But the Judeo-Christian concept of sin is unique in that it is an all-or-nothing proposition – any sin, however trivial, is enough to damn your soul and cut you off from God. The Talmudic Rabbi Shammai (who lived around the time of Christ) argued that it is better for a man never to be born, for any man once born is doomed to sin, and it is better not to exist at all than to sin against the One God. Jews set aside a special day every year, Yom Kippur, to beg forgiveness of their sins and restore “at-one-ment” with God. (That’s not just a linguistic coincidence, that’s where the word “atonement” actually comes from.) Christians do the same thing with baptism, which is supposed to literally wash away sins – and Catholics add things like confession, penance, and acts of contrition. I don’t know if Islam has a similar attitude; but the Jewish and Christian attitudes towards sin set them apart from all other religions I have ever heard of. It’s a very different thing from Hindu-Buddhist karma, or from the Greco-Roman idea of a “pollution” that would make one unclean and unfit to enter a temple. And its very, very different from the Wiccan idea of “threefold return” for good or evil actions.
There were indeed early Jews who believed in the existance of other gods. Jewish belief evolved from a “God of Heaven” to a true monotheistic idea, but it was an evolution. I’m afraid I don’t recall the exact historical period when the idea of ‘modern’ monotheism emerged. My knowledge is a bit sketchy. I’m sure someone more informed will eventually come along.
It’s generally believed that Josiah, one of the last kings of Judah before the Babylonian conquest, finally put an end to competing gods and forms of worship in his kingdom when he centralized all sacrificial worship at the Jerusalem Temple, and shut down all other temples, shrines and fanes. He might have been inspired by refugee priests from the northern kingdom of Israel, which had recently been conquered and permanently destroyed by the Assyrians. Josiah also claimed to have found an ancient and forgotten “Book of the Law” in some neglected corner of the Temple – it was the book of Deuteronomy, probably; at any rate, whether it was authentic or not, he managed to pass it off as dating from the time of Moses or Joshua. A few generations after Josiah, when the Jews returned from the Babylonian Exile, their religion definitely had reached the point where it was recognizable as what we now call Judaism.
Many pagans in general are anti-Christian. I tend to find this both unfortunate and tedious. The Asatru and other heathens I know tend to be either indifferent or generally friendly, with a few who recognise the historical syncretisms in their practice and one who’s looking into modern syncretistic approaches.
I figured the OP was falling into a lot of the Wiccan publicity, but since it mentioned “especially those that were prevalent in pre-Roman Europe”, it seemed worth correcting.
It doesn’t exist in the Eastern Church either – they went with Pelagius.
(Personally, I don’t understand how believers in original sin can reconcile that with the glorification of Jesus as a saviour figure – if it’s still a going thing, then the guy failed.)
And why not the pagan religions of non-Europe? Central Asia and Africa are as closely related to Israel as Europe is.
Er, you mean polytheistic? Pantheistic means something else. Most early pagan religions were most certainly not pantheistic.
This has been debated here extensively before, and the conclusion I reached from it is that it does not mean that there necessarily are other gods - just that you should not believe in another god.
No. Their creation mythology is mutually exclusive, even when taken from a purely metaphorical standpoint.
Well, c. 1500-1000 BC, they would hardly have known about the gods outside of their immediate surroundings, which probably would have been numerous enough. Once you start getting into 500-0 BC, you start having a larger “community” in the area, from Persia to Egypt and Greece. Still, you don’t see the Hebrews talking much about Scythian shamanism. They would mostly be concerned with local gods that their people were worshipping, not gods of civilizations thousands of miles away.
We’re not anti-christian really… anymore than we’re anti-wiccan. Make of that what you will. :>
My first thread that has generated more than a token number of responses, and I missed most of it!
Thanks for the responses and opinions; now let me clarify a few things:
Liliaren, I think my use of the term “Earth-based” was a poor choice. I was thinking specifically of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Northern Europe (Celts, Norse, etc), although my question applies equally to any non Judeo-Christian faiths (Native American, Hindu, etc.).
Zagadka, i did mean polytheistic, not pantheistic. Thank you for correcting me.
Hamish, I was specifically not thinking of Wicca, which is a relatively recent development, but rather the “historical pagan faiths” that many people do confuse with Wicca. I do actually understand the difference, but I feel that I have almost completely failed to convey that fact.
I was not familiar with the term “henotheism”, but that just might fit by beliefs. Or it might not; I’m not quite certain. I’m not sure if I would say that I definitely believe that other gods exist. Whether they might be Demons, or Angels, or Ainur, I don’t see any reason why they can’t or shouldn’t.
The Creation mythology tells us that “In the beginning”, there was only God, and that He created everything else, but it does not necessarily give us an exhaustive list of all the things that were created. No mention is made in Genesis of the creation of angels, demons, cherubim and seraphim, et. al., but these “supernatural beings” all exist within the Christian mythology. So why not other “gods”, bearing in mind that a “god” does not necessarily imply omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, but simply a supernatural presence that cannot be understood in human terms.
Definitely not ‘Earth-based’, then; that’s a Wicca-and-relatives-and-descendants term. :}
I’m afraid I can’t speak to the fundamental basis of any of the northern European paganisms; I have not (yet – I’m working on this) studied them at that level, and my reconstruction isn’t even European, let alone northern. 
One of the pillars of the religions as practiced in the current day is spectacularly irrelevant to the original practices – research. 
