Will heathendom (pagandom) bring freedom back to us?

Must be poor wording on my part because that is not what I am saying.

I am saying that the act of stating what heathens should do is odd. Why? Stating what all members of my group X should do is rather Abrahamic to me. Like I should tell all pagans how to live their lives and how they should struggle for freedom. LIke I can make that kind of rule. And a rule about what they should do. Which is even more resrictive than a rule about what they should not do, at least in many cases, since it compells towards a specific life.

I am not saying that being a heathen is like being a monotheist/Abrahamist.

It is that act of laying out what should be done that seems more Abrahamic than heathen to me. My objection works on the assumption that these groups are different.

Ah, okay. So you don’t unite them. That’s okay. Else you would try to unite fire and water.

Oh, yes, they are! They are very much different, more different than all others from each other!

Why did so many heathens became monotheists? What was the success of the missionaries?

1.) Chosen people in the case of the Judaism?
2.) Salvation (especially by Jesus) in the case of the Christendom / Christianity?
3.) Capture / conquest and power by war in the case of the Islam / Mussulmans / Mussulmen?

Will also many monotheists become heathens? And without missionaries?

1.) ?
2.) ?
3.) ?

its the old inverted pyramid my friends. From the worship of the one, the one and only, descend to the worship of the many. The many each unto it’s own worship, even if it’s the self. And finally that vanishes into the nihilistic none. No one seems to understand, no one tries to appear as if they don’t, but the political miasma draws them away from such an intangible, dangerous mystery, even while knowingly suspecting it. Theosophy,the science of mind , and the gnostic Jesus would prevent the ultimate descent into this kind of absolute freedom.

In the americas the devastation of the series of plagues brought over by Europeans no doubt gutted the cultures, then murder, colonialization, systematic rape, forced suppression of cultures, and so on. This also happened in Europe, though not with the unintentional germ warfare as a softening up bombardment. Once colonialism is in place, and this was true in Europe and the Americas and everywhere else the babies of Rome have gone, then there are punishments for not being a monotheist and rewards for being one. The former including the death of you and your family. Often children were schooled separately from their parents and culture.

Certain forms of paganism had some kind of power worship, winners have spiritual power or some related meme. So if you lose, it undermines the religion. (of course the citizens in monotheist cultures and Romanmachine armies have lost completely in advance, but that is another story)

I noticed a trend in this direct in the 90s-00s. NOt that most of these were believers in monotheism who shifted, but they came out of the ranks of once monotheistic genetic lines.

Missionaries today tend to market their ideas. You could look at the traditional missionary as marketing ideas, but I think you probably get my drift.

By loving the words of their fathers.

That is probably the reason why they can not be as successful as the former missionaries were. Maybe that is also the reason why some heathens of this forum (I don’t mean you and some others) don’t answer my questions, because they are no real but marketed, merchandised heathens. Nonetheless I appreciate their reservation, but with a mere reservation they can not so easiliy become more as they would, if they were less reserved, less distant. But probably there is no other way, if an honest religion is exercised. However: a marketed heathen seems to be similar to - for example -a marketed hippie, or a marketed punk, or a marketed rapper.

My questions can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here.

Moreno, you are the only one who has answered one of those questions, namely this one: You are no heathen, aren’t you? Your indirect answer “As a heathen, I think …”. Thank you.

I think any modern human coming out of the mish mosh of paradigms they are bathed in by family school friends and media is going to have to be rather dedicated to get into any ideology or world view. That said, I see no problem with such a person finding a book about some specific form of paganism and, say, realizing, this is it. I knew it. That is what i feel. And using this experience and book to connect to others, develop practices, values and deepen the outlook. Just because the author went through a publishing house and the book was marketed does not mean it is more tainted than coming from some priest who is sent out by the marketers in the Vatican. The modern convert, however, I think, has a different challenge than the earlier ones since he or she must actually figure out what ideas are being left behind. At least a tribal member in AFrica or a Celt or a native american could probably lay out fairly quickly the general outline of his or her beliefs AND actually be correct. Modern people shift through 10 paradigms in half an hour. What rituals will they have to give up? What beliefs will no longer be considered true? What is their sense of self? All this is so muddled and cluttered and contradictory. I’ll bet it creeps in all the time unnoticed, and even the missionaries have a hard time picking it up.

My version of heathenism is put off by the current physicalist paradigm where everything, including life forms, including humans, are seen as modular chemical machines that we have the intelligence and wisdom to manipulate. My heathenism does not experience a dead universe with life and sentience as radical exceptions, especially the latter. I find the hypocritical application of scientific methodology to all matters (except when it suits ‘them’) incredibly damaging and pretty stupid, actually. Many people are pretty limited, but this is no reason for me to assume that I cannot understand things via other processes. For me it first important to extricate the mind and emotions from the grip of limiting hateful memes. Tied to this is noticing what is actually happening out there and in me.

That’s a start, I think at answering your questions, not in terms of should, but more what I connect with my heathenism.

Do you know any native american?

I have known some, but not in a Close friend sort of way.

The set of things not heathen, I Think, lacks the solution. So if freedom comes back it will be via non-Abrahamic routes. Or freedom increases might be a better way to put it. There is some swingroom or there would be no hope. (I suppose I am also a heathen in relation to monoepistemologies like scientism.)

Or it will be without history as it was more than 6000 years ago.

Perhaps it will be the history of creative acts, trends and discoveries and not the crap we had to memorize in high school. Crap in the sense of not useful in the form given and crap in the sense that it was generally a history of wars and ‘great men’, those parts that were true that is.

My tentative answer was blocked by moderation and then buried in the thread. I’m quoting it:

I posted Polonius as an example of advice from a loving father, not as intended to be THE way to live.

So,like,not your words.

Polonius was well-intentioned, but pretty muddleheaded and couldn’t follow his own advice.

Like many parents :slight_smile:

A “heathen” may draw his motivation for a good conduct in honoring his ancestry…
To not engage in actions that would shame his name.
To love his parents and grandparents and those that came before so that he wishes to make them proud.
To have self pride and self love from belonging to this lineage/culture, and to wish to preserve it.

What if a serious break from that lineage needs to be made?

And I said, So,like,not your words.
Since I got the impression you are a woman.

The only situation in which such a break would occur would be in the case in which the parents failed to… indoctrinate the child with their values, or that the child has broken from his indoctrination, such that his values differ from those of his ancestry.
In this case, one may embrace the values of a different culture and begin a new tradition by passing it along to his children.

If you can’t draw motivation from your ancestry, you can draw it from becoming ancestry… for your descendants.

If you don’t want to have children, then who cares? Piss on your food and shit on your bed and hope to die soon :slight_smile:

From my use of “fathers”?
It is meant as ancestry, think nothing of it.
And from what do you gather I am female? By the “a” at the end of the name, the female form of the word?

That is what a heathen should do, yes.

Actually it is what all human beings should do, but nihilistic human beings are not able to do.

So the question is not only heathendom versus monotheism, but also heathendom versus nihilism.

Another name for that is “Blind Faith”.

Would you care to elaborate, dear?