/lit/ - Literature

>>13383988
Can you not google?

https://www.seiyaku.com/customs/pagan-symbols.html

>>13383988
Just how old are you? Also while its true, stealing is a harsh way of looking at it. Cultural movements always build upon their predecessors and contemporaries.

Well their holidays certainly aren’t originally Christian.

Christmas is a culturally pagan holiday
Birthdays are pagan
Even Easter eggs are pagan

>>13384040
Easter is a pagan fertility holiday originally

>>13383988
nobody just invents new meaning out of otherwise meaningless shapes, not if they want people to pay attention and believe
Everybody gets their ideas from somewhere else.

>>13383988
Yes, it could be argued that much of Christian thought comes from the writings of Philo

>>13383997
Yes, when Christians destroy culture it is just Luv and Happy Times.

>>13383988
yes there are loads of pagan/wiccan books that go on about this. pic related is one

>>13383988
Yes. Has anyone on this board even been in a church? It's just like the roman pagan imperial court (even having orgies and elections) and anglo-saxon town hall meetings. It is nothing like Jesus's sermonies. And that's because the sole purpose of "Jesus's" ministry was to bechain woke pagans into spiritual and social enslavement to the spirit of urban catholic faggotry.

>>13384027
Some of them are.

>>13384263
Even if that's true there must be an originator of the idea

>>13383988
Christianity stole from pagans the day it was created. Yahweh is an ex-pagan god, you could see evidence of that in the Old Testament.

>>13384794
>Atheist
>They killed my deities
Huh?

>>13383988
There's a thing called Syncretism. It's a practice where a belief system adopts something from a different system. Christians do this, but they're not alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism

>>13386065
The difference is that most syncretic systems don't undergo political and martial campaigns to exterminate the people they borrowed ideas from

/lit/, got any late empire reading recs?

All of Christianity is LARPing nowadays, especially here on 4chan

>>13383988
Christianity is a Frankenstein religion.

>>13384794
retarded techie gaytheist.
>feminine love is pagan
faggot moon worshiper.

>>13383988
The pagans stole their religion from the levant

>In the Vedas, God tells Vaivasvata Manu to build a boat to survive the upcoming flood.
In the Bible, God tells Noah to build a boat to survive the upcoming flood
>in the Vedas, the demon Ravana told people to build a tower to get to heaven without having to do pious deeds
In the Bible, it was the tower of Babel
>in the Vedas, Krsna fed Durvāsa Muni, his ten thousand followers and the whole creation, with just a grain of rice
In the Bible, Christ fed some thousands of followers with just some breads and fishes.

>>13386423
you'd like to believe that wouldn't you

>>13386423
If you aren't a monk (the ones that weren't knocking up nuns and aborting the children anyway) you aren't a christian. It's a dead religion and it's been dead as soon as the adherents realized Christ isn't coming back in their lifetime and starting writing stoic/gnostic fan fiction.

>>13383988

They "stole" stuff like Christmas, but Christmas isn't important to Christianity deep down, it's just something that, you know, is nice to do once a year.

>>13384040
>Christmas is a culturally pagan holiday
No it isn't. The pagan festivals that coincidental happenED to occur AROUND December 25th stopped being observed centuries BEFORE Christmas was first celebrated, and Christmas started in Italy not Germany. Overcome that time and space gap with actual evidence demonstrating some kind of continuity. Christmas trees were invented by Martin Luther (you know, that Martin Luther). Just shut up.

>Birthdays are pagan
Which is why Christians celebrate name days instead.

>Even Easter eggs are pagan
Pagans invented eggs?

>>13384041
Easter was Passover originally.

>>13386135
Good thing Christians didn't do that, you poor persecuted martyr.

>>13386452
>In the Towering Inferno, OJ Simpson escapes a burning skyscraper.
In 9/11, skyscrapers burned.

9/11 was stolen from a 70s movie!!!!

>>13386619
>Which is why Christians celebrate name days instead.
Not all of them, don't gatekeep too hard.

Yes and that is actually a good thing.
Most holidays just the date tho.
Saints if you will are sort of like the small gods of the village and the house.
The alter was not a thing in the beginning.

