The Depth of Religious and Value Difference

No a Pagan Europe would not have been Liberal

One of the strange things about arguing Paganism vs. Christianity is that a lot of Christians don't believe in their religion... Not that they don't believe their religion (some do, some don't) but whether or not they intuitively believe it's true metaphysically (whether they see creation, the flood, the miracles of Christ, as historical fact or metaphor), whether they are true believers or closet agnostic, Christians of all stripes seemingly don't believe or understand that their religion and the culture of their religion itself exists.

Like the fish when asked "How's the water?" replies "What is water?"

One of the main arguments I get again and again in these debates is that I and other vaguely defined Nietzscheans are confusing Christianity, which my interlocutors allow has some (or many depending on the church) institutional corruptions, with the wider corrupt liberal culture and now gay race communist culture that has descended on the west and taken over their churches like it has seemingly every other institution, poisoning communities, marriages, against each other, and compelling the importation of millions of foreigners.

This Twitter Thread is a Great Example

They find it either confused or almost bizarre that I'd blame these recent, corrupt, and occasionally explicitly anti-Christian ideas on a 200, 500, 2000, or 3500 year old religion, depending on which figure or thinker they want to date the final form of their faith to.

Surely if Christianity had never existed And Jupiter, Odin, and the Mysterious Slavic and Celtic gods had remained...They'd be going through the sicknesses of liberalism and progressivism too in the modern day, just like Christianity is... Instead of “Charity” liberal corrupted Pagan Churches would say that ancient Hospitality norms compel us to accept infinite migrants, they’d draw obscure parables from mythology or the Sagas to justify the exact same family courts taking 50% of everything men own to enable their wives… And the Liberal decay would look largely the same.

It’s not anything about Christian Culture and values that create modernity… Christianity is seemingly one of the smallest cultural factor in the world today compared to liberalism or even obscure marxists like the Frankfurt School.

But this isn’t true.

This is like a fish, who, having water explained to him by reference to currents, replies “How would I know how the water is today? The nearest current is miles away.”

The response betrays the fact that they simply don't understand the scale of how BIG a question culture and religion is, and how little of what they think of as "normal" or "human nature" is actually a universal.

It is actually a struggle to explain JUST how vast a factor religion and religious values are. How completely various faiths change everything about a people and culture…

To narrow it done to just sex and marriage practices, in the near western world...(a topic which itself would consume a career) All of these societies were in contact with each other:

You had Roman, Germanic, Christian, and Muslim sexual norms and Ideals within just over 1000 miles and a few hundred years. And they could not be more different.

In a Roman marriage it'd be perfectly normal for a husband to not only sleep with a slave who's not his wife but to do it in front of his wife, who was expected to treat her husbands slaves, basically like household appliances. And while in the early roman period the Husband had the power of pater-familias (life and death) over his wife... Even by Julius Caesar's day it was common for wives to cheat on their husbands, and for this to merely end in divorce... Caesar himself divorced his wife for a rumor of infidelity, claiming not to believe it, but claiming he required his wife to be even above suspicion (in a oft-interpreted and reinterpreted episode)... For the late Romans Marriages were convenient, or inconvenient, political arrangements... with men (who had slaves for sex, and ample imported prostitutes throughout the city) often treating marriage as one of the great chores and torments of life... ironically, despite the vast harems of slaves a wealthy Roman man might have, Rome was legally monogamous… You could only have one wife, who was ideally of a comparable social class. Roman men often despising their wives and marriage as burdens, expenses, or vectors of political attack. Marriage was seen as an awkward legal contract or corporate merger… And a truly scandalous wife who slept with every man except her husband might be treated by the husband as an embarrassing distant relation that he no longer sees at holidays, saving his time and affection for his loyal Iberian slaves.

This got so bad the Emperor Augustus and countless subsequent emperors had to implement policies to try to get Roman husbands and wives to produce children… That in spite of the insane amounts of sex and incredibly high birthrates of ancient Rome with a Total Fertility Rate averaging something near 5 to 6 per woman… Actually getting Trueborn Romans to breed WITH EACHOTHER and produce more Trueborn Romans was an ongoing intractable political struggle

Whereas at the other extreme Islam (at least early islam) considered even premarital fornication (a Roman commonality) to be punishable by 100 Lashes… and adultery (even hypothetically in men, but more commonly punished in women) to be punishable by stoning to death. With a Cuckolded man being almost required to seek his wife's death (and that of her lover) so as to restore his honor. The thought a great general would simply divorce a wife publicly accused of adultery and remarry would be unthinkable. Marriage as the highest reflection of honor demanded blood if it was violated.

