I have a some affection for Pagans, the modern type who engage in nature worship of the most gentle kind. I've repeatedly spoken up for the right of Wiccans and Pagans of that kind to practice and talk about their religions in public and on anti-religious websites unharassed by materialists. And I have, occasionally, expressed my admiration for how they seem to have fun in their religions. But there has to be a distinction made between those groups and others who are often put into the general category of "Pagan" some of whom kill a heck of a lot of animals in their rituals, I'm dead against killing animals. Or people for that matter, human sacrifice is as much a part of the history of Paganism as the Thirty Years War is of European Christianity.
I tend to go with what Isiah said on that count.
“The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?
Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.
When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.
Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
Take up the cause of the fatherless;
plead the case of the widow.
In that you have, among things, the real basis of democracy, a moral obligation to aid the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the dispossessed. Indeed, it places those above religious rites and sacrifices and prayers. I would like to see examples of classical Pagan scriptures that match this one for an internal critique of religion and the priest class.
Clearly, in my affection for modern Pagans I don't include the classical religions of places like Greece and Rome, brutal, murderous, patriarchal, oligarchic, slave holding state-religions which a lot of today's Pagans have falsified into some kind of ahistorical romantic fantasy. Considering the near ubiquity of a rigid patriarchal system which far surpasses that of Christianity in its history, it's amazing how many women hold those brutally oppressive systems in high regard. I think that the only explanation of that is the replacement of the real history of those with non-reality based fantasy as found in paperback novels and Hollywood junk.
The idea that the modern concept of democracy had much of anything to do with the Athenian democracy is absurd. The 18th century constitution which disenfranchised everyone except for adult white male landowners might have more in common with the Athenian system which existed for the benefit of the same description of men but the history of the United States and every other modern state has rejected that definition of the word. Our democracy, incorporating the people whose rights to justice are insisted on by Isiah, clearly didn't get that from Pagan sources but from the Bible where those ideas are found. Far more of the voters who, gradually, forced the change of the original constitution, of by and for propertied white men, to what we aspire to today read Isiah than classical philosophy. And most of them believed that Isiah was divinely inspired while virtually none of them believed the Pagan myths.
Many of the religions that have been grouped into the category Pagan, practiced actual human sacrifice, slow as well as rapid, including explicit sexual enslavement into their profit making systems, enriching their aristocratic priesthoods, selling slave children to temple brothels was common in Pagan Rome. Some of these religions were entirely sexist, seeing women - and children - as the property of husbands and fathers who, under these Pagan religions, were free to kill their children, the murder of infant girls being routine, or sell them into slavery or give them away to people who would rape them or work them to death. And that's what they did to their native population, what they did to aliens among them, to those in other places which they conquered, makes the most bloodthirsty passages in the Old Testament typical of the times and places those acts happened. Much of this is fully documented in the literature that was left by the Pagans, themselves, their religion giving most of them no reason to feel ashamed of it.
Today's Pagans, even when they adopt the names of classical and the, at times, even more brutal Odinic pagan goddesses, are nothing like the Pagans they romanticize into some kind of 20-21st century egalitarian, democratic fantasy that has to be based on today's fiction, not on a reading of the documentary or archeological record. I would imagine that for those groups most disadvantaged and endangered by the respective Pagan political-religious systems, those who could find themselves as the candidates for sexual enslavement, plain enslavement or human sacrifice were able to breathe something of a sigh of relief when those fell to Christianity which at least taught those things were deeply sinful, even if that moral teaching was inconsistently achieved. The status of children under both Judaism and Christianity was improved because they were held to be individuals with rights as human beings instead of the property of their fathers. The sexual abuse of children by priests that has been exposed in the past two decades can be contrasted to the temple prostitution of them under many of the Pagan religions, with the full support of laws in those societies. Under Christianity the rape of anyone is forbidden as a serious wrong and a sin which carries consequences, not a religious rite.
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The immediate cause for this post is an exchange, yesterday,
on the blog I used to frequent. It began with someone who goes by the name "Tralfaz Wizard" making an absurd statement:
Was thinking about this stuff this morning: Pagans invented both science and mathematics. And it was pagans with a concept of democracy (Greeks) who developed the metaphysics and epistemology necessary for science as opposed to the Chinese, who did not have much of a democratic concept (their philosophy was largely concerned with ethics of rulers) (although the Chinese did make contributions in mathematics). A huge oversimiplification to be sure, but the monotheism of Judao-Christianity-Islam would never have invented science probably because of philosophical limitations, and this monotheism is really anti-science in essence.
Considering that science, in the modern understanding of its history, began in the work of people such as Copernicus, Galileo, Nicholas Steno, Newton, and a series of people in Christian Europe- a number of them Catholic priests, and, in the case of Steno, a bishop, the statement displays nothing except a complete ignorance of the actual history of science and a fashionable anti-Christian bigotry that is ubiquitous on that blog and elsewhere. And it extends that, with an incredible and bigoted ignorance of the role of Islamic scholars who INVENTED ALGEBRA, for Pete's sake. They gave Europe the number notation that replaced the clunky system they'd inherited from the Pagan world and which was developed by a series of Christian scholars, one of the most important of those Descartes who gave us the idea of coordinates with all of its incredible usefulness for every single advance in science which came after him. The history of mathematics and science invented by "monotheists" is so massive, so obvious, so documented that it's rather astounding how a college level teacher could not know it is there. It should be as shocking as it would be if he didn't know George Washington was the first president of the United States.
Yet that massive ignorance, matched with a bigotry generated fiction was not refuted in the "Eschaton brain trust," it was echoed and built on.
Hecate: Thank you
Trafalz Wizard: You've probably already thought of this. Monotheism is held up as this huge accomplishment. But all it is really about is orthodoxy. Its entire purpose seems to be to defeat polytheism. It never actually strives to accomplish anything else.
Trafalz Wizard: Paganism, like true science, is naturalistic. And the various pagan systems likely developed organically as attempts to explain the world. Science attempts to explain the world. They're both metaphysical.
Thurb: So many reasons for our religious overlords to want us to forget that whole Galileo thing.*
Moe_Szyslak: I wrote a paper in college about how the scientific revolution was, in part, a product of the trade in relics. I still hold that view....
Such is the quality of the product of that "brain trust."
I will finish with this
Trafalz Wizard:
Really interesting question, how science and technology got united in the west versus other places. As a formal pursuit, science is rooted in Greek philosophy (hence Ph.D.) but trying to get stuff done and solve problems was always right there.
Hence Ph.D? apparently the college teaching "Wizard" doesn't know the history of universities which had entirely more to do with Catholic monastic scholarship than Greek philosophy. He might have been clued in by the way that so many of them still issue their doctoral diplomas in Latin, not in Greek. And most of those diplomas were written in CHURCH LATIN.
As one of my internet friends said, there is so much wrong with what was said by these educated people that it's hard to know where to begin or how far to go with it. What it does show are an astonishing ignorance of the literature and history of science, including the biographies of virtually all of the early figures in science and some of the most important figures in the history of mathematics. And I'm not even considering the quasi-monotheism of Pythagoras. Not to mention a "Wizard" and a Witch and Pagans who claim to be upholding the scientific tradition which was originally created to overturn a magical view of the physical universe by "monotheists." Considering the attacks on their harmless beliefs by their rival, atheist "defenders of science" in such groups as the CFI and pseudo-skepticism, the entire thing is an amazingly incoherent muddle of ignorance and bigotry.
Unfortunately, the exchange of that kind of so-called erudition isn't only found on Eschaton, it's widespread among the so-called educated class of today. They absorbed a lot more of anti-Christian and anti-religious bigotry than they ever did of accurate information on these topics.
* I'm sure one of the people who would have been shocked by this exchange would have been Galileo who was a Catholic who maintained a daughter in a convent, an obvious "monotheist" who, in what should be his well known
letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany showed that he knew the history of his science better than today's college educated class:
In order to facilitate their designs, they seek so far as possible (at least among the common people) to make this opinion seem new and to belong to me alone. They pretend not to know that its author, or rather its restorer and confirmer, was Nicholas Copernicus; and that he was not only a Catholic, but a priest and a canon. He was in fact so esteemed by the church that when the Lateran Council under Leo X took up the correction of the church calendar, Copernicus was called to Rome from the most remote parts of Germany to undertake its reform. At that time the calendar was defective because the true measures of the year and the lunar month were not exactly known. The Bishop of Culm, then superintendent of this matter, assigned Copernicus to seek more light and greater certainty concerning the celestial motions by means of constant study and labor. With Herculean toil he set his admirable mind to this task, and he made such great progress in this science and brought our knowledge of the heavenly motions to such precision that he became celebrated as an astronomer. Since that time not only has the calendar been regulated by his teachings, but tables of all the motions of the planets have been calculated as well.
Having reduced his system into six books, he published these at the instance of the Cardinal of Capua and the Bishop of Culm. And since he had assumed his laborious enterprise by order of the supreme pontiff, he dedicated this book On the celestial revolutions to Pope Paul III. When printed, the book was accepted by the holy Church, and it has been read and studied by everyone without the faintest hint of any objection ever being conceived against its doctrines. Yet now that manifest experiences and necessary proofs have shown them to be well grounded, persons exist who would strip the author of his reward without so much as looking at his book, and add the shame of having him pronounced a heretic. All this they would do merely to satisfy their personal displeasure conceived without any cause against another man, who has no interest in Copernicus beyond approving his teachings.
Contrary to the phonied up history of Galileo's allegedly not being a Catholic, he, himself noted his indebtedness to priests, bishops and even Popes as scientists and patrons of science. Galileo's trial happened in a very specific context in the political intrigues of the years in which it happened. It was, from its start in an obviously satirical portrayal of his opponents in the person of "Simplico" into whose mouth Galileo unwisely inserted the words of the sitting Pope Urban VIII who was under the kind of political pressure and attack. In the context of the times, Galileo was inviting trouble by doing that. I don't know what the "Wizard" teaches but I hope it's not something where he can easily insert his ignorance of history, as is so commonly found among today's college educated class.
