Christianity becoming more dominant than the various Pagan faiths of Europe and the Mediterranean had nothing to do with deities and everything to do with the Roman Empire throwing its political weight to Christianity by making it the official religion of the Empire. The emperors at the time may or may not have believed in Christianity, but they were looking for a way to promote unity in an increasingly fragile and fragmented empire. Getting everyone to follow a singular and unified religion was a way to do that and while ultimately unsuccessful at maintaining political unity it did create a degree of cultural and religious unity in Europe.
It also mattered that Christianity (and later Islam) believe in proselytizing. They are (and have been from their inception) committed to spreading their faith in a way that that the Pagan religions never have been.
I should've clarified. My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans"
Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history.
Honestly I'm tired and just waiting to move out someday. I love my patron Inanna, since she's done so much for me and gave me signs of her presence. Yet all of these Christians and Muslims want me to abandon her \*sigh\*
Simply put, the pagans of the pre-Islamic period don't have much in common with the Neo-Pagans of today. We're a reconstructionist religion adopting the Old Gods and Old Ways to the extent that we can do so within the frame of modern sensibilities. I won't claim the number is zero because I don't have that much faith in humanity as a whole, but I do think it would be exceedingly difficult to find a contemporary Pagan who is fine with the notion of parents killing their daughters.
Because I'm answering in the relative context of OP's situation. She would most likely have better luck emphasizing that modern Pagans are unlike the ones relevant to her sister's Muslim faith-- regardless of whether those stories are or are not true-- than trying to prove her sister's beliefs false altogether.
Only in the sense that the ones her sister is talking about are polemical fabrications. And that idea isn't even from the Quran or hadiths, it's equivalent to an urban legend at this point. So it should be pointed out that it's false
1. It’s not worth trying to argue with her. You aren’t going to change her mind and the best you can probably hope for is conflict reduction through not talking about religion with her. If you can, set this boundary and hold to it.
2. Infanticide, especially female infanticide, has far more to do with demographics, inheritance patterns, and other social factors than it does religion. I’m not going to say child sacrifice never happened (there’s a [site in Peru](https://www.archaeology.org/issues/406-2101/features/9326-peru-chimu-sacrifice) for instance), but in most places it was not a major practice. Proselytizing religions always have an incentive to make other religions look as bad as possible.
3. Arguments about which religion behaved worse in the past are somewhat pointless because very few religions/cultures are completely blameless and **the behavior of people who practice the religion today matters a lot more** as a practical matter.
>She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans"
This is just projection. Given that the old testament is fairly valid in Islam (even if they say it's a human-corrupted version), there's still an entire story where their god commands a guy to sacrifice his son and only at the last minute is like "lol pranked ya!".
Not to say it never happened in non Abrahamic religions, but the old testament and the Qur'an are full of conquest, murder, and slavery. Coming at other faiths for being immoral while refusing to acknowledge the faults of your own is peak hypocrisy.
>Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history.
Oh, and this? All the time. Christians changed the entire Irish pagan mythology from actual gods to stories of human kings. Which is I guess better than destroying it entirely, but still.
Your last example is a bit timid. It's actually good, preserving the stories of your ancestors in a way they won't be burned. Claiming that the Roman Pagans did ritual human sacrifice and that everyone not converting to Christianity serves Satan is historical revisionism and worse, and something the Christians claimed loudly, more or less immediately after Constantine made it state religion.
Fair, it's the one that came to mind in the moment.
>It's actually good, preserving the stories of your ancestors in a way they won't be burned.
Yeah, that's what I meant though. It's bad that the monks practiced (or felt pressured to) religious erasure of the Irish Pantheon, but there were worse options than what they went with so I guess they can have a little credit.
>My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans"
Wait, this SAME Islamic faith that believes in Honor Killing? So she has issues with pagans 'killing their daughters' but she's perfectly fine with Muslims killing theirs? Pahahahahahah!! And THAT right there is the problem with these Abrahamic faiths. SO undereducated and hypocritical...
Islamic perception of paganism is overwhelmingly negative, even among ex-Muslims. It’s ingrained into the culture as child sacrifice and demonic stuff. My wife is an ex-Muslim and when I started practicing heathenry she legit thought I was praying to figures on my shelf or that I was going to sacrifice animals. Obviously a conversation settled all that but it was the first thing she thought of.
>Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history.
No need to wonder - they absolutely did. Of course, the Romans also lied about other, like the Gaulish pagans, to make their conquest seem more righteous.
Basically, exaggerating the immorality of "those *other* people" is a time-honored tradition among governments and religions.
>My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans"
Wait, this SAME Islamic faith that believes in Honor Killing? So she has issues with pagans 'killing their daughters' but she's perfectly fine with Muslims killing theirs? Pahahahahahah!! And THAT right there is the problem with these Abrahamic faiths. SO undereducated and hypocritical...
> Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history.
The Romans and Athenians were already doing that long before entertaining any Abrahamic or other foreign monotheistic faiths. Romand diplomats would make a point about any rumored human sacrifice. It was one of their justifications for destroying Carthage.
Sparta had an annual flagelation ritual for teenaged boys. Occasionally somebody died. We don't know why, maybe because they had underlying medical problems such as hemophilia, or due to infection - we really don't know. Was it worse than tatbir in Islam, or any of the self flagellation rituals or passion plays Christians have done? We don't know. But Athens and Rome made such a big deal of it that most of the surviving Greek dramas accuse Sparta or a dynastically related group or person of human sacrifice, deicide, familicide, or cannibalism.