Inspite of comparable sexual slavery ( a Sultan or Islamic noble could have dozens of sex-slaves) Islam was quite different from Rome in that Polygamy (as opposed to serial “monogamy”) was also allowed, thus wives never became so political as to stop being centers of property and reproduction… or at least a political marriage neither wife nor husband could stand did not preclude ALSO having wives who would generate trueborn sons)

Execution for adultery by stoning continues as a punishment in Islam in several countries.

Christianity by contrast is almost entirely different, it comes out of ancient Judaism which had comparable adultery punishments to Islam (stoning to death)... however early Christianity was considerably different: The perfect marriage ideal in Christianity is Mary and Joseph, a mother whose first child was not her husband's, and which did not compromise Joseph’s love for her. Likewise Jesus famously rescued the adulterer Mary Magdalene (one can speculate as to the significance of the name repeat)... and preached a gospel of forgiveness, survival, "turning the other cheek" and "resisting not evil". This gets very significant for early Christians who being Greeks and Jews, were disproportionately the slaves of the Romans... Who exercised their total power over slaves bodies wantonly, irrespective of whatever marriages the slaves practiced amongst themselves. Notably the Jews, having gone in and out of bondage a dozen+ times… recognize descent only via the mother, with patrilineal norms of descent not working under the repeated sexual humiliation, rape and slavery.

The significance of Joseph standing by Mary, and Jesus rescuing Magdalene creates a tradition and expresses a wider value set that you see to this day where Christian reverends encourage wives and husbands to work to forgive and repair infidelities as tragedies, and rescue the marriage above all else as a matter of duty and the benefit of children... Church Ladies, Christian priests, and their feminist descendants are scandalized and attempt to shame men who upon finding out about their wives infidelity and the fact “their children” are via another man… Resolve to divorce or abandon the wife (in other traditions such a husband might be expected to kill such a wife and children, and be forbidden to pray until he had). The Marriage is conceived as a trial that can only be endured and survived by working together and working to love each other, maybe even in spite of the other person and all possible reason.

And then there is the Northern Germanic tradition (and the Celtic/Arthurian tradition it influenced) which is the most dramatically romantic of the four... Where love at first sight, being willing to lay down one's life for love, fight to the death over the slightest matter of a beautiful lady's honor, or even commit suicide over romantic tragedy predominates during the pagan era and the Romantic Christian Medieval period that immediately followed... The dramatic ideal of pure passion and true love, and faithfulness to that passion as the highest ideal, damn whatever convention, political implication, or personal consequences. Lancelot's celebrated wooing of Guenevere despite her already being married to King Arthur, the Greatest of kings and dearest of Lancelot's friends no less, is an example of how totally passionate Romantic Love itself is attributed moral and reality distorting importance. A king’s greatest ally betrays him in the most humiliating of sexual manners… And this was celebrated for hundreds of (now a thousand plus) years as amongst the most beautiful admirable tales ever told.

So totally is love celebrated no matter its consequences.

The most pure example of this is probably Brunhilde and Siegfried... Two half divine figure descended from Odin (she's technically Siegfried's aunt) who fall instantly in love when Siegfried wakes her from a never ending slumber... Only for Siegfried to not marry her, depending on the version out of obstinacy, a prior promise, a magic potion that makes him forget Brunhilde, etc.

So what does Brunhilde do with this seeming betrayal? She plots to have Seigfreid killed of course. She manipulates those around her into killing him, tricking her either now betrothed or now wedded husband to take part in it... And then she dramatically commits suicide (in some versions after sacrificing her slaves), betraying the man who thought he was to be her husband, and casting herself alive onto Siegfried's funeral pyre that she might be his wife in death... In Manosphere language: Better to die with Chad, than live with Brad.

