ashe

The way I read it... this thread is not talking about the power of stories. There is no question that stories are powerful -- just look at Heaven's Gate or Jonestown. Some stories are very powerful but, even so, please don't drink the Kool-aid.

ashe

Shven

Accepting the story without question is just as bad as writing it off without considering it because its 'just a story'

muon

Ojuice, I'm trying to understand what your position is on this. First of all, what do you mean by Yahweh making his rule tolerable? Do you hold that Yahweh somehow usurped power from the Olympians, or merely that most humans switched their worship from one set of gods to another god? In other words, did the change of religion in the Roman period correspond merely to a change in human allegiance, or did it reflect some actual change in the celestial order?

If Yahweh did somehow overthrow the rule of the Olympians, I will have to ask how he was able pull that off, why the other gods weren't powerful enough or motivated enough to stop him, and what it means for Yahweh to have overthrown the other gods when large masses of people in India, the Far East, and the Americas had no interest or knowledge of either Yahweh or the Olympians?

Or if rather you mean that humans transferred their allegiance without the Olympians losing any of their own status and power, what does this say about the purpose of humans worshipping the gods? If the gods didn't care enough to defend their own worship, why should we care? What do you make of the near-universal ancient belief that the gods demanded worship and would punish society if this worhip was discontinued---this was the major motivation for persecuting the Christians, after all.

What you said above makes it really sound like you believe that Yahweh conquered and displaced the Olympians. Quite honestly this strikes me as a perfectly Christian attitude, which will probably horrify you. The early Christians did not deny that Jupiter and company existed---they merely claimed that they were inferior in power and morality, and so not worthy of the name "gods". This skirts awfully close to what you seem to be saying. Wouldn't it be more consistent to attribute Yahweh worship to mere human error, and thank the gods that they didn't wipe out mankind as a result of this error?

Ojuice5001

I do think of Yahweh as having usurped power from the Olympians. This world and the supernatural world have that kind of correspondence to each other, so that a change of that magnitude would reflect some kind of a change in the world of the gods.

By making his rule tolerable, I mean that Yahweh needed to take the old gods' wishes into account when running his realm. This meant allowing the survival of pagan writings and customs (which certainly did happen), and also that the Roman gods would be allowed to continue to control a significant number of human and natural events in the medieval world. Yahweh allowed them in order to prevent the kinds of more significant pagan revivals that happened in both the Renaissance and twentieth-century neopaganism.

It simply means that Yahweh became the most powerful god in the Roman Empire, and, a little later, in Europe. In itself, it's not unusual for one pantheon to become more powerful than another. The reason its consequences were so different is that when Yahweh gained power, he implemented a religion that saw the old gods in a very different way than the normal pagan way of viewing things.

That exclusivist Christian outlook itself is one of the reasons Yahweh was able to pull off this coup. He also knows how to tap into all kinds of other aspects of the human heart. History has shown that it's important for a leader to understand people.

I'll just say the obvious here: that the Roman Empire did fall not long after it abandoned its traditional gods. Jupiter stopped protecting the Empire, and Yahweh tried to protect it but was not experienced enough to succeed in the long run.

I know what you mean; it is rather defeatist, and likely unflattering to the gods. But like Piscez said, the fact that Christianity predominated so completely does suggest a theory of that kind. The purist pagan would come up with a different way to view the situation, but I do not object to the idea of learning things from the Christian conquerors. That's another lesson from the history of conquered peoples: They learn from their conquerors' successes. And hopefully, shift the balance of power.

So yes, it may be that it is a Christian-influenced attitude. My thinking may have been marked by blindness to this influence. For instance, there's a story of Emperor Julian's last visit to the oracle of Apollo, where the oracle bemoans the end of the grandeur of Hellas. I now realize that it's supposed to imply the superiority of Christianity, and was circulated by Christians for that reason. But when I first read it, I didn't truly catch that implication. What can I say? As a Chestertonian, the quote that springs to mind is, "Paganism was the greatest thing in the world, and Christianity was greater, and everything since has been comparatively small." Not that Christianity really is greater--but I can see that point of view.

gurugeorge

It's tempting to think that visions of "gods", "fairies", "spirits", "angels", "demons", etc., etc., et. multae ceterae, are just made-up crap.

But actually, when you look at the matter more closely, they seem to derive from real experiences. They are not just made up. They derive from experiences of what, in terms of Western occultism, is called "astral vision".

It's rather like dreaming when awake, or lucid dreaming. Unless they've had these sorts of visions by chance, people who have them have usually been trained in a certain procedure (sometimes involving fasting, drugs, etc., but not always and not necessarily). By all accounts, it takes a bit of work to get these visions, and a bit of dedication, but it's not beyond the average person's capabilities.