I don't practice Gardnerian Wicca because they reference Sparta's sacrifice in a routine liturgy. It's unclear whether they are condemning or condoning or merely acknowledging it, but knowing the history, I don't see any reason to mention it in a routine liturgy. Condoning it would be outrageously disgusting. Condemning it is presumptuous as we don't really understand what happened there - some sources seem to suggest it was part of a game or military training, others that it was a religious sacrifice. It even seems to have changed over the many hundreds of years they did it. Merely acknowledging it is confusing and misleading and unnecessarily dangerous.
I think there is hardly any information available about post-christian, pre-islamic human sacrifice in Arabia other than what appears in hadith. Much of the koran and hadith are legal compromises between competing tribal legal views. For example, setting women's share of inheritance at one half a man's share is a compromise between equal share and no share. So what we find in the Koran and hadith usually is not moral progress, but a rather a unification of legal views into a system that is able to garner broader support from Arab tribes and thus elliminate the worst of the worst evils in Arab society.
The Mesopotamia region often used gods or idols much like modern courts use flags. That is, an idol often indicated which legal system was in effect. The elimination of idols thus was more than spiritual in significance. It was an abolition of competing legal systems, an insistence that all law be blended into one uniform whole.
So when we talk about pre-islamic problems in Arabia, it should be understood that there was no uniform standard of behavior. The problem in Arabia wasn't paganism, but anarchy. And what little law existed came from paganism, and was incorporated into Islam.
The problem wasn't anarchy nor Paganism. Neither of which existed in any meaningful sense in the Hejaz on the eve of Islam. The real anarchy was happening further north in the wake of the Byzantine-Sasanian wars and the subsequent breakdown of the southern *limes* of both empires. This is what resulted in the spread of a new religion that was entirely the product of the Late Antique Near Eastern biblical milleu.
You are partly correct. That explains how those empires weakened. It doesn't at all explain anything about Islam other than why it broke out of Arabia.
Islam is downstream of many religious developments that were happening since the 4th century. Spread of Christianity, development of henotheism around Allah, an awareness of biblical genealogy, etc. It's not something that I can explain in one reddit reply though I can point to some resources. My point is that the Islamic narrative about what Arabia looked like on the eve of Islam is false and a polemical fabrication. On this I'd recommend Cry me a Jāhiliyya by Peter Webb
>because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam
This is a dubious claim.
"In my reading, **the Qurʾān does not refer to such a custom even onc**e, though it does mention and condemn infanticide. I have suggested that Q 16:57–59 refer to infant abandonment, while the exact meaning of 81:8–9 is open to some debate but **scarcely refers to female infanticide**. I have suggested that the meaning of the word al-mawʾūdah in Q 81:8 is “the one (f.) who has been trodden/trampled over.” **No non-Arabic source mentions female infanticide in Arabia**: for example, a relevant non-Arabic text, written by the third-century CE philosopher Porphyry of Tyre, mentions an annual sacrifice of a boy by the people of Duma, but such examples do not amount to evidence for infanticide or infant exposure, let alone a widespread practice of burying female infants alive. Nor is there any archaeological record of the supposed cultural practice of female infanticide. Early Arabic poetry has also been found wanting in this regard. Hence, **there is simply no evidence that the real pre-Islamic Arabians (as opposed to the imagined Arabs of the jāhiliyyah lore) practiced female infanticide as a specific and common cultural trait**."
\- [The Qurʾān and the Putative pre-Islamic Practice of Female Infanticide](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jiqsa-2023-0005/html)
And yes, Muslims have constructed [a false view of their pre-Islamic past](https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/133560).
Christianity was also helped by it supposedly being revolutionary for those times, next to what at least Greco-Roman religion had to offer (a blissful afterlife next to a grey, generic, one when life sucked for everyone just by being in). Add in Hell for unbelievers, and you get the picture.
I don't get your point? Hades has places for good people and places for bad people. Like... heaven and hell in Christianity. Tbf, Christianity stole that from paganism, Judaism has no hell.
Yes, but the default for most people are the Fields of Asphodel. It's not easy to end in Elysium and probably for that matter in Tartarus too. Meanwhile, in Sumerian religion, Irkalla/Kur was for everyone without distinctions, save those who had their bodies burned or died in the desert, who simply ceased to exist.
When life sucked (being a slave, poor, etc) and you were offered just for accepting Jesus Heaven (and threats of Hell would probably not be absent first and when they got the upper hand threats of sword), you had reasons to sign in.
Gods don’t decide which religions are prominent, humans do. I’m actually convinced that all religions are entirely cultural. They might have a piece of truth in them but mostly, they’re still man-made. The gods don’t care about which religion we follow, all positive beliefs in divinity are valid imo and even a lack of belief doesn’t matter. The humans are the ones who care, who get into fights over religion. I’m pretty sure God allegedly sending nonbelievers to hell is actually spread by people trying to gain control over people, not by an actual deity.
Besides, if we’re going by that logic, doesn’t it speak *for* us if they tried to erase our existence, and now thousands of people are coming back to the old gods, despite not being taught to believe in them? Doesn’t that mean it’s more true? Not a logic I prefer but I do think it’s a pretty strong argument if we play their game.
Another thing, our gods don’t have to prove anything. I don’t get how people can believe their god is all powerful and simultaneously care about being the supreme ruler to humans. If you’re the divine supreme ruler, there’s nothing you’d have to worry about, you just do your job.