Don’t feel too bad about the error, though; the question of whether paganism is defined by being “Earth-based” and whether or not that excludes us recons (and by extension the original faiths we’re reconstructing) is one of the traditional long-running flamewars of modern paganism, especially on the 'net. 
Sure, but since when do Christians tolerate rationality within their “Belief Compartment”? I find Augustine’s view quite hilarious: Original Sin was transmitted via sperm! “Through Adam’s schlong, we all went wrong”…
Anyway, in my view, the invention of “Original Sin” was very clever psychologically. It allows all the lazy, semi-believing Christians of Convenience (99.9999% of all Christians) who have never turned the other cheek, never loved their enemies, never donated their belongings to the poor, to justify their semi-believing laziness to themselves by comforting themselves that, alas, everyone – most especially themselves – are excused because God made them sinners.
Oh yeah, the Lewis-Tolkien conversation was perhaps the final straw for Lewis’s holding out against Christianity.
Diogenes, no one denies that Pagan resurrection myths predate C’nity. You say C’nity co-opted them, I say JC fulfilled them.
Friar,
Yeah, I guess I just misunderstood what you meant by Tolkien saying that the pagan myths had “found their substance” in Christianity. I’ve occasionally heard some Christians try to argue that pagan resurrections were “copied” from the Christian one and I thought that you were saying that Tolkien thught that too.
Looking for prefigurations of Christianity was started pretty early on, though. Some theologians claimed to be able to find unwitting adumbrations about Christianity in the classic pagan literature (eg, Odysseus lahing himself to the mast = Jesus on the cross). This is obviously a highly subjective and faith-based view of course. The same approach is sometimes used with “double” interpretations of certain passages from the OT.
We most certainly did not. Pelagius is a heretic in the Eastern Church just as much as he is in the Western. Pelagius taught that man could save himself by his own efforts. The Orthodox Church teaches that we inherit the effects of the original sin by Adam and Eve: a corrupted nature and an inherent tendency towards sin. We do not inherit the guilt, and even though a person has a nature that tends towards sin, that does not mean that they cannot refrain from sinning voluntarily. However, there still exists an ontological gulf between man and God, which needed to be bridged by Christ, who was both God and man. The Church fathers teach that even if man had not fallen, Christ would still have come, because there needed to be a link between human nature and the divine. Man’s nature is still corrupted, but because Christ has joined it to the divine, it can be renewed and healed (and will be, for everybody, at the end of time).
As for the original question, the Eastern Church has never been henotheistic; references to “other gods” in the Bible are metaphorical: they are things that have been set up and treated as if they were gods, but are not. Rather, they are either demons, or the vain imaginings of humans.
Thank you for the correction; I clearly need to go through my readings of the relevant debates again.
Why must they be demons? I agree with the first part of your statement; they cannot actually be “gods” because there is only one God, creator of Heaven and Earth. But why does that automatically make them demons (or figments of imagination)? Is it not possible that there are supernatural beings other than God who are not bent on destruction?
I think the idea is that any “good” supernatural beings wouldn’t accept worship, because they’d know only God should be worshiped…so if a supernatural being let you worship it, it would have to be evil.
Precisely. Eastern Orthodoxy does not teach the existence of jinn, faeries, or any other type of non-angelic non-human sapient creature. There are only two types of sapient beings: humans and the various types of angels and demons (known as a group as the “bodiless powers”). Any angel would direct worship to God, so a supernatural force that appears to accept worship for itself is either a demon or delusion; either way, it’s a good idea to avoid it.
How would a supernatural creature be able to prevent itself from being worshipped? What’s it supposed to do, come down to earth and say “Don’t worship me?”
Also, what’s the big deal if someone innocently and with good intentions were to worship the “wrong” god? Why does God care? What does he get out of worship? Are 800 million Hindus all screwed because they worship “false” gods. Does personal virtue count for nothing?
How is a person supposed to know what the “right” God is in the first place? They all have equal evidence, so isn’t it just a guessing game? Pull the right god out of a hat and you win?
To me, this is a problem with religious exclusivism. I’ve used the analogy before that it’s like God is telling everybody that he’s thinking of a number between one and a million and the only way to stay out of hell is to guess what the number is with no hints and only one try.
For believers in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for the most part, though, the idea is that all the different gods don’t have equal evidence. Only God is real, and everybody should be able to realize that. So, for them, at least, the choice of God to worship isn’t a morally neutral thing…everyone who worships a false god is doing a morally evil thing.
It’s not what God gets out of it (for He has no need for worship), but what the person gets out of it. The whole point of Eastern Orthodoxy is to produce an interior change in oneself, so that when one is brought into full communion with the uncreated energies of God at the end of time, one is able to withstand and participate in them. Those who are unprepared to meet God will experience His energies as unbearable torment. Thus, if the whole point of earthly life is to prepare for the ultimate communion with God, worshipping false gods is hardly an effective means of accomplishing this. Good works are not a goal in themselves, but a means to the goal of communion with God.
As for the fate of non-Orthodox, the Church makes no pronouncement, leaving their ultimate state in thehands of God. God has given the Church as the only sure means to salvation, but it is not for us humans to say what He will do with everybody else.
But they DO have equal evidence. Believing something doesn’t make it true. From a purely objective standpoint, there is no more evidence for Yahweh than for Thor.
Why should they be able to realize that?
This whole argument is just begging the question since there’s no way to know what the “right” god is.
I also don’t see why accidentally worshipping the wrong god would be “morally evil.” Why? Who does it hurt?