Pre-christian europe

was there any chance for the pagan religions of Europe to hold out and never convert?

or was it inevitable after the roman empire converted from Hellenism?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
sites.google.com/site/investigatingchristianity/home/yahweh-the-primitive-storm-god--sky-god
theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/03/easter-pagan-symbolism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipporah_at_the_inn
bibleorigins.net/YahwehsBovineFormsImages.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

No, even before Christianity, sol invictus, paralleling Akhenaten's cult in Egypt, was on the rise. Even if Christianity never arose, polytheism would have declined in favor of monotheism. Christianity did, however, provide a great deal of depth to the monotheism which it otherwise would not have had, allowing it to endure as a paradigm far longer than it otherwise could have.

>polytheism would have declined in favor of monotheism

What is Hinduism.

from my understanding. kings and other rulers would convert to Christianity but the common people would still hold onto the pagan traditions for years to come. which is how many of those traditions spilled into Christianity (Easter being a prime example)

pretty hard to find reliable sources on this topic though.

The Druidic priesthoods of Europe were founded by the scattered tribes of Israel and are based on Hebrew traditions.

>What is Hinduism.
We're talking about Europe, not India.

>the common people would still hold onto the pagan traditions for years to come. which is how many of those traditions spilled into Christianity (Easter being a prime example)
I must remind you that it is NOT called Easter among the Orthodox, it's called "Pascha" (Greek for "Passover"). Since the Pagan tradition of Easter is Germanic, it obviously did not influence the Orthodox. We do have Pascha eggs (always painted red for Christ's blood, and representing Christ rising to life from the hard tomb), but we don't have any rabbit.

WE WUZ DRUIDZ N WIZARDZ N SHEIT.

Also, Pascha eggs are a thing because through Orthodox Lent (to this day), eggs are one of the items that you can't eat, so giving each other baskets of foods that become permitted at the end of Lent (Lent ends with Pascha), was a thing. Eggs were one of the more common items in that basket. It was a way of celebrating the conclusion of Lent and the rising of Christ.

I agree with constantshill on this one. A perfect being can't have human flawed characteristics like the gods of paganism. The pagans eventually realized that and converted. Even Hellenistic Jews realized that, and downplayed some of the more anthropomorphics traits of their god Yahweh described in the bible, eventually leading to Philo, Gnosticism, and early Christianity, to the transcendental God the Father of Jesus of Nazareth, a completely different deity from Yahweh.

Majority of so-called pagans are in fact atheists.

Christ's covenant is predicted in the old covenant very explicitly.

YHWH is not malevolent (Ezekiel 33:11 )

>(Easter being a prime example)
The word "Easter" is Germanic but nothing else about the festival is.

Rabbits.

I'm not saying he's evil. I'm saying the God-conception of the Hebrews slowly evolved over time, from a more grossly anthropomorphized to a more transcendant version.

Christ is literally and doctrinally the anthropomorphizing of God.

Medieval Christians associated rabbits with Mary because they thought they were hermaphrodites and could give birth while being virgins.

We're talking about Christ's Resurrection, not his Nativity.

Ok.

Still, Yahweh was initially a Canaanite storm god and evolved over a long period of time to a more transcendent version.

>Yahweh was initially a Canaanite storm god
Do you have any evidence for this?

Yahweh has always been the Warrior King of Heaven user.

Can he give you any that won't result in you covering your ears and shouting LALALALA?

>Yahweh (/ˈjɑːhweJ/, or often /ˈjɑːweJ/ in English; Hebrew: יהוה) is the national god of the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah.

>In the oldest biblical literature he is a typical ancient Near Eastern "divine warrior" who leads the heavenly army against Israel's enemies;[6]

>he later became the main god of the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) and of Judah,[7] and over time the royal court and temple promoted Yahweh as the god of the entire cosmos, possessing all the positive qualities previously attributed to the other gods and goddesses.[8][9]

>By the end of the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE), the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the true god of all the world.[9]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

All this development is beautifully captured in the bible itself, and you can see it unfolding, if you read it without bias.

I doubt it, since he'd have to give me some to do that.

>it's a Constantine spergs out all over the thread episode

Not the tripfag but

D O C U M E N T A T I O N

A R C H A E O L O G I C A L
E V I D E N C E

L I N G U I S T I C
C O N N E C T I O N S

Pretty much anything beyond (admittedly, convincing) conjecture.