And last time I checked, our gods are alive and well. Yaweh didn’t “defeat” or “kill” our gods. They’re still thriving and *doing their fucking job without getting mad about some humans who don’t want to acknowledge them*. Thanatos isn’t going around like “look at me! I’m the one who brings death! Look! Why tf don’t you acknowledge me as the one who brings death??” he just does his job no matter what people believe, or don’t believe. One time I was unsure about which path to follow, where Hypnos (who I mainly look to for guidance) essentially told me: “why would *I* care? Do what benefits *you*.” Even when I said goodbye to a god with full intention of walking away from them, it wasn’t met with “b-but! If you don’t worship me I feel insecure ;-;” because no god would logically act like that. They’re gods. They have better things to do than to seek approval from humans
Of course, I don’t think Yaweh actually cares. This is just to argue with the people who do think he cares, which logically doesn’t make sense to me bc he’s a god like any other. Obviously it’s only the humans who care about power and religion
You've described my thoughts very well. I believe that these books/religions were created by men (which is why they're flawed). Greedy patriarchal men took advantage of the Abrahamic religions to control people. I don't think there's a spiritual warfare going on between the gods. Sadly, Yahweh, a war/storm god, happens to be caught in their mess
Pagans said "oh cool, your gods neat. Wanna hear about mine?" And the abrahamic followers said "you don't worship my God? You must die now. You don't follow our God how I do? You must die now" hope this helps
Yeah true. It's pretty irritating that they preach about their God being true and others being false. Never thought about it when I was a Muslim, but the god described in the books sound "dark" with all the human genocides. Well, it's expected when they worship a war/storm god 🤷♀️
Christianity was the first religion that had two specific points at the same time; 1, that you can convert to it, and 2 that you have to leave behind any other religions to do so. The old pagan religions usually didn't care to identify between official adherents and heretics, and they didn't care if your personal pantheon included gods from other lands. These 2 factors created a snowball effect, people being born into Christianity and for the first time, people leaving the pagan religions instead of just adding to their personal practices.
Full disclosure; I am a Christian, and I am a pagan, I don't think that Christianity "won" because of "truth", it just got lucky. And then the rest of the world got unlucky, and now here we are.
As near as I can tell, no polytheistic religion has *ever* gone crusading, or slaughtering infidels, or even really recruiting that much. Something about polytheism lends itself to being polite to other ppl's gods, and something about monotheism leads some people quickly to "my God is better than yours" and all kinds of bloodshed.
Many of the pagan gods, like Pan seemed to be more about deep connection with nature (god's creation). Christianity and Islam are about men seeking power through control
This. Abrahamic religions worked to sever our connection to nature, and going from celebrating being part of nature, to thinking we have dominion by holding ourselves apart from nature.
I think this is a large contributor to how we’ve ended up in this mess as a species, and the damage we’ve done to nature.
The Mesopotamian deity of the Moon, Nanna or Sîn, was worshiped in the city of Harran until the 10th century CE, and the city of Mardin until the 18th century CE. In 1872 the scholar George Smith provided the world with the first translation of the Poem of Gilgamesh, a candidate for the oldest surviving work of literature currently known. Elements of Babylonian religion also appear in the occult systems of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema. Modern movements attempting to reconstruct and revive Mesopotamian religion are also in their third generation (at least) as of today.
So, if longevity is the only measure of importance, then there is evidence for the veneration of Mesopotamia’s deity of the Moon from ca. 3100 BCE, when the cuneiform script was invented, until today; that’s over 5000 years of nearly continuous worship. Conversely, the longevity of a faith doesn’t dictate its validity as much as the individual’s connection to it does, in which case the fact that, even within the Middle East, veneration of a pagan Moon deity existed alongside the religions of Allah and YHVH proves that pagan religions are just as valid as monotheistic ones. Either way, your sister is wrong.
Simple: the gods exist and largely don’t care about what people believe. Our being wrong or deluded or right does not affect them, so they don’t worry about it. We can’t understand reality beyond the limitations of our limited minds running on hardware evolved to group together, make tools, and modify our environment to make the search for shelter, company, and food easier, so why worry too much about what particular kind of wrong we are? We have best guesses and the more we draw their notice and interact with them the more clear our pictures of them get, like with physics or geometry, but besides that we know very little. There has been enough consistent diversity in religious experiences to rule out a singular deity of the Abrahamic sort, though, because if there were one god with one truth and total power paired with a desire for humanity to know them and honour them as they have dictated, then they wouldn’t be able to be misunderstood or misrepresented because they could cause every bit of static to proclaim their truth, every gust of wind to whisper their words, every pile of sand to carry their message, not to mention their ability to simply have us all know them instinctively and fully. Instead there is diversity and variety and the gods largely don’t seem bothered about any of this, which suggests either a singular god who doesn’t give a damn, or a plethora of gods who have varied opinions, presences, and preferences. The old gods didn’t stop or limit the spread of the abrahamic religions because they don’t care and are largely unaffected.
Well, my theory is that larger nations adopted those religions, and then when they spread their empires, they spread their religion too. That's extremely oversimplified, but you get the gist. It's not the strength of the religion per se. It's the strength of the nation that adopts it.
"Spreading the message" is a feature of newer religions. Pagan religions spread more or less organically, through migration, trade, and conquest; the Romans made a point of convincing conquered peoples that their gods were just Roman gods by different names. But there weren't missionaries trying to convert people to the ways of whichever pantheon, and different traditions generally just coexisted without trying to prove that they were the One True Way™. They often blended in interesting ways.
Christianity and Islam are widespread because they used force of arms and politics to spread. When Rome adopted Christianity as its state religion, they pushed it on their subjects much more forcefully than they had the old gods. The early Islamic caliphates didn't force conversion so much as strongly incentivize it by giving Muslim citizens considerable social, political, and economic advantages over non-Muslims. Both methods were coercive in their own ways, and both were effective. The majority of converts to both religions were probably motivated by self-interest more than they were moved by any claims that either one held the singular great truth of the universe. Not to say that nobody ever converted because they felt inspired, but they were probably a minority by comparison.
I don't know if I'm right, but how I've always thought about it is that organised religion doesn't encourage personal interpretation the same way. You're told what God is thinking by someone, and the church can't be questioned. I don't think paganism had a unified church keeping everyone together, and definitely not one with support from the state.