>>13386634
Yes, all of them. The celebration of birthdays was totally suppressed by the Church until the 4th century when they started to relax because Greek paganism was dead by that point and they no longer had to worry about the Helenistic associations. It still took another 1,300 years until Christians started widely celebrating birthdays. You're literally claiming that a modern custom only widespread since the 1800s is ancient and pagan in origin when there's a gap of a millennium that you haven't accounted for. Your misunderstanding is steeped in anachronism to such a degree that I have to question your motives.

>>13383988

It's a meme.

>>13386639
>Most holidays just the date tho.
Throw a dart at a calendar. It will land on a pagan holiday celebrated somewhere at some time in the past. There are only 365 days in the year. Were Christians supposed to add a new day to the year whenever they wanted to add a celebration to the liturgical calendar in order to avoid the date happening to coincide with some pagan holiday that hasn't been practiced for centuries or millennia? How long would a year have to be? 500 days? Should they have tried to change the orbit or rotation of the earth somehow?

>Saints if you will are sort of like the small gods of the village and the house.
The celebration of certain saints is where some stinky syncreticism actually did happen, but that was mostly due to spotty record keeping in the actual Dark Ages when things were too chaotic and finances were spread too thin. Highly questionable sainthoods are usually described with a caveat and the new Catholic calendar in 1969 removed some the feasts for the worst cases. Most protestants don't even recognize saints at all.

>The alter was not a thing in the beginning.
The altar goes back to the Ark of the Covenant and the Tabernacle.

I am a pure-blooded pagan if anyone wishes to ask me questions.

Though I may not reveal any aspect of my religion that must remain secret. We've had problems in the past with thieves, you see. These days, it is foolish to freely reveal your practices.

>>13386665
I live in a country that is 80% pagan. I mean real pagan. Folk religion. These people have actual beliefs and morals, flawed as they may be, and they haven't artificially and arbitrarily cobbled together a worldview from various New Age bullshit in service of nothing but their own egos. They follow actual paganism, not new poseur "reconstructed" religions that people made up at nudist camps in the '70s or on internet chatrooms in the '90s. I refuse to call someone like you a pagan, and I don't think you should either, because I interact with real pagans every day and they're nothing like you. They're like actual normal people. All those creepy, disgusting, overweight, pale people with shitty clothes and jewelry back home who call themselves pagan, puffed up on nothing but vanity as evidenced in even the tone of your post, are an utter embarrassment to humanity. You can even tell something's wrong with them just from the shape of their faces, like they're some kind of genetic mutants, like something is wrong with their brains. Why are "post-Christian" westerners so absolutely cancerous in every way? You have nothing in common with pre-Christian pagans. Just call yourself a New Ager and disappear into the abyss of history along with the other rotting boomer hippie garbage that spawned you.

>>13386718
You are free to refuse to call me a pagan, of course. It has no effect however, because you are not the ultimate arbiter. I have not received my faith from chatrooms or nudists as you suppose, but from the spirits themselves.

And as far as questions go, I only detected one in your paragraph. However, it seems rhetorical.

>>13386733
God is the ultimate arbiter and He called people like you worse things than pagan. You're constantly answering my question whether you intend to or not.

>>13386743
Well, that's not what god said to me.

Regardless, I'm not even particularly attached to the label of Paganism. It's really only for the benefit of others that I use words to describe my faith. No words or descriptions actually are passed between me and the spirituality, as we don't communicate using language. Mysterious ways and all that, as the bible probably plagiarized at some point. I could call my practices anything from Islamic to Autoerotic, but a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet.

>>13386758
I'm afraid your little rose garden was smothered by too much manure.

>>13386639
Isn't it bad to see the canonized as any sort of god? That the only power saints have is to pass on your prayers to God?

>>13386649
Calm down Pavel. He just means there are a lot of practising Christians who don't celebrate name days at all. Which is true.

>>13386760
well I have a nice song you might like to hear anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSPuztg4fiE

>>13386772
Modern birthdays evolved from Medieval name days not ancient Greek pagan birthdays. After the Church relaxed the proscription against birthdays, Christians gradually started naming their children after saints whose feast days happened to coincide closest to their births, so they basically celebrated name days as birthdays. In the 1700s the practice of name days and even observing saintly feasts declined especially among Protestants but modern birthdays come from the Medieval Christian name day tradition not from the pagan Greek tradition, which is my point.

>>13386779
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGa7h-Cr60g

>>13386766
Yes, I'm only using it a reference to what was before and how Christianity transformed it.
>>13386664
Pretty sure the early Christians did not use an alter may be wrong tho.