>he is a typical ancient Near Eastern "divine warrior"
Could you elaborate?

The rest of this isn't evidence, it's just a narrative that reorganizes events.

Furthermore, "Canaanite storm God" is nowhere mentioned here.

In the Garden of Eden episode, Yahweh literally walks around the garden and he can't find Adam and Eve.

Constantine is honestly the reason every other thread on this board is Christcucks vs Atheicucks.

Being depicted riding clouds?
Lightning being called his arrows?
Having storehouses of rain, snow, wind and hail?

Yahweh was never a Canaanite Storm God. He was always a Poet Warrior, as reflected in King David, the man after Yahweh's own heart.

>The word "Easter" is Germanic but nothing else about the festival is.
"Eastre" Godess of fertility (hence the eggs). Its a religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. It was celebrated before Christianity arrived.

> A perfect being can't have human flawed characteristics like the gods of paganism.

The pagan religions we're not preachy or even followed a strict set of beliefs. There was no need to be perfect. The kings were scared of the idea "hell".

>Majority of so-called pagans are in fact atheists.

Just because they don't fit the arbitrary Christian definition of god doesn't mean they are atheist.

Hardly, I've talked with him before on it. He's more willing to suspend his own belief than anons I've bickered with.

You literally just want to start shit.

It's pretty uncontroversial in the study of the history of religion.

This conversation highlights the need for people to understand the distinction (not necessarily opposition) between the history of religions approach and the positive religious claims of particlar religious phenomena. Too many history of religions folk (e.g. Karen Armstrong, who also commits in my view the grave sin of pretending to objectivity while pushing her own religious view IN HER TEXTS under the guise of history of religion) fail to take seriously the claims of the subjects and movements in question (very often you get the sense that, until scholasticism and perhaps as late as fundamentalism, the subjects never REALLY believed literally what they were saying). And very often people who take seriously and understand the theological claims of a particular religion fail to appreciate the development of religious thought as humanity evolved. The fact is that, in the history of ideas, what eventually came to be known as Yahweh did evolve from its specific Canaanite cultural/historical context. And it is just as equally true that there is no way to rearrange Christian and Jewish beliefs about Yahweh that corresponds to the beliefs of the pre-Abrahamic culture that it developed from.

My issue with your assertions, is that all your citations of YHWH controlling weather are in the context of him being God of everything and weather being one thing of a lengthy list, not ONE of them is about weather as his primary function.

No, Constantine themselves is fine. Great debater, fantastic writer. Really brilliant outlook on life but that might be my personal bias as an Orthodoxboo.

But atheists lose their shit when Constantine shows up, and then Sola Scriptura faggot show up, and it just turns into a shitshow. If Constantine just dropped the fucking trip, this wouldn't happen.

There is no source whatsoever of eggs being a part of any pagan holiday before Christianity.

OP here. i'd also like to add that some areas didnt convert on their own accord but were forced to after invasions such as the baltic areas.

>Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it. He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew

>He shot arrows and scattered the enemies, bolts of lightning and routed them. Psalm 18

>Cherubim are sphinxes, usually with the body of a four-legged animal, the head of a human, and the wings of a bird. They are creatures from Mesopotamian mythology.

Yahweh also had a wife, Mama Shekinah, who is hand in hand with Yahweh as the Holy Mother of Israel and is who is being referred to as God half of the time throughout the Bible, before the femininity of God was obscured by the priesthood of the Catholic Church.

Mama Shekinah had a radiant, luminescent form and could transform Herself into a living pillar of fire or cloud of smoke.

>It's pretty uncontroversial
Yeah, and? How is that evidence?

Nothing you posted here seems to have anything to do with Yahweh's identity as the Warrior King of Heaven.

...

"The voice of Yahweh strikes with flashes of lightning"... Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood." Psalm 29

>extol him who rides on the clouds" Psalm 68

>Ps 68:32-33: "Sing to Elohim... to him who rides the ancient skies above, who thunders with mighty voice.

>The clouds poured down water, the skies resounded with thunder; your arrows flashed back and forth. Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind, your lightning lit up the world; the earth trembled and quaked." Psalm 77

>Ps 97:1-5,9: "Yahweh reigns.... Clouds and thick darkness surround him;

>Ps 135:6-7: "Yahweh... sends lightning with the rain and brings out the wind from his storehouses."