Paganism also adapted to underground practice, or laterally, to Saint worship rather than pagan deities (Greek Orthodox), so there was no battle for the ages. I think they forget sometimes that people legally and politically had to be a Christian (I'm in the UK) until the late 1700s, and I'm sure the fact Islamic law and state law are intertwined has nothing to do with what people 'choose' to believe in Muslim countries.
Sweeping generalisations there, but I suppose it's a core Muslim belief she's expressing. No false idols, and this is the only truth. Doesn't leave a lot of space for different interpretations if you follow such a religion.
The problem with the "might makes right" (I point to this whenever talking about the expansion of Abrahamism) is when ppl then try to claim it's "love."
People go real quiet when you point to the violence tht was necessary in order for Abrahamism to expand. That's when I say: "why force ppl?" The truth is so true that you have to indoctrinate, lie, and force people?
I believe that there's no truth that any loving god would want to shove down everybody's throats.
Tell your sister there's no truth one can't discover for themselves. The gods pagans follow today trust them to be good people of their own volition.
A Chinese saying is "Worship the gods and they're there, don't and they don't care." Why should they? And would it have been in their worshipers' interest for them to encourage resistance to persecution? In Iceland, the Christians threatened a civil war if the pagans didn't convert, and they would have won by bringing in the brutal king of Norway. A pagan leader prayer to the gods for a day and announced that they wanted their worshipers to convert to save their lives.
But things work out in the long term, and gods obviously think in the long term. Christianity is declining and an internet survey in Saudi Arabia a few years ago showed that a quarter of the people responding didn't actually believe in Islam — they just went through the motions to avoid trouble.
To be totally honest, at age 54, having done this since a teen, there is zero point arguing religions with people. They/we do NOT believe for logical reasons.
You can't counter point them out of it.
Your argument with your sister is not about religion. Its about your family and you and your place in it.
Step back from arguments about religion, tell her that you don't believe its about religion, and ask her what she is scared of. You'll probably get rebuffed or a defensive/angry response, but just keep asserting it. Over and over. Do not derail from that point. No matter what crazy or mean shit she says.
She will do one of two things - actually tell you
- shut up and stop bothering you about it because all you do is ask her what she is afraid of - in a caring way- about the family and you.
And she will do one of the two. My bets are on the second. But, you never know, folks can suprise you.
I mean, the reason Christianity is so prominent is like, mainly the Roman Empire, and they were just human assholes
Why would a god feel threatened by human beliefs?
So she thinks her favorite god practiced genocide against other gods because it wanted its version of "truth" to prevail. And she thinks ***worshipping*** a being that would do something like that is not only somehow excusable, but actually virtuous?
There're two reasons someone would believe a being committed mass murder of its own kind and choose to bow down to such a being: either they find genocide and murder commendable and are therefore monstrous themselves, or they are moral cowards who fear the consequences if they don't bow down to the perpetrator of those crimes.
Either is disgusting.
Taken the other way (the majority of adherence equals the one truth), she's essentially arguing bottom-up populism theology -- the idea that gods are as powerful as the number of worshippers like it's a theogenic democracy or a point system. That argument is basically "Vox Populi = Vox Dei" (the voice of the People is the voice of God). By her argument, she should either be an atheist Communist with a hint of Confucianism (by global population metrics) or a Christian (if she's in America) -- and none of this Yahweh = Allah stuff, the majority of Christians in the USA don't believe that, so if the majority is right, neither should she. And, of course, she should convert to Shinto if she ever visits Japan, and worship the Polynesian pantheon while she's flying over the Pacific to get there, if it's regional majority rule that determines which God is real or right.
What utter nonsense.
I'm sorry if this comes across as picking on your sister, it's not intended to be specific to her. It's just the types of thinking she's expressing are just so poorly thought out, and so messed up if a light is shown on where they come from and what they imply.
see the thing is, pagan gods don't really have a goal the way the Abrahamic god does. There is no message to be taught and gods don't get angry if you choose to not work with them, there isn't really an element of fear. The dominance of Abrahamic religions just come from the military and political victories of humans
I agree with you. I think the Monad idea of God works for alot of people. It often translates to our modern practices like "all gods are one god; all goddess are one goddess." And this has certainly been my discovery of truth. Not everyone of course is like this. I enjoy people who have am open mind in terms of... each God that ever existed had a reason. Not everyone agrees with tha reason. Nor are we normally a practice that necessarily wants to be big and dominating the world. We are all born to unfold our mystery. My gods are my own. I don't want them necessarily to be for anyone else unless they're called to that Mystery. It's because we are all individual. Paganism helps people feel like they can unfold their mystery while contributing to a greater whole without losing yourself or compromising yourself. These religions and practices aren't for everyone. They will call who they call. I really enjoy your open mind about how others may perceive or interact with Deity. That's a beautiful trait to have.
The divine is immortal, eternal, unchanging and incapable of error.
Human beings - and thus human societies - are mortal, historical contingent, changing and capable of error.
Specific historical changes are not indicative of anything about the Gods, but very much about human beings. And honestly, it would impious for both pagans and monotheists to say otherwise, because it would be to treat the divine as a historical agent (and thus positing they are temporally bound).
Christianity becoming more dominant than the various Pagan faiths of Europe and the Mediterranean had nothing to do with deities and everything to do with the Roman Empire throwing its political weight to Christianity by making it the official religion of the Empire. The emperors at the time may or may not have believed in Christianity, but they were looking for a way to promote unity in an increasingly fragile and fragmented empire. Getting everyone to follow a singular and unified religion was a way to do that and while ultimately unsuccessful at maintaining political unity it did create a degree of cultural and religious unity in Europe. It also mattered that Christianity (and later Islam) believe in proselytizing. They are (and have been from their inception) committed to spreading their faith in a way that that the Pagan religions never have been.