Nah it's fine I have no problem if the holidays stays the same as long as we clelebrate something worthwhile.

>>13386790
your song was less kind

>>13386791
A priest simply needs a table to hold the bread and wine while doing the Lord's Supper. It's a practical thing. Communion can be delivered without an altar, but it's a pain to not have a flat surface to set things down on while you work (I'm a teacher and I cringe whenever I walk into a classroom without a podium or table). The earliest Christians, the church of Jerusalem, worshiped at the Temple in Jerusalem before it was destroyed, which had an altar. All the earliest weird archaic geographic offshoots still practiced today have altars. The actual Last Supper was probably conducted from a low wooden table while everyone sat around on cushions, as was the Greek style. If the altar is omitted from ancient art it's because the bread and wine are the focal point and the altar is just furniture to support them. For churches that teach Real Presence then it makes sense to have a specially consecrated table, and altar, as the Communion represents Jesus' sacrifice, and sacrifices have been performed on altars since Abel built the first one.

>>13386625
At least we know christianity is most certainly a child of the jews, given their tendency to lie so much.

12 disciples = 12 houses of the zodiac etc etc. The whole thing is steeped in Babylonian astrological mysticism and makes constant references to the movement of the heavens.

>>13387688
Ever heard of the 12 tribes of Israel?

>>13387475
Most of the major figures in the foundations of the current New Age and neopagan movements in the mid-20th century were ethnically Ashekenazi Jews.

>>13387715
Yes. And that is yet another reference to the number 12 derived from Babylonian astrology.

First were the Hebrews that stole from the pagans.

>>13387733
Are you sure it isn't a reference to the Chinese zodiac? They have 12 constellations as well.

>>13387774
No, cause despite the Chinese sharing the same sky as the rest of the planet the Jews had little contact with them during the bronze age unlike Babylon which held the Jews captive for a while resulting in cultural contamination.

Rightwing neopaganism is basically an effort by gentile ethnonationalists to imitate Judaism and Zionism by fabricated an artificial ad-hoc constructed religion they don't actually even believe in to subserviently reinforce ethnic identity and establish a nation-state, because a universal religion like Christianity is open to all peoples and therefore not politically expedient, so these nationalists want to replace Christianity with a closed religion modeled directly on Judaism instead. If any religion is Jewish in origin, it's rightwing neopaganism. Stuff like Nordicism is so transparently just reskinned Zionism that it's actually amusing when /pol/ish neopagans accuse Christianity of being Jewish.

>>13387789
Is there maybe some reason why both systems used 12? Could it be that the number 12 is inherently useful for describing certain things in nature for some reason?

>>13387826
There are 7 planets in classical astronomy, the planets that could be seen with the naked eye. The Sun, the moon, mercury, Venus, mars, Jupiter and Saturn. 6 moved through the heavens while they sun had a fixed orbit (around the earth in geocentric models) so that leaves 6 planets that get doubled up for 12 hours of day and night. You have 360 degrees of space around the earth, divide it by 12 and you get 12 houses of 30 degrees each for each of the 12 signs.

I think Chinese astrology is influenced by Hindu astrology and Hindu had cultural exchange with the middle eastern variety, but don't quote me on that I don't know enough to claim a direct common origin.

I am a Manichean and you guys are basically stupid

>>13387730
Okay, and? All kinds of shitty organizations are run by jews.

>>13384041
This is Reddit nonsense. Leave this board and never return

>>13384794
cringe and bluepilled. If you want to criticize Christianity all you need is Nietzsche. Not this stupid "I'm such a victim" bullshit

>>13384954
As if this is some kind of deep insight. It makes sense that for cultures to move from polytheism to monotheism, they would single out one of the already existing gods.

>>13386519
>it's been dead as soon as the adherents realized Christ isn't coming back in their lifetime
The Dies Irae, a Catholic song mainly about the Day of Judgment is even scrapped from official requiem masses nowadays. No "Christian" today seriously believes in the Second Coming of Christ as a physical, earthly event. No one.

>>13386452
>>in the Vedas, the demon Ravana told people to build a tower to get to heaven without having to do pious deeds
This makes a lot more sense than the stupid "God is angry people are working together" bullshit about Babel they tell you in Sunday school.

>>13387818
Good post.

>>13387818
based

>>13387818
Amen.