I mean, really?

There is absolutely no way anyone could know the answer to that stupid fucking question.

Why do you think any of this makes Yahweh a Storm God rather than the Warrior King of Heaven?

Yes, really.

...

Eh, Constantine is a part of relatively recent phenomenon of pushy EO proselytizers on the Internet. Much less annoying than many, but the smarm and showy humility are in equal measure annoying. Like I said, better than most, but I wouldn't go so far as to lavish the "great debater, fantastic writer" praise. It's bog standard EO playbook. A similar phenomenon which is more prevalent on other corners of the internet would be the so-called "new Calvinists" or "young, restless, reformed" types, or the budding Confessional Lutheran overeager debaters.

They love the limelight.

Care you to cite a verse?

>Ps 144:5-7: "Part your skies/heavens, O Yahweh, and come down; touch the mountains so that they smoke. Send forth lightning and scatter the enemy; shoot your arrows and rout them.

>Ps 147:4,8,16-18: He hurls down his hail like pebbles. Who can withstand his icy blast?... He stirs up his breezes and the waters flow.

>Ps 148:8: "lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding"

>Is 29:5-6: Yahweh of the armies will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with wind storm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire."

>Is 40:22, 6-7: "He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers

sites.google.com/site/investigatingchristianity/home/yahweh-the-primitive-storm-god--sky-god

Som much for the " God of love", whom "no one has ever seen", that is the God of Jesus of Nazareth.

Mama Shekinah is what you know as the Holy Spirit of the Trinity. She is the Mother hand in hand with the Father Yahweh, and their Son is Yahushuah. The Catholic Church intentionally obscured the spiritual femininity of God in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, among many other obscurations.

>There is no source whatsoever of eggs being a part of any pagan holiday before Christianity.

Yes there is. its literally the opposite. Christianity has nothing to do with Easter.

>theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/03/easter-pagan-symbolism

just so im not giving an obscure link. you can find way more.

No one has seen God's essence, but you absolutely can behold God's energies.

>Yes there is.
Please cite a primary source.

You gotta love the Zipporah at the inn episode though.

The God of love that "No one has seen" (John 6:46) comes down in person to assassinate Moses beacuse he didn't circumcise his son!

>24. And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.
>25. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, "Surely a bloody husband art thou to me."
>26. So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipporah_at_the_inn

If we were to hold out at all it would be in a really discreet way.

We Milesians who don't know nuffin about no Tuatha de Danann, massa. Saint Brigid, pray for us.

No one has seen God's essence (transcendence), God's energies (immanence) is certainly something you can behold, This is what Saint Gregory Palamas defended.

nothing but word games

Could you explain what you mean? In Orthodox Christianity, humans and angels also have essence as distinct from energies (animals just have energies).

>Mama Shekinah is what you know as the Holy Spirit of the Trinity.
Is Mama Shekinah one Person of the Godhead, of undivided essence with the Father and the Son, equal in glory and majesty and coeternal? Uncreated? Unlimited? Unbegotten, but proceeding?

Yahweh has always been a Warrior God user. You just have a simplistic, adolescently sentimental conception of human nature, divine authority and theological concept of the ordered Cosmos.

>I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I YAHUVEH do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7

Read the Septuagint. Any time you read a reference to the Holy Spirit, it is the voice of Mama Shekinah.

>the earliest known Israelite place of worship is a 12th-century open-air altar in the hills of Samaria featuring a bronze bull reminiscent of Canaanite "Bull-El" (El in the form of a bull), and the archaeological remains of further temples have been found at Dan on Israel's northern border and at Arad in the Negev and Beersheba, both in the territory of Judah.[44] Shiloh, Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah, Ramah and Dan were also major sites for festivals, sacrifices, the making of vows, private rituals, and the adjudication of legal disputes.[45]

>In Iron Age Samaria was found an ostraca or potsherd inscribed egel-yah, "bull-calf Yah,"

Totally not a typical Near Eastern warrior god.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
bibleorigins.net/YahwehsBovineFormsImages.html

>Read the Septuagint
I have

> Any time you read a reference to the Holy Spirit, it is the voice of Mama Shekinah.
Could you cite the verse?

