Survival of Pagan Names for Days of the Week

Jews maybe, occasionally, although the most notorious of Jewish persecutions by (sort of) Church authorities, the Spanish Inquisition, was really about Jews who had ostensibly converted to Christianity but were suspected of still observing Jewish laws and rituals in private. Thus, from the Church’s point of view, this was about heretical or apostate Christians.

As for atheists, in another recent thread I put out a general challenge to come up with a single instance of anyone persecuted for atheism (in anything like the modern sense of that term: believing that there are no gods) in ancient or medieval times, either by Christian authorities or the authorities of any other religion. This was after another poster had asserted that atheists throughout history had routinely been persecuted and murdered by the religious for their (lack of) belief. Nobody could come up with any examples earlier than that of Percy Shelly, who was expelled from Oxford (not murdered) ostensibly for being an atheist (really, of course, making a lot of noise about it and related political issues) in the early 19th century.

This is mainly, of course, because there were no fricking unbelievers to be persecuted during the middle ages. The social and intellectual conditions conducive to atheism did not exist. A few atheists (or quasi-atheists) did, arguably, exist in the ancient, pre-Christian era. The Epicureans are fairly reasonably construed as atheists, although they did not quite deny that gods existed, just that they mattered. However, I know of no evidence that Epicureans as such (or any other “ancient atheists” that may conceivably have existed) ever suffered persecution from the religious institutions of the religious majority around them.

Anyway, I am in no way arguing that the Church, when it had the relevant power, was “incredibly tolerant” of religious dissent. It most certainly was not, and often persecuted those suspected of heresy very harshly indeed. However, to describe this in the way the OP did as a matter of being routinely “oppressive toward non-believers” is thoroughly misleading, suggesting the nonsensical myth of atheists having been martyred for their unbelief down through the ages.

Heretics, the people who actually did get oppressed by Church authorities for many centuries, were not non-believers, they were Christian believers, often fanatical believers, who believed in some variant form of Christianity that Church leaders thought (rightly or wrongly) to be dangerous to Christian solidarity (and thus the leadership’s grip on power). Most often these heretics were considerably more fanatical and inflexible in their religious belief than the Church leaders were. Jews, being non-evangelizers, were not much of a threat to that power, which is why most of the persecutions of Jews in the middle ages were not orchestrated (though not necessarily opposed either) by Church authorities. Atheists were not a threat because they didn’t exist. Heretics - people promoting variant versions of Christianity - really were a serious threat to Church power, as was eventually proved when all efforts to suppress one of them (Martin Luther) failed.

You’re being pedantic to the point of reversing reality.

The Catholic Church - and later the various Protestant denominations - was historically an oppressor of non-believers. The non-believers could be pagans, Muslims, or Jews; they could be other Catholics who schismed (or, later, Protestants); they could be freethinkers who disagreed on any of the Church’s tenets. Sometimes the oppression went down officially from the Pope; sometimes it was a local matter perpetrated by bishops and priests; sometimes Catholic Kings and lower leaders led it; sometimes it was townspeople. There were times and places of acceptance but there never was any Golden Age.

It is all of western history from Constantine to the 20th century. There is no other way to read it, and to try to palm it off as being anti-heretic is to completely alter religion’s effect on the entire world.

I am not trying to palm anything off, and the qualifier about heretics was in my very first post in this thread. You, however, misrepresented me as saying that the Church had been "incredibly tolerant, when I said no such thing. It (both the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations) has typically been incredibly intolerant of believers that it perceived as heretical, and yes, it has aggressively tried to spread its belief system to non-believers, often at the point of a sword. To my mind, however, the OP’s use of “oppressive to non-believers”, however, carries strong connotations of a quite different sort of oppression that just did not happen. That suppression of murdering of atheists thing just did not happen, and even pagan beliefs and customs (like naming the days of the week after pagan gods - the topic of the thread) were often tolerated or assimilated (vide Christmas, Easter) when they did not present themselves as a threat to Church power. There is a big difference between responding aggressively and ruthlessly to perceived threats, and just being in the habit of oppression just for the sake of it.

Nonsense. If anything less than full obeisance is taken as a perceived threat - and that’s 2000 years of history - then it is oppression for the sake of it. Don’t ask the oppressors; ask anybody who has been oppressed.

There’s no need to continue this hijack further. You defined “non-believers” in a way that I found ridiculous, and that’s confirmed by the OP himself. Once you open non-believers to the normal, common definition your qualifiers fail.

You’re both right. Friday in Old Norse was both Freyjudagr and Frjádagr, one after Freya and the other after Frigga. Also Frigga and Freya might have been the same goddess, or at least diverged from the same stories.

Let’s not call it a hijack and say it’s a chance for me to rephrase the OP in a way perhaps more palatable to njtt:

Why did Christianity on the one hand subsume some pagan practices (e.g. Christmas, Easter) and on the other allow some to remain unaltered, like referring to the days of the week, months, and planets by blatantly pagan and/or secular names? Why not change those as well?

There. How’s that?

It probably never occurred to them. The Church didn’t rename the pagan holidays, they just had their own holidays coincide with them, thus (probably unintentionally) appropriating many pagan traditions. Any kind of program to rename common things like the days of the week for religious reasons would have been extremely difficult at a time when the vast majority of Christians didn’t even use the language of the Church. As far as I know, that kind of program wasn’t even attempted until the French Revolution when almost all of those it was imposed on used a common language and literacy had expanded well beyond the small world of kings, popes and clerics. But, even in that instance, the changes didn’t stick.

Note that the English word for Easter is pagan in origin and that’s the single most important day in Christianity. Ēostre.

The Quakers were bothered by the pagan origins of the days of the week. They ended up just refered to them as First Day, Second Day, etc.

Note that they didn’t change the names of the planets either. Though they were named after the pagan gods.

My German professor claimed that they did try to change the names of the days of the week in German, but succeeded only with Wednesday, called Mittwoch (mid-week) rather than something like Wodenstag.

It certainly did occur to them. There’s a famous letter from Pope Gregory to St Augustine, dated around 597, instructing him, in his planned conversion of the Heathen English, to deliberately take over their places of worship, customs and festivals and simply give them a Christian veneer, causing as little disruption as possible.

Depends on what country you’re in. I assure you, I spelled them right for my countrymen. :wink:

May I ask what country would that be? I assure you, the Academies wouldn’t accept that spelling of Miércoles if you drugged every single academic out of his gourd - it definitely doesn’t include a Y sound in any country.

That’s because your academies aren’t familiar with Filipino. But now that you mentioned it, I don’t remember how we spelled them during our Spanish class.