Apparently, these visions have a certain coherence. They're not quite the sort of jumble an ordinary dream is. In those visions, entities communicate with the recipient - it really seems to the recipient like a communication from an independent entity, with its own life, in its own coherent world, with its own kind of order.

So naturally enough, pre-science, the hypothesis most of the people who have had these visions have held is that they are visions of another "level" or "plane" of existence, vast beyond measure, where these kinds of discarnate intelligences live and move and have their being. It is supposed that these entities interact with the physical world only rarely, and when they do interact, they communicate by means of our imaginative faculty - IOW, they use the "stuff" of dreams to communicate, as an interface.

This is a bold and interesting hypothesis, and it shouldn't be too much trouble for scientifically-minded types to try the experiments and see for themselves.

Even granted the seeming reality of these visions, of course it's still possible that what seems to be the case isn't, and that there are no "other planes", there are no "discarnate intelligences", and it's all some peculiar faculty of imagination - not imagination as we ordinarily understand it, which for most people is sort of fleeting and incoherent, but another faculty of the brain, hitherto unexplored by science. Or, if it's dreaming, it's not just ordinary dreaming, or ordinary daydreaming, but some other capability of the brain altogether.

The discovery and analysis of this capability would, in itself, be hugely interesting and rewarding for science.

Philippe*

I know these kinds of experiences and I am still mentally sane, though I usually speak of it only to my yogic fellows. Otherwise you are seen as a mental case in a cartesian society such the french one, or possessed by demons/djinns in christian or islamic backgrounds, as these experiences don't especially go in the sense of the official science nor the official holy word of God. And generally people are afraid or joke about it and can even become violent, I too think some hardcore sceptics could hide some inferiority complex if it were true, it would crush their pride as they tend to place the intellect above all.

Philippe

Tom Sawyer

Do you have any kind of equation to represent how changes in one world are reflected in others or are you just guessing this? Because my math says that changes in the supernatural world don't affect our world at all ((x/53) * delta y^2 = 0), so you appear to be empirically wrong here.

Or could it be that when the two cultures came in contact with each other, there was some kind of period of overlap before one became dominant? I know that doesn't make as much sense as a secret deal between the Gods for control of the Empire, but I think it could be a possibility.

I'll just say the obvious here: that there was no threat of nuclear war until just after women got the right to vote. Women are obviously not experienced enough to vote for leaders who won't build nuclear weapons.

muon

OJuice, the conclusions you are drawing about the relationship between Yahweh and the Olympians are not particularly favourable to your gods. I would much prefer to think that when humans ceased to honour the gods and turned to Christianity instead (kicking and screaming in many cases), it just turned out that the gods didn't really care. The ancients rightfully wondered why the gods would want or need our worship in any case. The lesson I would draw from the change in religion is not that the gods were overthrown, but rather that the gods decided they didn't need human worship. This isn't to say that the gods might be welcoming and responsive to humans who decided to worship them anyway, but rather that the gods didn't demand belief. Surely to a pagan this approach would be more palatable than maintaining that the gods got overthrown by an usurper.

(Of course this discussion requires me to set my atheism aside, but given my strong academic interest in ancient Hellenic paganism I'm capable of doing that for the sake of argument.)

badger3k

That was basically the Greek view of their gods - they didn't care particularly, and had their own "lives" going on. Sometimes the took an interest in humanity, sometimes they didn't. There was an interesting book I read, and from it the following quote on the Greek Religion:

From "Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn From Myths", by Mary Lefkowitz. At the very end of the book, her summation reads:

"In practice, ancient worshippers paid tribute to the gods and did not expect to receive from them any direct communication or recompense. If mortals cannot look to the gods for comfort, they are compelled to seek consolation, so far as possible, from other mortals. ... Because there is no orthodoxy and no one deity to depend on, the burden is left to the individual. It is a religion for adults, and offers responsibilities rather than rewards."

I like the thoughts on that. The Greeks (at least the ones I am aware of) seemd to regard their myths in two ways - the used them to identify places or people (or events), and regarded them as "historical", but at the same time seemed to realize that they were stories, and not literal truth. Perhaps we are in some ways similar since we "idealize" the Founding Fathers while at the same time knowing that many stories about them are false.

The idea that earthly events have their analogues in the heavens is not a new one, and the argument of Yahweh and the Roman Gods is in that camp. However, mythology is full of stories of conflict between the gods, and temporary coups have occurred in the past.

Just a few thoughts.

Nostalgic Pushhead

Ojuice... what about the Norse gods? The Egyptian Gods? Ect?

Do they exist as well?

You say Yahweh exists, but you side with the Greek gods. Why are they better?

I'd go with Eru and the Valar, from Tolkien's mythology myself. They're pretty cool.