Plethon did nothing wrong.

user, I'm not even involved in this, but this is always such a childish argument.

>b-but God is too mean for my poor little bleeding heart!

i'll take it a step further. Christmas is just an integrated pagan tradition.
>2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.
>3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.
>4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Jeremiah 10:2-4

you really want to continue this?

No God is typical user. Every God has unique characteristics in and of themselves, it's only your own understanding of esoteric and theological concepts that is lacking. You have to understand this, right?

>Genesis 32:30
“For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”

>Exodus 33:11
So the Lord spoke to Moses face to face

>Exodus 33:20
But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.”

>John 1:18
No one has seen God at any time.

The author of John forgot that part!

kek.

christcucks btfo

Earliest mention of YHWH is pertaining to the Shuamites. It probably means "HE IS"

"El" means "god", like "Theos" does in Greek. It's innately not the name of one specific god, but can be used that way, just like "the King" can refer to a specific king, but the title does not refer to one innately. "El" was used as a title for most Canaanite deities.

Everybody knows this about Christmas user. You're demonstrating a pretty ignorant understanding of this concepts while trying to pass yourself off like you've actually studied these things. You just come across as exhibiting impotent frustrations.

You've never even read any of these books you're quoting and you don't even understand who is speaking and in what context or where.

In other words, you can't.

Hackett, Jo Ann (2001). "'There Was No King In Israel': The Era of the Judges". In Coogan, Michael David.

This just validates Orthodoxy, which says you can see the face of God.

This is not where I'm coming from at all. I'm showing that the God-conception of the ancient israelites is an evolving one, starting from a gross-anthropomorphic one to a more transcendental version. This episode shows a grossly anthropomorphic deity that comes down from heaven to claim a baby's foreskin, like a maddened rabbi. How different from the God-conception of Jesus and the early Christians, the God that is so transcendent that "no one has ever seen".

Did you read these books?

Yes, anyone who's actually read the bible understands that Yahweh begins as the Lion of King David and becomes the Lamb of Yahushua. Yahweh also knows exactly what's happening from the beginning from an outer perspective while at the same time experiencing it first hand.

>I have seen God face to face
>No one has seen God at any time

I mean really. If it were any other book, by any other religion, say the Quran, you would use this type of thing to claim that the book is contradictory, therefore not reliable, therefore not inspired and not infallible.

You, sweetheart, are biased.

Circumcision was the old covenant equivalent to baptism. God wants to ensure the Israelites don't do what modern Protestants like to do, and leave their children out of the covenant.

No one has seen God's transcendence, that is, God beyond all creation, because nothing created is or ever can be beyond all creation. But certainly God's immanence can be directly seen, and in fact spirituality, in Orthodox Christianity, is ultimately concerned with seeing God directly, that is the point (well, that and Theosis, but you have to see God before you can be one with him).

Have you actually read either of those books, understand who is saying either of those sentences or what context they are being said in user?

Except that's not how he begins at all, but

>Israelite religion accordingly emerged gradually from a Canaanite milieu.[23]

>El, "the kind, the compassionate," "the creator of creatures," was the chief of the Canaanite gods.[24] He, not Yahweh, was the original "God of Israel"—the word "Israel" is based on the name El rather than Yahweh.[25]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

Yahweh is a Canaanite tribal god.

God the Father is a Hellenistic Hebrew concotion.

Deal with it.

...

You're reading into the text.

Theosis is a Neoplatonic thing, the bible authors had no idea what that was.

Yes.

El just means God user. It isn't a specific deity. Yahweh was also referred to as El. Every God was. You're still trying to pass yourself off as some kind of learned scholar when you're just being arrogant and demonstrating ignorance.

Describe the context of the books and the scenes each of those sentences are spoken in in full detail then.

It's what is happening to Moses when light radiates so brightly from him he was to wear a veil.

God's immanence (energies) physically manifest as light (that is where halos come from).

>Everybody knows this about Christmas user

Apparently not user. Considering someone is saying Easter has nothing pagan about it.

or do you have trouble reading?

>In other words, you can't.

what a joke. you didnt refute a single point in the article i posted.

Nothing about the Easter bunny or colored eggs derives from Christianity, nor will you find them mentioned in the Bible.