>>13386619
>No it isn't. The pagan festivals that coincidental happenED to occur AROUND December 25th stopped being observed centuries BEFORE Christmas was first celebrated, and Christmas started in Italy not Germany. Overcome that time and space gap with actual evidence demonstrating some kind of continuity. Christmas trees were invented by Martin Luther (you know, that Martin Luther). Just shut up.
Christmas was invented as a way for early Christians to warm up pagans to their religion. They realized that pagans celebrated the return of the sun around that time so they happened to celebrate Jesus’ birth around them to make the pagans less hostile towards them. One of the Bishops around the time Christmas was created even stated that he hoped this new holiday would allow for pagans to embrace Christianity.
>Which is why Christians celebrate name days instead.
Maybe some in yurop do, but you can’t claim that most Christians don’t celebrate birthdays and not be intellectually dishonest
>Pagans invented eggs?
Laughable critique

>>13387818
>n-neop-p-pagans are s-sl-slightly w-worse than u-us
Good try, chrsitcuck.

>>13388909
They are good points and show Christian hypocrisy.
Nietzsche's critique is also shit.

>>13389017
Do you think pagans back in the day were all nice and tolerant to whatever religion was before them?

>>13387818
It's ethnically exclusive so it's judaism and zionism. Good post.

>>13389174
I mean, at least the Jews wrote down their traditions and had the brains to safeguard it. Neopagans are LARPers who just think Thor is cool and hate Christianity because mom made them go to church as a kid. What does a pagan even believe? That their magic rituals actually do shit?

>>13389233

Writing down your traditions is the opposite of safeguarding them. Knowledge is power, and I deny you that. With no book freely available for you to read you cannot steal my religious practices. Nor can you spend time pointing out obvious contradictions such as atheists commonly enjoy doing with the bible.

you're powerless :)

>>13386718
what country

>>13389260
>With no book freely available for you to read you cannot steal my religious practices.
Everything you know you found online dude.

>>13389281
Incorrect, it was received through spiritual communion.

>>13389281
Le petit enfant literally can't conceptualize the notion of a religion he didn't read in a book.

You do know every single book was written by men and not god?

>>13389112
They didn't preach tolerance, non-violence, and worship of a loving god, retard.

>>13389233
seething

>>13383988
A lot of the basis for Christian thought is taken from the Greeks. There's also a ton of trappings in the rituals that could be considered pagan, but are just the consequence of Christianity's growth in the Roman Empire, rather than anything pagan. The typical "christmas and easter wuz pagan holidays" is biased bad history, though.
>>13384040
Christmas wasn't really pagan. You see celebrations of it in a period where christianity was virulently antipagan, and its dating for Jesus' birth is consistent with jewish practice and Easter's timing. The importance of birthdays did increase over time, and with it the celebration of Christmas.
And it's downright insulting to linguistics to call anything about easter pagan aside from random decorations like eggs and rabbits.
>>13386619
Pretty sure there were some concurrent winter solstice festivals, it's just that linking them to Christmas is somewhere between bullshit and ideologically motivated leaps of faith.
>>13388944
Am Christian. Believe in second coming. You're wrong.

>>13386718
State your country or shut the fuck up you poseur.

>>13386718
Anon, you realize that's an image taken from an anime, yes?

>>13390708
more christian revisionism

>>13390708
This. Neofagans claim that Easter is a pagan holiday because it's named after the German fertility goddess Ostera. Too bad Easter isn't even called Easter in most of Christendom. It's called some variation of thr original name Pascha (Passion) in every country that doesn't have a language derived from German (like English speaking countries), you know countries like Italy and Spain and Greece, where the holiday actually started rather than where it spread much later after the Christianization of the Germanic tribes who only then stuck a handle on it they could relate to. Easter is just a name and no Christian cares if it's called that any more than if we call Odin's Day Wednesday because no one actually believes in those gods anymore, not even neofags, so it doesn't matter.

>>13384794
Christianity is a plague that has held back the white race for over a millennia. we are finally on the verge of overcoming it and we must not rest until it has been completely purged.

>>13391453
Says incredibly nervous atheist for 2000 years

>>13391708
christianity is dead anon. i walked by a church today and the faggot rainbow flag was hanging from it. i laughed out loud. enjoy being a cucked dumb goyim for the rest of your life!

>>13391718
heh

you really don't see it do you? It's right in front of your eyes, but it's invisible to you. Well, let me illuminate you. This is what Christianity does. It morphs and steals, it doesn't die. Parasites don't(metaphorically, I assume parasites do actually die).

