Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laurie Fendrich, professor of fine arts at Hofstra, sarcastically longs for a return to the pre-Christian, pagan past:
When all is said and done, I think we might have been better off if the great monotheistic religions—Islam, Judaism and Christianity—had never gotten off the ground. Beautifully lucid and full of solace as the idea of one, just God is, imagine for a moment if history had gone a different way, and we’d all remained pagans of, say, the Greek sort.
As modern-day pagans, we’d each be lovingly maintaining a little altar in the corner of our living room that would be dedicated to a particular god or goddess. Our closest friends and neighbors would most likely have altars honoring the same god or goddess, but not necessarily. All of us, no matter the particular deities we chose to honor in our own little homes, would honor and respect all the others because they belonged to the pantheon that expressed all of Nature. . . .
With hundreds if not thousands of deities being worshipped and a nearly infinite variety of pantheistic expressions throughout the United States and the world beyond, people would find it difficult to wage war over any particular gods. How would anyone figure out who wasn’t religiously the same, since all the gods would in one way or another be overlapping all the other gods, and honored by everyone?
Oh, yes. Let’s imagine a world without the Judeo-Christian command to love one’s neighbor. Let’s imagine a world in which every individual is not made in the image and likeness of God. Let’s imagine a world in which the gods can be even more capricious and wicked than their own worshipers. Let’s imagine a world in which wars were neither just nor unjust, but instead just a fact of life. And let’s also remember—because we don’t have to imagine—the Peloponnesian War, a war that needed no competing Gods to produce a casualty rate unimaginable today. (It would be as if 44 million Americans had been killed in the European and Japanese theaters of World War II.)
It might be interesting to imagine what the world would be like if the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob never broke into history and supplanted paganism. But it’s also helpful, because it reminds us that the reality—that God loves us, created us in his image, and wants us to love each other—is so much better than the alternative.
November 10th, 2009 | 3:07 pm
Let’s also imagine the pagan Roman world: where Christianity was illegal, and Christian leaders killed for their faith?
…Tolerance. Right.
November 10th, 2009 | 5:18 pm
This person needs to talk to an African Christian who’s come out of *real* heathenism, not the kind you look back at romantically through admiring classical statues. He’ll tell you of a horror of living afraid of the dark, of never knowing what spirits you’ve inadvertantly offended; of wearing yourself out observing a thousand taboos. The real face of paganism is not a pretty one. The beautiful Greek statues were made by people who’d mostly stopped believing in the old gods.
November 10th, 2009 | 5:46 pm
You fail to mention, of course, that the Peloponnesian War was not fought for religious reasons, but geopolitical ones. Athens wasn’t attempting to impose its version of Hellenic Greek paganism on Sparta.
Ms. Fendrich’s original point remains, however; polytheist societies are, as a rule, much more tolerant on a religious level than monotheist societies are, because implicit within polytheism is a certain tolerance of other beliefs.
The example of Pagan Rome’s intermittent (and ultimately futile) repressions of early Christianity, of which Mr. Mendez reminds us, is a special one; Rome was in fact noted for its tolerance of local cults and religious practices, even granting a special dispensation for the Jews from the requirement of Emperor-worship. The Christians ran afoul of them specifically because theirs was a new faith that sought to undermine the Roman faith; had Christianity been capable of co-existence with other religions (as did, for exmple, Mithraism, one of Christianity’s chief rivals at the time), I think the Roman response to it would have been vastly different.
Oh, and your link is incorrect. It should point here: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Unhappy-Thoughts-on-Religion/8674/
November 10th, 2009 | 6:32 pm
I doubt it is possible to generalize about religious violence committed by pagans and monotheists. Christopher Kirsch tried to do so in his history of the Roman transition, but there were so many caveats to his general thesis (”pagan tolerant, Christian intolerant”) that the thesis died of a thousand qualifications on both sides. Christians have often persecuted unbelievers, but so have Greeks (Socrates being just one example), Romans, Norse, Chinese, Tibetans, Africans, Polynesians, Japanese, and oh, just about everyone, it seems.
The difference is less in the evil that people of all persuasions do, than in the revolutionary good the Gospel brought into the world. I’ve described some of the changes wrought in various forums, most recently in The Truth Behind the New Atheism. What’s striking about the Christian revolution is how often the people who benefit most palpably from it, are totally unaware of what they gained. (Like Richard Dawkins, walking over Oxford cobblestones once trod by the likes of Wycliffe, Boyle, Wilkins, Wesley, Penn, and Locke, among other Christians who have changed the world for the better just from that one town!)