Here marriage and love is a fury, a tempest, a wildfire (possibly literally) something divine in the most horrifyingly sublime and romantic way. With slave girls encouraged and tricked to die with their lords, and free women willing to die in their apocalyptic romantic passions rather than settle for a shameful slavery or second marriage. We can speculate, as I do elsewhere, about how this heavily selected germanic attitude affected their ongoing genetic stock, and the propensity for blonde women to turn psycho and commit extraordinary violence and suicide for reasons that no one, not even they, can fully articulate… This apocalyptic romanticism has often been speculated as highly aristocratic and eugenic… or that it Uniquely adapts the north european to the endless wars of that continent.

But This is just immediate marriage norms of 4 very closely related traditions. These 4 traditions existed within a few hundred miles of each other within a few hundred years. Indeed from about 100ad to 800ad you could find some version or proto-version of all 4 of these norms within about a month’s walk, or what today would be a day’s drive.

This is how wildly religious and cultural traditions vary and diverge in not the form but the very nature of all values. Brunhilde is not just incompatible with the Christian Idea of a wife and motherhood embodied by Mary... She is an image of an almost demonic madness and evil itself to Christian eyes. Joseph's forgiveness or understanding towards Mary is a mockable dishonor and his affection a ridiculous pathetic simping and shame for which a Caesar would unceremoniously divorce his own wife without concern or even much emotion before returning to his household of slave girls... And The nonchalance with which even a Caesar would dismiss a wife and her infidelity would be an unacceptable dishonor demanding blood or eternal shame for a Muslim... And the flippancy with which a Muslim man may divorce a disobedient (but not adulterous) wife saying "i divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you" would not be a quiet personal tragedy to a German woman, but rather an outrageous insult to her honor for which she'd conspire have her husband killed.

We could go on... A Japanese Lord could simply command a underling to divorce, or command an unmarried or widowed lady to marry a person of his choosing, there are even accounts of Japanese lords ordering Samurai to kill their own wife for some shame or offense she had done, so as to maintian his own and his family’s honor. The Aztec men had great harems, sometimes in the hundreds or thousands of women for a great Aztec lord, won via annually declared war on their Helot populations of subject peoples.

human values and traditions Vary vastly more than you'd ever think possible... thing's you'd never in a million years imagine anyone doing, or that you'd think would violate all norms of human nature, some culture has found a way to make at least conditionally viable... There exist Himalayan tribes that practice reverse polygamy, where one woman takes multiple husbands who trade off during the year... however this is not to say the leftists are right, we are blank slates, and cultural constructivism is correct... Rather the viability of all these cultures, values, and beliefs is determined (at least in part) by the alien selection pressures of genetics and group evolution... Those Himalayan men who share a single wife for example are almost always brothers or other close relations who travel for work/survival... such that any child is at least partially related to all of them, and they're rarely together competing for her attention at the same time. Three brothers might share a wife they only see whilst they’re in town the same way they might share a distant cottage.

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This is why I find it absurd to think "Paganism would have been corrupted by liberalism too"... If paganism had continued nothing resembling liberalism or egalitarianism could have even been philosophically suggested, indeed if modernity and technology are the corrupting forces and did corrupt either Roman Paganism or Germanic Paganism, either would have turned into indescribably weird oddities as alien to modern people as the the Trans-Madness or Pride parades would be to Medieval peasant.

Women flying into incomprehensible Brunhilde-esque madnesses and forming terrorist movements to kill their favourite boy-bands that together their armed faction might burn alive and ascend to Valhalla with the Backstreet Boys they've successfully firebombed...only to be celebrated for it, and the mad fangirls to be glorified in documentaries, books and films as divine avatars of true-love, the way we celebrate famed rebels or humanitarians… the recent femcel shooter being treated not as a pathetic madness, but a national hero of furious prideful unyielding femininity. Or Modern Romans forming political marriages with women they barely meet, and only consummate so as to expedite a divorce, even as both husband and wife maintain scores of sugar-baby lovers and captured Iraqi Slaves, and coordinating their sexual affairs and romances with each other so as to best advance their political and social careers. "How dare you accuse me of sleeping with my wife?!"

It's possible a Modern Pagan Europe and America would have gone just as mad as the current Christian west has...Indeed Rome variably exhibited several madnesses. But the madnesses an alternate Pagan west might develop under conditions of social media and industrial society would be alien in ways almost unimaginable.