Eons ago, they took Saturnalia from the Pagans.

>In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]

>D. The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia’s concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus’ birthday.

And they will do the same today. Laugh, I am sure Pagans did once at the sheer audacity of the overt theft of something patently not compatible with christianity. But they will take the rainbow flag and homosexuality into their scripture and live on, much longer than you.

>>13391739
>they will take the rainbow flag and homosexuality into their scripture and live on
you are correct in this statement as it is already happening. but this will only accelerate its death as more people will wake up and live according to the natural law.

>>13383988
christendom won over fairly easily in the nordics, as their heathenry had turned nihilist over time. pic related

>>13391759
whenever I think of that homeboy cutting down that sacred tree I laugh out loud. cannot imagine how shocked people were to find out that some autist marched into town to commit the ultimate act of ree-ing.

>>13391759
pic related also talks about how nordic christianity organically incorporated life affirming aspects of the folk faith during the period of christening. pretty region-specific but pretty based

>>13391739
>neopagan
>anti-Christian fedora tipping
>anime girl avatarfagging

Cringe upon cringe.

>>13391842
>historical facts are anti-christian!

You needn't take it personally. After all, you weren't there and do not bear responsibility.

>>13383988
here it is OP
>proto-indo-european mythology spreads to middle east
>middle east is now a melting pot of hundreds of gods and local beliefs
>one group of sand people start to claim that one god (yahweh) is the king of them all, better than el or baal or asherah or ishtar
>this elite semitic group gets powerful and demonizes all the other gods
>they write the bible over the course of hundreds in dedication to their newly apointed god king, though they base much of their story from preexisting semitic mythologies like gilgamesh and the baal cycle
>this is the birth of judaism
>promotes this monotheism over all other traditions and succeeds in spreading it throughout most of the region
>eventually one jew claims himself to be the son of god and creates his own philosophy
>gets killed for being heretical (in the eyes of the hebrews)
>many years later his new followers write about him and add these collections of writings to the hebrew bible
>le christiany is born
>fast forward to roman and medieval times
>whitoids start to incorporate pagan elements from their native relgions into christianity, birthing holidays and traditions that were never originally there in the first place
tl;dr christianity, like all religions, is just a wacky mixture of prexisting beliefs

>>13391746
what is natural law?

>>13391718
>Portestants
>Christian
Nah

>>13392356
protestants
anglicans
catholics
lutherans
mormons
jehova's
baptist
evangelical
methodist
presbyterian
pentecostalists
seventh day adventist
orthodox


all just different names for christianity, fuck off with you "protestant" bullshit

>>13393139
Mormons and JWs aren't Christians at all because they deny the Trinity. They are whole other religions entirely. If you consider them Christian, you might as well consider Muslims Christian, since there's a Jesus figure in Islam as well.

There are some true heretics and wolves in sheep's clothing among all the denominations. In particular, a tiny minority of Baptists and Pentecostals have fallen into a non-Trinitarian heresy called the Oneness Doctrine. Seventh Day Adventists started out as non-Trinitarian but adopted the Trinity over time.

Baptists and Anglicans aren't Protestants. Baptists predate the Protestant Reformation. Some High Church Anglicans are more like schismatics than being theologically Protestant per se.

Liberal "Christians" who try to smuggle sodomy into the religion are not Christians, regardless of their denominational affiliations.

>>13393217
>Liberal "Christians" who try to smuggle sodomy into the religion are not Christians, regardless of their denominational affiliations

The only requirement to be a christian is to believe you are one.

>>13393318
Actually read the New Testament. There are dozens of passages that talk about false converts and false Christians.

>>13393455
no need, the bible doesn't decide who is or isn't a christian. It can say whatever it wants, it won't change anything.

>>13393468
Deception can be a major influence on how people see each other. Likewise, self-deception can be a major influence on how people perceive themselves. You imagine yourself to be wise in your own estimation, but your ignorance of this basic fact of human nature demonstrates to me that you certainly are not. You have deceived yourself into thinking that you're an authority on something you do not even begin to understand, and speak out as if you were, but I know, and I think at some level you do, too, even if you will never admit it, perhaps even to yourself. Likewise, there are a good many people who imagine themselves to be Christian who are not, and many who all themselves Christian knowing that they are not. What people think they are and what people are are often two different things.