November 10th, 2009 | 10:37 pm
I won’t presume to know whether we all would have been “better off” without Abrahamic religions. That’s a huge question. I will say we could do very well with a lot less of their influence.
November 10th, 2009 | 11:28 pm
Was Laurie Fendrich’s article actually sarcastic? Whether they agreed or disagreed with her point, the people who commented on the article on the Chronicle website all seemed to take her seriously…
November 10th, 2009 | 11:42 pm
“Ms. Fendrich’s original point remains, however; polytheist societies are, as a rule, much more tolerant on a religious level than monotheist societies are, because implicit within polytheism is a certain tolerance of other beliefs.”
Maybe so. However, the Peloponnesian War does count against the implicit extension of her point, that a modern world of Greco-paganism would be a significantly less violent place.
The Peloponnesian War may not have been fought over religion, but their common, tolerant paganism didn’t prevent the Greeks from going at it hammer and tongs for other reasons.
Nor did it prevent the wars of conquest and extermination that founded and sustained the various ancient empires, nor the internal oppressions that defined those empires’ structures — not merely the religious persecution of Christians and Jews, but much more terribly,the systematic and nearly universal evils of ancient slavery.
So perhaps we would indeed have less wars of religion in the world if the Abrahamic religions had not arisen. But it doesn’t follow that we’d have any fewer wars, or any greater concept of human worth or justice.
November 11th, 2009 | 12:01 am
Keep in mind, Paganism was not one religion with many gods, but many religions each with their own god or gods, which competed with each other as well as Christianity. Like any product in a crowded market, Christianity eventually achieved market leadership, and then control, by better addressing the customer needs. When these needs disappear, and a replaced, discontinued, or subsumed by others, the demand for Christianity will decline. True, Christianity can free people from the more despicable and vicious forms of religions which seem to flourish in Africa. It has not done very well against Buhdism or Hinduism, and has seemingly made little dent in the Muslim world where freethought is thought crime.
November 11th, 2009 | 7:45 am
People would also find it difficult to conceive of a rationally ordered universe, and therefore to conceive of things like planets traveling in elliptical orbits governed by laws of gravity and motion, or of things like germs as disease-causers.
As thinkers from Alfred North Whitehead to James Hannam have shown, the birth of science had as a necessary condition the belief that the universe was not run by hundreds of thousands of deities all doing their own thing.
November 11th, 2009 | 7:54 am
The unfeeling, detached tone of several of these posts whose writers seem to know both paganism[s] and Christianity only from without is truly disturbing. Have we really have as a nation lost awareness or understanding of our culture rooted in Hebrew, Greek, Roman wisdom and arduously achieved through horrific trial and error? Do educated citizens of the United States truly consider paganism[s] equal to noble Hebrew and Christian teaching to love God and neighbor as oneself? Or was the quotation given intended to expose the moral incoherence into which we have fallen?
November 11th, 2009 | 10:20 am
As a Pagan myself, and an educated citizen of the United States, I would certainly say that Paganism is easily the equal to the teachings of Christianity and Judaism, and in most ways its superior.
November 11th, 2009 | 10:32 am
Re the post by “Joseph”: What are the premises on which you base your argument?
November 11th, 2009 | 11:10 am
There are no pagans today; only pretend-pagans. No one seriously believes that the ocean is Poseidon (and Poseidon is the ocean) or that earthquakes and tsunamis can be abated by sacrificing a horse to him. Or that the planetary stars that move across the heavens are literally gods going about their business – that the stars are “alive, divine, and influential in human affairs.” Or that trees are dryads, with wills of their own.
November 11th, 2009 | 12:48 pm
Oh, good, it seems that Mike knows all the Hellenic Reconstructionists in the U.S. and Greece _personally_, and so can tell us just what and how they believe. Or are you just psychic, Mike?
I only know pretend-christians, actually. That _must_ mean that there is no other type.*sarcasm*
November 11th, 2009 | 1:23 pm
I have heard these sorts of arguments before- the superiority of one worldview over another, laying all sorts of wars and bloodshed at the feet of, alternatively, Paganism, Judaism, Christianity, islam, etc.
But since I am a Christian, I can only answer from my own perspective- that one of the essential tenets of my faith is the fallibility and corruptibility of mankind. Had there been no Abrahamic religions, can anyone seriously think that all the evils that lurk in our hearts would have magically vanished?
I think the best answer, as with so many things, comes from Bill Watterson, writing as Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin: “You mean you don’t believe in a dark force that leads men into evil?”
Hobbes: “No I am saying I don’t think men need the help.”
November 11th, 2009 | 2:24 pm
I have been a Pagan for well over 40 years now. The other day I realized that there has been martial conflict going on since I was born in 1947.
I have come to one conclusion — humans use anything for excuse, be it religion, greed, or the fact they may covet something another country may have, sex, or whatever, it’s all an excuse so
that they may kill others. It’s been that way since we left the cave and until we say, “Today I will not kill” the people of today are no better than those from ancient times.
November 11th, 2009 | 3:08 pm
I, for one, am eternally grateful for the way practitioners of monotheistic faiths never wage war on each other because their god inveighs against it. However, now I’m puzzled about everyone from Redcoats to Nazis. Were they one and all pagans?
November 11th, 2009 | 3:25 pm
Anne–The Nazis were closer to pagans than to Christians in many respects.
As for the main question, “When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justufied, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.”–G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
November 11th, 2009 | 4:56 pm
The gods are dead – and a good thing too. They were an arbitrary, nasty, bunch.
That it is a good thing that God is dead is far less certain. Once we thought that when the God was dead, all would be well. Now we know better.
November 11th, 2009 | 5:54 pm
The piece doesn’t actually seem to be sarcastic. If it is, it’s not very well written, and if it’s not then the author hasn’t been keeping a very close eye on the “ZOMG RELIGION CAUSES WAR” argument, which is dead and which not even the so-called New Atheists use anymore.
ps. THIS IS WHAT PAGANS ACTUALLY BELIEVE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QtvIonRjog
November 11th, 2009 | 8:27 pm
To “Ars Artium” (no need for quotes in my case, btw– I find no need to hide behind some pseudonym): I would turn your question back upon you, and ask why you feel the “noble Hebrew and Christian teaching” of Christianity and Judaism is somehow inherently and objectively superior to the philosophy of any and all pagan religions.
I would ask that you specifically address the moral codes of behavior attendant to the religions of the ancient Germanic and Greco-Roman societies in particular, as they were both the greatest rivals to, and influences on, contemporary Christian teaching.
To M.L. Martin: Your calumny about Nazis and Pagans is intellectually dishonest, and does not move the conversation forward. The Nazis, in point of fact, clapped all of the actual Odin-worshipers into concentration camps when they assumed power. The Catholic Bishops and Lutheran ministers, somehow, managed to avoid such wholesale oppression. You may draw your own conclusions.
To Richard Henkus: The Gods are not, in fact, dead; the fact that they are honored and given sacrifice to this very day speaks to that fact. The question is not whether or not the God of Sinai is “dead”. The question is whether or not the God of Sinai was ever what he claimed to be in the first place.
November 12th, 2009 | 7:18 am
A response to Joseph: I am in complete agreement with the fact that the Christian faith was pre-figured in antiquity and that people from every nation had adumbrations of the full Truth that was to be revealed. All of these true and pure insights have been integrated into the whole of Christian belief which represents a culmination of all that is good and true. A committed Christian cannot fail to recognize that truth is to be found in the writings of Seneca, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle, for example. It taproot is the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Perhaps you can offer other significant names. What Christianity provides beyond these partial truths is the ultimate Truth – that God is not capricious but acts in a way that can be apprehended by human reason; that human persons in their wholeness can freely choose to become capable of friendship with God, although “apart from Him we have no good” and, finally, that He chose to manifest himself to us in human form to show us “the way in which we should walk.” While this is my personal reponse, there are others qualified to offer much more substantial, clearly structured arguments to you. Father James Schall comes to mind; Professor R. R. Reno of Creighton University; Father Edward Oakes.
November 12th, 2009 | 7:57 am
One further thought to Joseph: Using a pseudonym when participating in a blog discussion can be more revelatory than using one’s own but completely anonymous first name. The pseudonym is chosen from the writer’s hierarchy of things valued.
November 12th, 2009 | 10:48 am
Re Joseph’s statement: “Ms. Fendrich’s original point remains, however; polytheist societies are, as a rule, much more tolerant on a religious level than monotheist societies are, because implicit within polytheism is a certain tolerance of other beliefs.”
I would point out the “on the ground” reality in India these days. Christians are targeted, challenged, outcast and persecuted.
November 12th, 2009 | 2:17 pm
We need a ‘rectification of names’ here. Seems the word ‘pagan’is used in multiple senses: actual ancient beliefs, a collective noun for all ancient beliefs, and a label for some new non-Christian belief. What’s my line? Will the real Pagan stand up?
November 12th, 2009 | 2:58 pm
Treat others the way you would like to be treated. Plato
November 14th, 2009 | 9:15 pm
To “Ars Artium”: When you say:
“What Christianity provides beyond these partial truths is the ultimate Truth – that God is not capricious but acts in a way that can be apprehended by human reason; that human persons in their wholeness can freely choose to become capable of friendship with God, although “apart from Him we have no good” and, finally, that He chose to manifest himself to us in human form to show us “the way in which we should walk.””
You beg the question. How is it that you know yours is the “whole truth”, and that the truth that I follow is but an incomplete fraction of yours? I might counter by saying that what you deem to be “truth” I deem to be invention. Effective invention, perhaps, and even sublime in its way at times, but ultimately nothing more than the invention of human beings attempting to explain their world and offer a means of behavior within it. My world-view is no less true than yours, in that sense, and for me it is entirely more true, inasmuch as it is the world-view I choose to espouse. In the absence of any *objective* evidence to the contrary, there is simply nothing to say that Christianity’s claim to “truth” is any more valid than that of Theodism (the particular Pagan faith which I follow). I would also point out, parenthetically, that my Gods are not any more “capricious” than yours, inasmuch as the God of Sinai is not above his own patternless whims; look at the laws of Deuteronomy for some excellent examples. My own faith is fully within the bounds of human reason, and allows for, I might argue, a much more personal relationship between a given God and a human being than yours, said relationship being based on the particular affinity of one person with a God or Goddess who has particular attributes that enhance that affinity.
As far as names and pseudonyms, you have but to click on my name in this post to take you to my blog, where you will find my thoughts on a number of different subjects, and can therefrom make your own determination as to what I do and do not value. (As well as taking you to my full name, I might add.) No need to be so touchy on that point; I was merely trying to save you a few keystrokes by not putting quotation marks around my name.
November 14th, 2009 | 9:28 pm
To ODIrony:
That is an excellent point, and actually an issue I’ve been following (albeit somewhat haphazardly) for some time now, as Hinduism and my own particular brand of Pagan belief have a common ancestor in the religion of the Indo-Europeans (there are, for example, striking parallels between Indra and Thor).
The phenomenon of Hindu fundamentalism is a relatively recent one, so it is quite possible that such an attitude is something that was learned from the monotheistic faiths. It is also, however, much more linked to Indian nationalism than pure religion, as the entry on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica confirms, and I think that is the vital point there. Just as we see a rise in Orthodox Christianity concurrent with Russian nationalism under Putin, so too we see a rise in Hinduist feelings as we see an uptick in Indian nationalism in the face of Islamist aggression. (Heh– I never said this would be simple.)
I would also point out, just for the record, that Hindu fundamentalism does not target Christians exclusively (or even primarily); Muslims are more often the targets of their wrath (which makes sense, given the rivalry between India and Pakistan). In a very large sense, Hindu militancy is a response to increased Muslim militancy, and, to a lesser degree, more aggressive proselytizing by Christians.
November 15th, 2009 | 4:10 pm
I don’t think that the Peloponnesian war is the best example. My first thought upon reading this was “Has she ever read the Odyssey or the Illiad?” The pagan Greeks lived lives of constant warfare *instigated and inflamed* by the gods. Human war is just a proxy for the wars of the Gods. If there is any lesson to the greatest works of Greek paganism, it is that the gods start the wars and the humans suffer for it. It was the Judgment at Paris that began the conflict. It was the interventions of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, etc that extended it. A decades-long war, the destruction of a great civilization (genocide in modern terms) and terrible atrocities, all because of the terrible pride of the gods.
November 15th, 2009 | 10:24 pm
The irony– it burns!!
Zach, one wonders if you’ve ever read Deuteronomy…
November 19th, 2009 | 8:03 pm
“Let’s imagine a world without the Judeo-Christian command to love one’s neighbor.”
Actually, this command exist outside of Judeo-Christian religion, whose don’t follow what preaches.
“Let’s imagine a world in which every individual is not made in the image and likeness of God.”
The problem is that will be only one picture and everything else different from that patttern will tagged as “heretic” and killed.
“Let’s imagine a world in which the gods can be even more capricious and wicked than their own worshipers.”
Actually, if you read the bible, God is more capricious and wicked than his followers.
“Let’s imagine a world in which wars were neither just nor unjust, but instead just a fact of life. And let’s also remember—because we don’t have to imagine—the Peloponnesian War, a war that needed no competing Gods to produce a casualty rate unimaginable today.”
As if all we need is a religious excuse to kill someone. Wait! Christians already made it!
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