A common way for atheists to explain their views towards religion is that they view it as superstition, in the same way that many view the norse gods or any other ancient religion.
So my question for the religious people on this board, how do you view the norse gods? Were they just completely made up, or was there any truth to their beliefs?
If not, do you think your views here is similar to that of an atheist?
Moved to IMHO from GQ.
I know very little about Norse religions, although AFAIK Asatru is the best known. They’ve made a little blip in the news regarding this story. TL : DR - A group bought a defunct Lutheran church in a small Minnesota town, and wish to use it for their rituals. It’s controversial because it’s explicitly whites-only.
Is it bad form to do a quick shout-out to “Norse Mythology,” a new comic book series, Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell, re-telling stories from the mythos in luscious art and sterling writing? Issue 3 just out; grab 'em and enjoy!
I don’t know how the Norse viewed their gods. For all I know, they were sort of their version of the Marvel Comic Universe. (After all, Thor is part of both!)
As a religious person, I draw a distinction between big-G God, like the God that Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe in, and small-g gods, like the Greek or Norse gods. The way I think of them, they’re not the same kind of entity at all, despite the fact that we use the same word for them.
A good friend of mine got married in a ceremony officiated by a priest of Thor. To be honest, I’m not sure how legitimate the wedding was… No, not because of the officiant, that was fine, but because they didn’t dance a polka at the reception.
I would agree with this, and further state that I am agnostic as to the question of whether Odin, Zeus, etc. exist. There may well exist entities more powerful than we humans but less powerful than God Almighty, and some of those entities might well be associated in some way with lightning or knowledge or the ocean or whatever, and there might even be such entities that call themselves by those names, or made themselves known to ancient peoples. Or they may not. Until and unless one of them introduces themself to me, I don’t much care.
Pretty much all the characterizations of God by established organized religions bear a lot more resemblance to badly-behaved authoritarian humans than to God.
I assume that is because that’s the state of understanding that got preserved within those various religious institutions. But within each religion there tend to be individual people doing their own seeking of an understanding that goes beyond childish caricatures. And the descriptions you’d get from those people of God is rather different. I haven’t met any folks who identify as being part of the Norse-God pantheon tradition, but if I did, I’d assume that the ones doing their own thinking would similarly have reached an understanding that wasn’t quite so Marvel Comics as what you get from the myths and fables.
Assuming you are Christian, do you think of the Jewish and Muslim god as just different interpretations of the same god?
I assume people throught the Norse gods were actually real, but they might not have. Do you think they might have had an element of truth to them, or would it just be something people came up with to tell stories and explain natural phenomena?
As a non-religious person I see them as pretty much exactly equivalent.
How did you come to make that distinction? Was it before you took on your particular religion or did you make that assessment and then plump for the most persuasive?
Btw, it’s kind of interesting to see Marvel characters with names that are common here in Norway.
Brage, Frigg, Frøya, Idunn, Loke, Magne, Odin, Thor, Trym, Vidar are all quite common here. All from Norse mythology, but not all used in Marvel (yet).
Thor is a regular name, like John.
I’m not up on Norse mythology but by views are not changed by that but in generally I would assume something like to other mythologies. My views of them is they are real and it is but a perspective view of them. The story needs to be pieced together, trying to remove the effects of culture to merge the views. This is why I can assume it is the same and fits together with other mythologies.
The view of many gods came from the time before the biblical myth of the flood, where the ‘gods’ or sons of God as is in the Bible were apparently living among us and procreating hybrids with us. Those hybrids are the heroes such as we see in Greek Mythology and I assume Norse Mythology.
The basic idea of those times is that the greater ruled over the lesser as created by and for Jesus when He was too young to know right from wrong.
After seeing what a mess it was it was time to start over with a new paradigm, which held the creatures of above more separate from the creatures from below. This divide between heaven and earth on creation day 2 was the only non-good day of creation. So that divide was troublesome, but not overcomable.
In my experience with the Christian faith, people who bothered to worry about this at all generally decided that either (a) mythological pantheons were caused by imperfect or forgotten understanding of God as people spread outward and time passed and/or (b) fallen angels/demons/some other quasi-divine beings posed as gods, either taking advantage of (a) or inventing faiths out of whole cloth. Which falls in with the Old Testament bits about God seeming to acknowledge other divine beings and being none too fond of them or their followers. Either way, you can safely arrive at “Our God is real and the classic mythological pantheons aren’t”.
Yes, I do.
I don’t know what the ancient Norse people thought about their gods, though it may well have varied from person to person or time period to time period.
I am reminded of these threads:
Well yeah; it’s pretty explicit in Muslim theology that Allah is the same god that Jews and Christians worship. Stuff like the covenants with Abraham and Moses are explictly part of Islamic belief, as well as Christian and Jewish.
The real differences come in with Jews not believing in Mohammed or Jesus, and Muslims not believing in Jesus as the son of God and savior, but instead in him as the penultimate prophet second only to Mohammed.
Same god, different take.
If you’re pretty sure the Norse and other “small” gods are just made-up fairy tales, what do you call Thor’sday, Wodin’sday, and Friaday? What about Saturn’sday, for that matter? Have you renamed them to suit your own religion?
Not to go off on too much of a tangent, but this echoes a question I’ve had for some time: Did the Norse (or Greeks, or Romans) actually believe their mythological stories, or were they akin to fairy tales? Or something in between? You can find great detail about the mythologies themselves, but very little about where the stories came from and how they were regarded at the time.
I define the God that I believe in as the singular creator of the Universe. Anyone else, then, who worships the singular creator of the Universe worships the same God that I do (though we may, of course, disagree regarding that entity’s other traits or deeds). If a Pastafarian tells me that the Flying Spaghetti Monster singlehandedly (er, singlenoodly?) created the Universe, then I conclude from that that “Flying Spaghetti Monster” is simply another name for the same entity that I refer to as “God”. Maybe that entity looks like a big white-bearded man, or maybe like a plate of bolognese, or maybe “looks like” is a completely irrelevant concept for God. Either I or the Pastafarian, or both of us, might well be wrong on that. But we agree that there was one Creator, and that we worship the Creator.
I recently became very interested in all this. I’m both Christian and Scandinavian. Norse gods were highly regarded in sagas and runes. They were very real to them.
They are real to me in comics and in the form of Chris Hemsworth. Lol
No. It’s not useful to invent your own names for days that other people who aren’t part of your religion wouldn’t know. And it’s not like who the days are named after (or that they are named after anything at all) is well known.
If the gods were real, then maybe avoiding their days would make sense if you don’t worship them. But if you don’t think they’re real, what’s the harm?
That, BTW, is the position I’ve always been taught about all gods. They’re all idols and thus fake, unlike the One True God. Why did people ever believe in them? The Devil tricked them. All idolater are ultimately worshiping Satan.
I’m not nearly so stark anymore, though. I’m fine with the “maybe there are different views of the same being” idea, as long as they were seeking out doing good. I stick with my God for reasons that are personal, but I don’t know for sure the others’ are wrong.
That said, since there are so few worshipers of the Norse gods left, I tend to think none of them were real God. I don’t think an actual God who cared about being worshiped would let his religion die out. And a God who didn’t care for worship or humans wouldn’t bother letting us know about Him at all.
Why you do my boy Quetzlcoatl dirty like that