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.
Comment on When God Sings, We All Sing
Barley_Man@sopuli.xyz 4 hours agoIf 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 3 hours ago
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 3 hours ago
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 hours ago
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.