And the difference between polytheistic religions and Christianity is that instead of having a god of archery and a god of prostitutes, Christianity has a patron saint of archery and a patron saint of prostitutes. Totally different!
Comment on Anon creates a religion
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Tbh right, in the last year or two I’ve come to accept that there is an absolute religious continuity from ancient paganism to the newest mainstream ones (e.gChristianity and islam). It might be a vague connection at times but you can see pretty clearly how one story or one ritual became different as a culture moved into a new age or a new area.
The words “Zeus,” and Deus and Jupiter all come from the same root word.
Every religion has a flood story
Religious texts reflect on the old faiths that their founders were raised in, or those worshipped by them around them
Anyway why am I saying all this? Well, I don’t know if God would actually go "You need to make a new religion. It tends to be "you need to fix the current religion, take control of it.
PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
eRac@lemmings.world 1 day ago
One branch has patron saints. Most others have one dude be the god of ‘good’ and one dude the god of ‘bad’.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Satan isn’t a god, and God is in fact the god of good and bad - of everything
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
Depends how Roman catholic you are
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 hours ago
There is a pretty clear influence from ancient Greek and Roman religion on Abrahamic religions (especially neo-platonism), but you don’t even have to go that obscure to make the argument you’re making.
They descend directly from the ancient Babylonian religion, which was polytheistic. It was converted from a polytheistic to a monotheistic religion first by moving to monolatry (the other gods are real, but its only valid to worship one of them), by conflating various gods with each other (saying that they are simply different names for the same god), and finally by creating a false history where the favored god was always the only one and the other ones were always considered false/idolatrous/demonic.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 day ago
The continuity between Roman/Latin paganism and Christianity in special is rather evident for me: the fate of the dead, the idea of sacrifice, the mystery cults and all that “your god is to the East!”…
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 23 hours ago
The deus thing - isn’t that a product of etymology?
As for the flood - possibly it’s featured in many religions because it was a real event
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
Yea, the flood story here is being flooded with semen