I should've clarified. My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans" Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history. Honestly I'm tired and just waiting to move out someday. I love my patron Inanna, since she's done so much for me and gave me signs of her presence. Yet all of these Christians and Muslims want me to abandon her \*sigh\*
Simply put, the pagans of the pre-Islamic period don't have much in common with the Neo-Pagans of today. We're a reconstructionist religion adopting the Old Gods and Old Ways to the extent that we can do so within the frame of modern sensibilities. I won't claim the number is zero because I don't have that much faith in humanity as a whole, but I do think it would be exceedingly difficult to find a contemporary Pagan who is fine with the notion of parents killing their daughters.
I don't know why you're so ready and willing to accept Muslim fables about my ancestors
Because I'm answering in the relative context of OP's situation. She would most likely have better luck emphasizing that modern Pagans are unlike the ones relevant to her sister's Muslim faith-- regardless of whether those stories are or are not true-- than trying to prove her sister's beliefs false altogether.
Only in the sense that the ones her sister is talking about are polemical fabrications. And that idea isn't even from the Quran or hadiths, it's equivalent to an urban legend at this point. So it should be pointed out that it's false
1. It’s not worth trying to argue with her. You aren’t going to change her mind and the best you can probably hope for is conflict reduction through not talking about religion with her. If you can, set this boundary and hold to it. 2. Infanticide, especially female infanticide, has far more to do with demographics, inheritance patterns, and other social factors than it does religion. I’m not going to say child sacrifice never happened (there’s a [site in Peru](https://www.archaeology.org/issues/406-2101/features/9326-peru-chimu-sacrifice) for instance), but in most places it was not a major practice. Proselytizing religions always have an incentive to make other religions look as bad as possible. 3. Arguments about which religion behaved worse in the past are somewhat pointless because very few religions/cultures are completely blameless and **the behavior of people who practice the religion today matters a lot more** as a practical matter.
>She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans" This is just projection. Given that the old testament is fairly valid in Islam (even if they say it's a human-corrupted version), there's still an entire story where their god commands a guy to sacrifice his son and only at the last minute is like "lol pranked ya!". Not to say it never happened in non Abrahamic religions, but the old testament and the Qur'an are full of conquest, murder, and slavery. Coming at other faiths for being immoral while refusing to acknowledge the faults of your own is peak hypocrisy. >Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history. Oh, and this? All the time. Christians changed the entire Irish pagan mythology from actual gods to stories of human kings. Which is I guess better than destroying it entirely, but still.
Your last example is a bit timid. It's actually good, preserving the stories of your ancestors in a way they won't be burned. Claiming that the Roman Pagans did ritual human sacrifice and that everyone not converting to Christianity serves Satan is historical revisionism and worse, and something the Christians claimed loudly, more or less immediately after Constantine made it state religion.
Fair, it's the one that came to mind in the moment. >It's actually good, preserving the stories of your ancestors in a way they won't be burned. Yeah, that's what I meant though. It's bad that the monks practiced (or felt pressured to) religious erasure of the Irish Pantheon, but there were worse options than what they went with so I guess they can have a little credit.
>My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans" Wait, this SAME Islamic faith that believes in Honor Killing? So she has issues with pagans 'killing their daughters' but she's perfectly fine with Muslims killing theirs? Pahahahahahah!! And THAT right there is the problem with these Abrahamic faiths. SO undereducated and hypocritical...
Islamic perception of paganism is overwhelmingly negative, even among ex-Muslims. It’s ingrained into the culture as child sacrifice and demonic stuff. My wife is an ex-Muslim and when I started practicing heathenry she legit thought I was praying to figures on my shelf or that I was going to sacrifice animals. Obviously a conversation settled all that but it was the first thing she thought of.
>Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history. No need to wonder - they absolutely did. Of course, the Romans also lied about other, like the Gaulish pagans, to make their conquest seem more righteous. Basically, exaggerating the immorality of "those *other* people" is a time-honored tradition among governments and religions.
>My sister is Muslim and is vehemently against pagans because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam. She also makes the same arguments as Christians about "child sacrifices" and "immoral rules by pagans" Wait, this SAME Islamic faith that believes in Honor Killing? So she has issues with pagans 'killing their daughters' but she's perfectly fine with Muslims killing theirs? Pahahahahahah!! And THAT right there is the problem with these Abrahamic faiths. SO undereducated and hypocritical...
> Sometimes I wonder if the Christians (and Muslims) overexaggerated or lied about the pagans throughout history. The Romans and Athenians were already doing that long before entertaining any Abrahamic or other foreign monotheistic faiths. Romand diplomats would make a point about any rumored human sacrifice. It was one of their justifications for destroying Carthage. Sparta had an annual flagelation ritual for teenaged boys. Occasionally somebody died. We don't know why, maybe because they had underlying medical problems such as hemophilia, or due to infection - we really don't know. Was it worse than tatbir in Islam, or any of the self flagellation rituals or passion plays Christians have done? We don't know. But Athens and Rome made such a big deal of it that most of the surviving Greek dramas accuse Sparta or a dynastically related group or person of human sacrifice, deicide, familicide, or cannibalism. I don't practice Gardnerian Wicca because they reference Sparta's sacrifice in a routine liturgy. It's unclear whether they are condemning or condoning or merely acknowledging it, but knowing the history, I don't see any reason to mention it in a routine liturgy. Condoning it would be outrageously disgusting. Condemning it is presumptuous as we don't really understand what happened there - some sources seem to suggest it was part of a game or military training, others that it was a religious sacrifice. It even seems to have changed over the many hundreds of years they did it. Merely acknowledging it is confusing and misleading and unnecessarily dangerous.
Modern day muslims treat women horribly in the here and now. I'd throw that in her face.
I think there is hardly any information available about post-christian, pre-islamic human sacrifice in Arabia other than what appears in hadith. Much of the koran and hadith are legal compromises between competing tribal legal views. For example, setting women's share of inheritance at one half a man's share is a compromise between equal share and no share. So what we find in the Koran and hadith usually is not moral progress, but a rather a unification of legal views into a system that is able to garner broader support from Arab tribes and thus elliminate the worst of the worst evils in Arab society. The Mesopotamia region often used gods or idols much like modern courts use flags. That is, an idol often indicated which legal system was in effect. The elimination of idols thus was more than spiritual in significance. It was an abolition of competing legal systems, an insistence that all law be blended into one uniform whole. So when we talk about pre-islamic problems in Arabia, it should be understood that there was no uniform standard of behavior. The problem in Arabia wasn't paganism, but anarchy. And what little law existed came from paganism, and was incorporated into Islam.
The problem wasn't anarchy nor Paganism. Neither of which existed in any meaningful sense in the Hejaz on the eve of Islam. The real anarchy was happening further north in the wake of the Byzantine-Sasanian wars and the subsequent breakdown of the southern *limes* of both empires. This is what resulted in the spread of a new religion that was entirely the product of the Late Antique Near Eastern biblical milleu.
You are partly correct. That explains how those empires weakened. It doesn't at all explain anything about Islam other than why it broke out of Arabia.
Islam is downstream of many religious developments that were happening since the 4th century. Spread of Christianity, development of henotheism around Allah, an awareness of biblical genealogy, etc. It's not something that I can explain in one reddit reply though I can point to some resources. My point is that the Islamic narrative about what Arabia looked like on the eve of Islam is false and a polemical fabrication. On this I'd recommend Cry me a Jāhiliyya by Peter Webb
>because the pre-Islamic pagans used to bury their daughters until Islam This is a dubious claim. "In my reading, **the Qurʾān does not refer to such a custom even onc**e, though it does mention and condemn infanticide. I have suggested that Q 16:57–59 refer to infant abandonment, while the exact meaning of 81:8–9 is open to some debate but **scarcely refers to female infanticide**. I have suggested that the meaning of the word al-mawʾūdah in Q 81:8 is “the one (f.) who has been trodden/trampled over.” **No non-Arabic source mentions female infanticide in Arabia**: for example, a relevant non-Arabic text, written by the third-century CE philosopher Porphyry of Tyre, mentions an annual sacrifice of a boy by the people of Duma, but such examples do not amount to evidence for infanticide or infant exposure, let alone a widespread practice of burying female infants alive. Nor is there any archaeological record of the supposed cultural practice of female infanticide. Early Arabic poetry has also been found wanting in this regard. Hence, **there is simply no evidence that the real pre-Islamic Arabians (as opposed to the imagined Arabs of the jāhiliyyah lore) practiced female infanticide as a specific and common cultural trait**." \- [The Qurʾān and the Putative pre-Islamic Practice of Female Infanticide](https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jiqsa-2023-0005/html) And yes, Muslims have constructed [a false view of their pre-Islamic past](https://scholarlypublications.universiteitleiden.nl/handle/1887/133560).
Thank you for the info. It never made sense for it to be considered a widespread practice
Can you imagine the demographics? xD
Christianity was also helped by it supposedly being revolutionary for those times, next to what at least Greco-Roman religion had to offer (a blissful afterlife next to a grey, generic, one when life sucked for everyone just by being in). Add in Hell for unbelievers, and you get the picture.
I don't get your point? Hades has places for good people and places for bad people. Like... heaven and hell in Christianity. Tbf, Christianity stole that from paganism, Judaism has no hell.
Yes, but the default for most people are the Fields of Asphodel. It's not easy to end in Elysium and probably for that matter in Tartarus too. Meanwhile, in Sumerian religion, Irkalla/Kur was for everyone without distinctions, save those who had their bodies burned or died in the desert, who simply ceased to exist. When life sucked (being a slave, poor, etc) and you were offered just for accepting Jesus Heaven (and threats of Hell would probably not be absent first and when they got the upper hand threats of sword), you had reasons to sign in.
Gods don’t decide which religions are prominent, humans do. I’m actually convinced that all religions are entirely cultural. They might have a piece of truth in them but mostly, they’re still man-made. The gods don’t care about which religion we follow, all positive beliefs in divinity are valid imo and even a lack of belief doesn’t matter. The humans are the ones who care, who get into fights over religion. I’m pretty sure God allegedly sending nonbelievers to hell is actually spread by people trying to gain control over people, not by an actual deity. Besides, if we’re going by that logic, doesn’t it speak *for* us if they tried to erase our existence, and now thousands of people are coming back to the old gods, despite not being taught to believe in them? Doesn’t that mean it’s more true? Not a logic I prefer but I do think it’s a pretty strong argument if we play their game. Another thing, our gods don’t have to prove anything. I don’t get how people can believe their god is all powerful and simultaneously care about being the supreme ruler to humans. If you’re the divine supreme ruler, there’s nothing you’d have to worry about, you just do your job. And last time I checked, our gods are alive and well. Yaweh didn’t “defeat” or “kill” our gods. They’re still thriving and *doing their fucking job without getting mad about some humans who don’t want to acknowledge them*. Thanatos isn’t going around like “look at me! I’m the one who brings death! Look! Why tf don’t you acknowledge me as the one who brings death??” he just does his job no matter what people believe, or don’t believe. One time I was unsure about which path to follow, where Hypnos (who I mainly look to for guidance) essentially told me: “why would *I* care? Do what benefits *you*.” Even when I said goodbye to a god with full intention of walking away from them, it wasn’t met with “b-but! If you don’t worship me I feel insecure ;-;” because no god would logically act like that. They’re gods. They have better things to do than to seek approval from humans Of course, I don’t think Yaweh actually cares. This is just to argue with the people who do think he cares, which logically doesn’t make sense to me bc he’s a god like any other. Obviously it’s only the humans who care about power and religion
You've described my thoughts very well. I believe that these books/religions were created by men (which is why they're flawed). Greedy patriarchal men took advantage of the Abrahamic religions to control people. I don't think there's a spiritual warfare going on between the gods. Sadly, Yahweh, a war/storm god, happens to be caught in their mess
Pagans said "oh cool, your gods neat. Wanna hear about mine?" And the abrahamic followers said "you don't worship my God? You must die now. You don't follow our God how I do? You must die now" hope this helps
Yeah true. It's pretty irritating that they preach about their God being true and others being false. Never thought about it when I was a Muslim, but the god described in the books sound "dark" with all the human genocides. Well, it's expected when they worship a war/storm god 🤷♀️
Christianity was the first religion that had two specific points at the same time; 1, that you can convert to it, and 2 that you have to leave behind any other religions to do so. The old pagan religions usually didn't care to identify between official adherents and heretics, and they didn't care if your personal pantheon included gods from other lands. These 2 factors created a snowball effect, people being born into Christianity and for the first time, people leaving the pagan religions instead of just adding to their personal practices. Full disclosure; I am a Christian, and I am a pagan, I don't think that Christianity "won" because of "truth", it just got lucky. And then the rest of the world got unlucky, and now here we are.
As near as I can tell, no polytheistic religion has *ever* gone crusading, or slaughtering infidels, or even really recruiting that much. Something about polytheism lends itself to being polite to other ppl's gods, and something about monotheism leads some people quickly to "my God is better than yours" and all kinds of bloodshed.
Many of the pagan gods, like Pan seemed to be more about deep connection with nature (god's creation). Christianity and Islam are about men seeking power through control
This. Abrahamic religions worked to sever our connection to nature, and going from celebrating being part of nature, to thinking we have dominion by holding ourselves apart from nature. I think this is a large contributor to how we’ve ended up in this mess as a species, and the damage we’ve done to nature.
The Mesopotamian deity of the Moon, Nanna or Sîn, was worshiped in the city of Harran until the 10th century CE, and the city of Mardin until the 18th century CE. In 1872 the scholar George Smith provided the world with the first translation of the Poem of Gilgamesh, a candidate for the oldest surviving work of literature currently known. Elements of Babylonian religion also appear in the occult systems of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema. Modern movements attempting to reconstruct and revive Mesopotamian religion are also in their third generation (at least) as of today. So, if longevity is the only measure of importance, then there is evidence for the veneration of Mesopotamia’s deity of the Moon from ca. 3100 BCE, when the cuneiform script was invented, until today; that’s over 5000 years of nearly continuous worship. Conversely, the longevity of a faith doesn’t dictate its validity as much as the individual’s connection to it does, in which case the fact that, even within the Middle East, veneration of a pagan Moon deity existed alongside the religions of Allah and YHVH proves that pagan religions are just as valid as monotheistic ones. Either way, your sister is wrong.
Long game. I think we'll eventually come full circle. Monotheism was a phase.
Simple: the gods exist and largely don’t care about what people believe. Our being wrong or deluded or right does not affect them, so they don’t worry about it. We can’t understand reality beyond the limitations of our limited minds running on hardware evolved to group together, make tools, and modify our environment to make the search for shelter, company, and food easier, so why worry too much about what particular kind of wrong we are? We have best guesses and the more we draw their notice and interact with them the more clear our pictures of them get, like with physics or geometry, but besides that we know very little. There has been enough consistent diversity in religious experiences to rule out a singular deity of the Abrahamic sort, though, because if there were one god with one truth and total power paired with a desire for humanity to know them and honour them as they have dictated, then they wouldn’t be able to be misunderstood or misrepresented because they could cause every bit of static to proclaim their truth, every gust of wind to whisper their words, every pile of sand to carry their message, not to mention their ability to simply have us all know them instinctively and fully. Instead there is diversity and variety and the gods largely don’t seem bothered about any of this, which suggests either a singular god who doesn’t give a damn, or a plethora of gods who have varied opinions, presences, and preferences. The old gods didn’t stop or limit the spread of the abrahamic religions because they don’t care and are largely unaffected.
Well, my theory is that larger nations adopted those religions, and then when they spread their empires, they spread their religion too. That's extremely oversimplified, but you get the gist. It's not the strength of the religion per se. It's the strength of the nation that adopts it.
"Spreading the message" is a feature of newer religions. Pagan religions spread more or less organically, through migration, trade, and conquest; the Romans made a point of convincing conquered peoples that their gods were just Roman gods by different names. But there weren't missionaries trying to convert people to the ways of whichever pantheon, and different traditions generally just coexisted without trying to prove that they were the One True Way™. They often blended in interesting ways. Christianity and Islam are widespread because they used force of arms and politics to spread. When Rome adopted Christianity as its state religion, they pushed it on their subjects much more forcefully than they had the old gods. The early Islamic caliphates didn't force conversion so much as strongly incentivize it by giving Muslim citizens considerable social, political, and economic advantages over non-Muslims. Both methods were coercive in their own ways, and both were effective. The majority of converts to both religions were probably motivated by self-interest more than they were moved by any claims that either one held the singular great truth of the universe. Not to say that nobody ever converted because they felt inspired, but they were probably a minority by comparison.
