No? At least not at the beginning. The Christianisation of the Roman Empire was largely peaceful, just like those of the German tribes, Irish, British, and a lot of Eastern Christians like the Nestorians.

There were plenty of forced conversions (like the Baltic area and the various colonies of the modern period), but not every Christianisation attempts where violent.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

...what does literally any of this have to do with the modern day? Like, that's what we're talking about. People who are pagans in the 21st century.

The idea that they have some sort of Debt of Honor to Christianity that they're spitting on by not being Christian is stupid.

(Also your description of Christian stuff is comically white-washy, by the way.)
 
Last edited:
The Laurent said:
nobody's beliefs should be determined by which religion "contributed more" to civilization, holy christ, yo.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You're literally the only person in the thread to even suggest the idea, my dude.

The Laurent said:
...what does literally any of this have to do with the modern day? Like, that's what we're talking about. People who are pagans in the 21st century.

The idea that they have some sort of Debt of Honor to Christianity that they're spitting on by not being Christian is stupid.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Balmong's post, I grant, was poorly worded and had some problems.

But your reaction is, frankly, not better, and kinda very hostile (and needlessly so) in tone.

No one said anything about a debt of honor, you are attacking an effigy of straw here.

While I think balmong's criticism of euro-pagans has some logical holes, that doesn't justify you jumping 10000 meters past what he actually wrote or your aggressively combative response.


I would note that the actual neopagans I know crack jokes about how "Wicca is actually 60% Anglicanism by volume."

(Re-construction means yeah, you're filling in gaps, and yeah some of that proverbial fill matter is going to be more or less Christianity derived as a consequence of the culture the reconstructionist grew up in.)
 
Last edited:
Chloe Sullivan said:
You're literally the only person in the thread to even suggest the idea, my dude.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Balmugi started this all off by saying:

"European paganists I have nothing but disdain for because they recieved all the good stuff that came with christianity,"

Is that your perspective on things?

That people in the 21st century should be grateful for Christianity and all the "good stuff" that came with it?
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Gardnerian Wicca is the Charismatic Christianity of neo-paganism. Bullshit claims of continuity no one else treats as anything but a joke.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Virgin Mary of Guadalupe probably has more ancient pagan roots than them
K von Carstein said:
…No? At least not at the beginning. The Christianisation of the Roman Empire was largely peaceful, just like those of the German tribes, Irish, British, and a lot of Eastern Christians like the Nestorians.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
hell the german tribes set Rome on fire a few times and still converted.


K von Carstein said:
Like the conservation of texts from antiquity, keeping some continuity in institutions between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, limiting slavery, giving at least some way for women to have a bit of power (nunneries), tending to the poors, trying to limit conflicts between nobles, funding science? Christians in the Middle Ages did pretty awful things (like literally everyone else) but saying that Christianity never did good things is wrong.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not to mention the fact that there were influential women saints like Saint Hildegard who contributed to medicine with things like this and was a polymath,create a secret language,composed music and was a philosipher
 
The Laurent said:
Balmugi started this all off by saying:

"European paganists I have nothing but disdain for because they recieved all the good stuff that came with christianity,"

Is that your perspective on things?

That people in the 21st century should be grateful for Christianity and all the "good stuff" that came with it?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
And I specified it to those European Paganist who mainly LARP as pagans instead of groups like native Americans in north america who are genuinely trying to rebuild their previous cultural and religious identity and practices because of European colonization and genocide.I also included other abrahamic faiths because they contributed greatly to our modern world too and to Christianity with things like arabic numerals,a loving god,medicine,mathmatics and rosaries to name a few from just Islam.
 
Balmung1 said:
And I specified it to those European Paganist who mainly LARP as pagans instead of groups like native Americans in north america who are genuinely trying to rebuild their previous cultural and religious identity and practices because of European colonization and genocide.I also included other abrahamic faiths because they contributed greatly to our modern world too and to Christianity with things like arabic numerals,a loving god,medicine,mathmatics and rosaries to name a few from just Islam.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I mean, like... so? The point about the antisemitism is actually a lot better than complaining about European Pagans discounting and abandoning Christianity.

They don't owe a religion jack or shit.

(Also, there have been plenty of religions with a loving God. Medicine and mathematics existed before Islam, or Christianity, or Judaism.)
 
Last edited:
notbirdofprey said:
Do you mean genocide and mass murder? That was how most conversions came about.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Not in Europe. Certainly not before the 6th century.

The spread of early Christianity owed a lot to its character and radical openness, in that it provided support most people of lower social classes with little or no restrictions. It then spread widely due to its evangelical nature and the vector of the Roman Empire.

After Constantine, Rome would favor Christians, but widely tolerate pagan practice and reserve wrath mostly for heretics. Rome's neighbors and other nations would also come into contact with the church through trade and diplomacy and engage in a long but generally bloodless process of christianization.

As Christianity transitioned into its medieval form, formally forced conversion and persecution of pagans started picking up steam, but relatively peaceful evangelism was still the main driver of increasing Christianization - even centuries later as the Scandinavian peoples began christianizing in droves.

Edit: I will note that the idea that modern neopagans of any stripe "owe" something to Christianity is insane.
 
I have my beliefs you have yours.Can we agree on something like protestant church design being shit or how the "pure wermacht that had honour and did absolutly no warcrimes" view is BS and has a lot of wholes in it.
 
Also as far as it goes, assigning credit like that to religions is kinda silly.

"If Islam didn't exist, X, Y and Z advances in mathematics, which were made by Muslims, wouldn't have happened" is a statement that cannot be falsified because we don't have an Alternate History machine, but it's one you should be pretty obviously skeptical of.

Same for any association. Hildegard von Bingen was indeed really cool and wouldn't have existed if the monastery system didn't exist (she'd be butterflied away)... but there's no counterfactual to compare it with.
 
Last edited:
Declaring that European reconstructionist don't deserve respect because they somehow "benefitted" from Christianity replacing (and sometimes actively destroying) their faith and culture is certainly a take, especially when one then proceeds to state that non-European reconstructionist should get respect.

Like, we could flip this script and say that non-European reconstructionist have it easy, because by the time Christianity came to them Europeans were at least half-way interested in writing stuff down, rather than just wiping it all away. And it would be a cringeworthy take for this thread.
 
notbirdofprey said:
It's incredibly silly to tell a Jewish guy that Christianity didn't use violence in attempts to Christianize his people.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That was never my intent. I merely wished to demonstrate that the Christianization of Europe was mostly a peaceful affair during its ancient period. I sincerely apologize if I ended up condescending.

While persecution of Jewish people by Christian authorities did occur, and it was both brutal and inexcusable, it was rarely sanctioned or carried out by Church or State until the transition into the medieval period of the Church (vide the Edicts of Justinian I of the ERE, or forced conversion carried out by the Visigothic Kings). Before that point, most religious Christian violence was primarily directed at heretical Christian groups (indeed, during that period, the strict definitions of Christian heresy were very much not set in stone.)
 
Amidatelion said:
Not in Europe. Certainly not before the 6th century.

The spread of early Christianity owed a lot to its character and radical openness, in that it provided support most people of lower social classes with little or no restrictions. It then spread widely due to its evangelical nature and the vector of the Roman Empire.

After Constantine, Rome would favor Christians, but widely tolerate pagan practice and reserve wrath mostly for heretics. Rome's neighbors and other nations would also come into contact with the church through trade and diplomacy and engage in a long but generally bloodless process of christianization.

As Christianity transitioned into its medieval form, formally forced conversion and persecution of pagans started picking up steam, but relatively peaceful evangelism was still the main driver of increasing Christianization - even centuries later as the Scandinavian peoples began christianizing in droves.

Edit: I will note that the idea that modern neopagans of any stripe "owe" something to Christianity is insane.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Emperor Theodosius' regime literally encouraged and incited lynch mobs to purge all non-christian faiths from the empire and gleefully enabled the mass scale slaughter of Jews and Pagans to force a singular ideology onto the Empire on pain of death and forfeiture of all property. This is literally the thing he was famous for, dude had one of the seven wonders of the world burned to the ground as part of his campaign of violent purges and the literal criminalisation of all faiths that fell outside the Nicene creed. The violence inflicted upon the Jewry in particular was savage and played a large part in reducing us to a small diasporic ethnoreligion as upon the cult of Yeshua being romanised and made acceptable for the Romans, the Christian dominated process of hounding the Jews into a disarmed and defanged scribe caste begun in earnest.

Then of course, we must mention that the great bulk of historical and modern antisemitism came largely from Christian or Christian-influenced sources. Judaism's relation with its eldest child went sour from more or less the moment Paul and Peter decided to throw the Jews under the bus to appeal more to the Roman gentiles despite Yeshua himself (as well as his surviving family) showing no real indication of being particularly concerned with or even interested in spreading his particular messianic cult to gentiles.
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
Emperor Theodosius literally had lynch mobs to purge all non-christian faiths from the empire and ordered the mass scale slaughter of Jews and Pagans to force a singular ideology onto the Empire on pain of death and forfeiture of all property.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I was not aware of this information regarding Theodosius. As far as I know, while he legislated unequally against Non-Christian faiths, I can't recall any direct attempt to ban or exterminate them. Are there any particular sources on the matter?

Spartakrod said:
Then of course, we must mention that the great bulk of historical and modern antisemitism came largely from Christian or Christian-influenced sources. Judaism's relation with its eldest child went sour from more or less the moment Paul and Peter decided to throw the Jews under the bus to appeal more to the Roman gentiles despite Yeshua himself (as well as his surviving family) showing no real indication of being particularly concerned with spreading his particular messianic cult to gentiles.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

This, of course, was not in question.
 
Amidatelion said:
I was not aware of this information regarding Theodosius. As far as I know, while he legislated unequally against Non-Christian faiths, I can't recall any direct attempt to ban or exterminate them. Are there any particular sources on the matter?



This, of course, was not in question.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Theodosius banned any actual practice of non-christian religions and made it okay to seize the property of those who did not adhere to the imperial cult by force. While he did not ban nominally belonging to a non-christian faith, he banned all the rites and sacrifices that were actually part of their religious practice and thus de facto made it impossible to participate in those faiths. It doesn't matter if you nominally allow someone to say they worship Zeus if you forbid literally all the rites that allow them to participate in the cult of Zeus. At that point it's just a side bit on your nametag, not a religion. Meanwhile under him, the Empire either did nothing about or directly encouraged extremely violent lynch mobs as part of the ideological purification of the Empire.

Theodosius was an incredibly bloody tyrant far in excess of anything Nero had ever provably done.
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
Theodosius was an incredibly bloody tyrant far in excess of anything Nero had ever provably done.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Hmm. This being stated, alongside the inconclusive nature of my own knowledge and cursory research, I can accept correction and concede that Theodosius promoted (or at the very least tolerated) religious persecution and de-facto bans, though not forced conversion.

Thank you for the information.
 
This is a really weird debate. I am not particularly fond of seeing a lot of European folk culture appropriated by neo-pagans claiming it to be some sort of relic of pre-Christian times. But I don't get the logic that European neo-paganism is some sort of failure because its practictioners come from traditionally Christian societies or because they rely on Christian accounts of old Heathen beliefs and ritual.
I don't see why the first argument couldn't be applied to a lot of early Christian converts in the Roman empire, taking the good stuff (neoplatonic influences, Humouric medicine, Roman urban life, trade networks) while refusing to honour the old gods.
The second point is a matter of necessity, most pre-Christian cultures of Europe did not record their beliefs and practices in written form. Thus all we really have to go on is the Christian descriptions, archeological remains and possibly work in the fields of comparative linguistics and religion.

There is also this secondary discussion about the mechanisms of Christianity's spread. The faith has existed for the better part of two thousand years, it has spread in many, many ways. Some more pleasant than others. A small sample includes:
-Public preaching and non-institutional missionary work (Early Christianity, some modern sects).
-Forced conversion on the pain of death (Saxon wars, the Crusades, European colonisation).
-Adoption by pagan elites wanting the prestigious religion of wealthier cultures, possibly as a means of political advancements (Germanic tribes in and around the Roman Empire after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion, the conversion of Scandinavia).

These mechanisms all carry very different moral significance.

@The Laurent makes a good point on the problems of crediting the achievements of Christians to Christianity. It should also be noted that after a certain point, Christianity becomes so entangled with the Roman Imperial culture that it becomes hard to separate them. The developments of various sciences and arts of the middle ages and onwards are not simply the fruits of the Christian faith, but also of technological, cultural and learned traditions that are of a wholly different origin.
The more or less peaceful conversion of various pagan lords during the first millenium is not necessarily because they liked the teachings of the Church. Many probably converted because they sought to emulate the wealthy and powerful Christian lords.
 
Arrou said:
The more or less peaceful conversion of various pagan lords during the first millenium is not necessarily because they liked the teachings of the Church. Many probably converted because they sought to emulate the wealthy and powerful Christian lords.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There are stories about some bishops having to stop the ruler from backsliding and it usually being something like"yes you will go to heaven and honour god NO don't do that pagan sacrifice you were progressing so much and I don't want to do this for the twentieth time"
 
I see we've reached 'fuck neopagans, all my homies hate neopagans' hour.
 
Chloe Sullivan said:
Well you're certainly living up to the thread name.



I don't think there are any credible claims of traditions surviving through the middle and modern ages to the present. Mostly it's just people talking names of stuff they vaguely recognize as 'pagan' and using it for their own cosplay and then being surprised to discover oh yeah there are people who are descended from those cultures who find that offensive.

There's a reason there is a lot of contempt for "fluff bunnies" - it's not because they aren't seen as "real neopagans," it's because they are seen as real cultural mis-appropriation-ists with no care for how many people's ancestors they are insulting.

The serious types who aren't just doing cosplay use the term "Reconstructionist" precisely because they recognize that there is no direct continuity of traditions/rites/practice and what they are doing is a re-construction based on limited knowledge.

Gardnerian Wicca is the Charismatic Christianity of neo-paganism. Bullshit claims of continuity no one else treats as anything but a joke.


Christian institutions were the basis for a lot of modern institutions? I mean at this point it's perhaps a bit distant to say credit goes, but that's a point that can be argued.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Mari and the Kalmyks definitely kept their traditional religions into the modern day (although YMMV on the "European" there), and there seems to be credible evidence that some Lithuanians and Chuvash also did.
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top