The madnesses of the Modern West however are entirely Christian... The unwillingness to judge women and hold them to standards, or, more tellingly, the modern treating of the most outrageous sexual improprieties of world famous whores as a tragic form of self-harm for which we should blame the men who interact with them, or who merely look up the relevant video online— Her publically sleeping with 100 men is a tragic self-harm for which she needs a hug, you looking up the video is disgusting porn-brained moral failure for which you should be berated. This is merely Christ's forgiveness of Mary Magdalene and his instruction "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" taken to its most outrageous extreme. Islam would stone such a woman to death, The Romans would sell her to a brothel where she could continue her perversion til the day she died in obscurity, and the Germanics... The free women would probably execute her, after tricking her into one really long drug fueled orgy (Look up the Risala of Ibn Fadlan... This was one of the Rus Vikings recurring sacrifice rituals for slave girls).

Likewise the inability to turn away "refugees" who arrive by the million is a perversion of the Christian charity to beggars, even as the inability to charge them with crimes, or punish them at all comparably with how an established member of the citizenry would be punished, is the Christian forgiveness and special attention to the weak taken to a perverse logical conclusion... (almost any other culture would treat them vastly MORE harshly for being a foreigner accused of a crime as compared with a citizen, who is supposed to have rights and privileges).

But most importantly the suicide of the west...the seeming willingness of the west to kill off or suffocate its native population in favor of virtue signaling... This is uniquely Christian. Almost all historical religions are Ancestral Ethnic religions. They replicate via the replication of the people who hold the religion. Judaism is a good example, it's very rare for someone to convert to Judaism, Judaism spreads by birthing more jews.

Likewise the Germanics basically never tried to convert anyone to worshipping Odin, you spread the faith of Odin by winning in battle, capturing wives, and having little baby Vikings and German warriors.

Rome started out as an ethnic religion, and then as it extended citizenship to non-ethnic romans it started to collapse as the new citizens despised the symbols, ancestors, gods, and heroes, of their historical ethnic rivals (Very similar to America: Washington, Lee, and Jefferson are hated foremost simply for BEING white and symbols of old white original America)

Christianity however has always spread more dramatically via conversion than by multiplication... Sure Christians breed... But they don't tell stories about having 12 kids who each have kids of their own, and dying in old age... They tell martyr stories. Stories of purely unshakably faithful saints who set aside all concern for their own lineage or self-interest, so that they might go on mission amongst the most dangerous heathens, and (in most stories) die horribly as a demonstration of the truth of their faith... At which point their heathen persecutors are at least partially persuaded that they are right, or at least possessed of some mysterious secret, and assume the Christian values and culture... Even as the saint and their genetics die out.

You notice how the west is basically scaling up that story to the entire civilization... Willingly sacrificing their birthright, nation and children at mass scale to prove a moral point in the hopes they'll persuade African Savages, subcontinental hindus, and boat people Muslims of their moral character and who knows, maybe they think they’ll persuade God? That no really, they're not racist, they really do love the brown heathen as their own children (even as their own children are beaten and raped in their schools).

Now if you're deeply critical you may say that Christianity has always been parasitic on it's population... That being a saint is the equivalent of being one of those insects that's been taken over by parasitic brain worms, and compelled to act against its interests, climb out on a limb, and die, all so that the bug might be eaten by a bird and the brain worm continue on up the food chain.

But at least in early Christianity... it was arguable that it was moving up. That the early martyrs were going from slave populations of Jews and enslaved Greeks and spreading to high class Romans and Germanic kings... That those conversions trickle back and benefit the kin of the saint with higher status and access to opportunities and marriages in higher status communities... But having infected the entirety of the first world, the maddened Christianity now sacrifices the flower of 1st world European civilization to try and prove its moral worth to African Savages who in their home countries would have converted for 1/1000th what western states spend on them... or at least mouthed their conversion and incorporated Christian symbols into their voodoo.

Oh but you still have to prove you really do love the migrant and think they're just a generation or two of public school (LOL) from being little programmers, doctors, lawyers and patriotic military officers (this is all the more disturbing because academia now tries to force them through for doctor and lawyer and the military now tries to force them through for commission, with disastrous result).