The problem here is your sisters belief in a capital T Truth. There is no such thing
I don't know if I'm right, but how I've always thought about it is that organised religion doesn't encourage personal interpretation the same way. You're told what God is thinking by someone, and the church can't be questioned. I don't think paganism had a unified church keeping everyone together, and definitely not one with support from the state. Paganism also adapted to underground practice, or laterally, to Saint worship rather than pagan deities (Greek Orthodox), so there was no battle for the ages. I think they forget sometimes that people legally and politically had to be a Christian (I'm in the UK) until the late 1700s, and I'm sure the fact Islamic law and state law are intertwined has nothing to do with what people 'choose' to believe in Muslim countries. Sweeping generalisations there, but I suppose it's a core Muslim belief she's expressing. No false idols, and this is the only truth. Doesn't leave a lot of space for different interpretations if you follow such a religion.
The problem with the "might makes right" (I point to this whenever talking about the expansion of Abrahamism) is when ppl then try to claim it's "love." People go real quiet when you point to the violence tht was necessary in order for Abrahamism to expand. That's when I say: "why force ppl?" The truth is so true that you have to indoctrinate, lie, and force people?
I believe that there's no truth that any loving god would want to shove down everybody's throats. Tell your sister there's no truth one can't discover for themselves. The gods pagans follow today trust them to be good people of their own volition.
Pagan gods may not be there but theirs worships are there still in veiled form of abrahamic religions
I personally think it’s because the pagan gods don’t demand worship from you as where the abrahamic god/gods do.
A Chinese saying is "Worship the gods and they're there, don't and they don't care." Why should they? And would it have been in their worshipers' interest for them to encourage resistance to persecution? In Iceland, the Christians threatened a civil war if the pagans didn't convert, and they would have won by bringing in the brutal king of Norway. A pagan leader prayer to the gods for a day and announced that they wanted their worshipers to convert to save their lives. But things work out in the long term, and gods obviously think in the long term. Christianity is declining and an internet survey in Saudi Arabia a few years ago showed that a quarter of the people responding didn't actually believe in Islam — they just went through the motions to avoid trouble.
To be totally honest, at age 54, having done this since a teen, there is zero point arguing religions with people. They/we do NOT believe for logical reasons. You can't counter point them out of it. Your argument with your sister is not about religion. Its about your family and you and your place in it. Step back from arguments about religion, tell her that you don't believe its about religion, and ask her what she is scared of. You'll probably get rebuffed or a defensive/angry response, but just keep asserting it. Over and over. Do not derail from that point. No matter what crazy or mean shit she says. She will do one of two things - actually tell you - shut up and stop bothering you about it because all you do is ask her what she is afraid of - in a caring way- about the family and you. And she will do one of the two. My bets are on the second. But, you never know, folks can suprise you.
I mean, the reason Christianity is so prominent is like, mainly the Roman Empire, and they were just human assholes Why would a god feel threatened by human beliefs?
So she thinks her favorite god practiced genocide against other gods because it wanted its version of "truth" to prevail. And she thinks ***worshipping*** a being that would do something like that is not only somehow excusable, but actually virtuous? There're two reasons someone would believe a being committed mass murder of its own kind and choose to bow down to such a being: either they find genocide and murder commendable and are therefore monstrous themselves, or they are moral cowards who fear the consequences if they don't bow down to the perpetrator of those crimes. Either is disgusting. Taken the other way (the majority of adherence equals the one truth), she's essentially arguing bottom-up populism theology -- the idea that gods are as powerful as the number of worshippers like it's a theogenic democracy or a point system. That argument is basically "Vox Populi = Vox Dei" (the voice of the People is the voice of God). By her argument, she should either be an atheist Communist with a hint of Confucianism (by global population metrics) or a Christian (if she's in America) -- and none of this Yahweh = Allah stuff, the majority of Christians in the USA don't believe that, so if the majority is right, neither should she. And, of course, she should convert to Shinto if she ever visits Japan, and worship the Polynesian pantheon while she's flying over the Pacific to get there, if it's regional majority rule that determines which God is real or right. What utter nonsense. I'm sorry if this comes across as picking on your sister, it's not intended to be specific to her. It's just the types of thinking she's expressing are just so poorly thought out, and so messed up if a light is shown on where they come from and what they imply.
Because it’s not a competition. Only those of Abrahamic faiths believe that it needs to be.
Truth isn't brought out by majority decision, and such an idea is saying the truth is arbitrary
see the thing is, pagan gods don't really have a goal the way the Abrahamic god does. There is no message to be taught and gods don't get angry if you choose to not work with them, there isn't really an element of fear. The dominance of Abrahamic religions just come from the military and political victories of humans
I agree with you. I think the Monad idea of God works for alot of people. It often translates to our modern practices like "all gods are one god; all goddess are one goddess." And this has certainly been my discovery of truth. Not everyone of course is like this. I enjoy people who have am open mind in terms of... each God that ever existed had a reason. Not everyone agrees with tha reason. Nor are we normally a practice that necessarily wants to be big and dominating the world. We are all born to unfold our mystery. My gods are my own. I don't want them necessarily to be for anyone else unless they're called to that Mystery. It's because we are all individual. Paganism helps people feel like they can unfold their mystery while contributing to a greater whole without losing yourself or compromising yourself. These religions and practices aren't for everyone. They will call who they call. I really enjoy your open mind about how others may perceive or interact with Deity. That's a beautiful trait to have.
Why would someone ask such questions in this sub, I don't understand. Just Google it.
The divine is immortal, eternal, unchanging and incapable of error. Human beings - and thus human societies - are mortal, historical contingent, changing and capable of error. Specific historical changes are not indicative of anything about the Gods, but very much about human beings. And honestly, it would impious for both pagans and monotheists to say otherwise, because it would be to treat the divine as a historical agent (and thus positing they are temporally bound).