Perchance

:shrug: It all depends on where you're standing, I suppose. After all, Asatru is pretty young- but so are a lot of ways of looking at the world compared to what's gone before, and (as far as I know) those who practice Asatru think of themselves as reviving a much older religion, one that is the one their ancestors practiced.

-Perchance.

mibby529

The fact remains, the scientists are siding with creationists. Of course, the "history" of pre-Columbian America is based on missionary accounts and the Book of Mormon.

Perchance

Hi mibby,

Not sure why you brought this up here. Even if it's true, Christian missionaries and Mormons are both Abrahamic, not non-Abrahamic.

Regarding Asatru/Pagan Reconstructionist religions in general (Hellenismos and Religio Romana being two other examples):

I think it's an interesting attempt, in some ways doomed to failure unless certain things change (for example, it might be hard to practice the exact rituals that the ancient people did if they involved animal sacrifice or ritual drugs, since both those things are now restricted). I also think the knowledge may be fragmentary enough not ever to permit their complete reconstruction. But certainly it helps educate people about those places and times, and I'm for anything that increases the religious diversity in North America and elsewhere. Many small splinter faiths would be less of a threat to non-believers, in my opinion, then one large one that has demonized people who don't believe in it.

-Perchance.

lpetrich

I've encountered Mibby in E/C, and he seems like an American Indian fundamentalist.

He rejects the hypothesis of the Asian origin of the American Indians just because some long-ago missionary had proposed it, he claims that the Book of Mormon is widely used as a pre-Columbian-history source, and he claims that the Bering Straits area had been impassable in the last Ice Age.

And so what about the Wounded Knee massacre?

Perchance

Thanks for the heads-up, lpetrich. I knew about the other thread, but thought it might be something different here.

I, too, don't see what the Wounded Knee massacre has to do with non-Abrahamic apologetics (unless this is a roundabout lead-in to American Indian supernaturalism and its defenses).

Mibby? What about it?

-Perchance.

Aerik Von

Most "pagan" religions don't really bother with them as few take them seriously. Lets face it...Muslims and Christians rely on their apologists to cover up the inherit flaws that plague their primative belief systems.

Perchance

Hi Aerik,

Are you saying that the pagan religions don't need apologetics, then, because they are internally consistent? If you are saying that, I would respectfully disagree with you. Some varieties of (neo)Paganism hold that the gods are real and literal and objective beings, although there is no more proof of this than there is proof of the Christian or Islamic God. Others are not above falsifying history to make it look as if, say, a Goddess was worshipped all across Neolithic Europe until the evil patriarchal Indo-Europeans came in and destroyed their civilization (Marija Gimbutas was a particularly big proponent of this theory). These are just a few examples. All varieties may not have these flaws, but to a non-believer, if they are claiming something in the supernatural realm, they become suspect.

If you mean that pagan religions could develop apologetics as a result of time and more attention paid to them... well, perhaps they could. Is there any reason you think they would or wouldn't one way or the other?

-Perchance.

mibby529

Not a fundamentalist at all. I feel science is being infiltrated by religion. Asatru has clearly infiltrated science.

Perchance

I would say that religion in general has clearly infiltrated science, as observed by the fact that creatonists (of whatever stripe) still exist.

Do you think that Asatru uses science in its apologetics? If not, why are you posting this here?

-Perchance.

[ August 22, 2002: Message edited by: Perchance ]</p>

Aerik Von

I am simply saying that if more time is spent on them...they might develop them but the groups who take it seriously are so small that they would serve the religions little purpose.