Simply put, when even places that never converted to monotheism like Japan, China, and even now India are below replacement fertility (largely becuase of the US forced constitution and the communist revolution in the first two instances destroying the traditional arranged matchmaking system)... I don't think we can afford a culture built around values that aren't even optimized to spread via sexual reproduction but by conversion. I don't think we can afford a culture that treats beggars as sacred objects, when the west is under 15% of the world's population, and there are literally billions of beggars just a 12 hour flight from your front door. And I don't think we can afford a culture which values quiet endurance, tolerance, and turning the other cheek when the west has EVERYTHING to lose. In a world where we're wealthy enough to indulge almost anything without people dying young of their poor choices, we need a culture where pride in honor, warfighting, fitness, and dominance is valued above pride in being special, meek, disabled, or sexually degenerate/failed.

There's a reason the modern pride flag has not just Gay, but disabled, and black identity included in it's color scheme... It's the same Christian egalitarian pride and joy (merry and gay) at saying a down syndrome child is just as good and worthy of saving, and that the faith and soul of a despised minority is Just as important.

These are continuations of Christian morality to ever more absurd logical conclusions just as Nietzsche predicted, and Tom Holland in his book “Dominion” and other progressive/liberal Christians of the 2010s openly celebrated as their final victory. That Homosexuality, secularism, liberalism, the Beatles and MeToo are all deeply Christian and do not make sense outside a Christian moral framework... And one might add mass migration, lockdowns, vaccine mandates... or at least the moral justification "Protect your neighbor" all only make sense in the Christian moral framework and its descendant ideologies... Islamic, Roman, Germanic, Aztec, and Celtic moral systems would be alienly different and incompatible with these moral instincts.

The interesting thing is however, because of how Christian implanted in the west, we have examples of Pre-Christian cultural and moral artifacts continuing up until the late-19th, early 20th Century.

The European practice of Dueling has no Jewish or Christian precedent. There is one duel in the bible, and David cheated, and Goliath's seconds, if they weren't dishonorable, would have killed David for cheating. Indeed Christian Priests advocated against dueling denouncing it as murder and attempted to criminalize duels basically from the second they gained any authority. Yet the ancient culture of aristocratic honor, and the contest to maintain one's image of courage and greater dignity than the rabble continued up until the mid-late 19th century (even the early 20th century in Germany and Eastern Europe).

Likewise the institutions and cultures of royal courts, the divine right of kings, the institution of slavery in the Americas, women's sports and travelling, and many core liberties such as the right to Free Speech and the Right to Keep and Bear arms all have little to no biblical precedent, but are found in Pagan Germanic kingly culture, the philosophy of Aristotle, the Greek city states and Germanic "valkyrie" culture, and the self-set limits and virtues that various City States, Caesars, and Kings accepted for the themselves (notably both Caesar Augustus and the Germanic Althing are praised in primary sources for the freedom of speech they tolerated/enabled).

Indeed one could argue much of the sicknesses of modernity, if one needs a more recent origin, result from the death of the absolutist European monarchies in WW1, and the result death of ancient European social and cultural institutions both Pre-Christian and Medieval.

However, I'd argue the end result is the same. Whether one accepts the near dates or thinks the cultural decline is an ancient erosion that's continued to the modern day. Many of the most important European values and cultural institutions: Individual honor defended by dueling, the lust for glory, semi-psychotic Germanic female pride, hellenic philosophy, Ruthless Roman Military Discipline (of the kind the royal navy would copy), Individual fitness and women's sporting, individual liberties like the right to keep and bear arms or the freedom of speech, the valuing of individual authenticity and forthrightness right or wrong, and the willingness to die or commit suicide rather than partake in dishonor....

All of these had their origin in the various pagan traditions of Europe, were maintained by European institutions that originated in paganism, and cannot be justified or recreated by Christian values, morality, institutions, and culture.

And I do not believe any of them can be recaptured or revived without reviving the Pagan values and Cultures that originally birthed them. You can not get European dueling or death before dishonor out of the Christian moral framework, nor can you get Roman military discipline... The Apostles fell asleep at their watch in the Garden of Gethsemane, Into the 19th century the Royal Navy hanged 13 year old boys for falling asleep at the watch. You cannot recapture the ambition for conquest and adventure without returning to the Iliad and Sagas, and you cannot revive our ancient european honors and liberties without actually treating the cultures and Althings that birthed those liberties and honors as sacred instead of Pagan stupidities.

And you cannot recapture national and ethnic honors, culture, self-defense, and glory, without treating those cultures and ethnicities as divine and wise in themselves instead of wild backwards savages set straight by Jews in bondage.

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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak