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Both Athens and Sparta were indeed worshipping a people represented by Athena and Apollo and the ideals they represented. It was an Indo European religion, those figures represent the Indo-Europeans themselves and cult worship of them functionally entailed worship of Indo-European forbearers and founders.
Athena and Apollo represent Indo-Europeans, Yahweh represents Jews. And in any case the Athena cult existed before Athens. Athens was named after Athena. That is nothing like the Mosaic covenant that features in Exodus. If the origin of Athena as a goddess was that she chose Athens as her city then it's unlikely it would have ever been a pan-Hellenic cult. But the pan-Hellenic cult came first and then the name of the city came later. Whereas the Mosaic covenant is the very origin of the Jewish religion and worship of Yahweh.
Can you please provide your interpretation of the blood covenant? Do you think it's literally true? If you don't think it's true, then how could you have any other literary interpretation than the god portrayed in Exodus is a symbolic representation of the people he has Chosen? The covenant is even inherited genetically, it's a tribal representation.
Yes, one of the weaknesses of the word "pagan" is a lack of clarity- I was referring to Indo European religion which does have this quality.
I’m curious about your spirituality (not a gotcha question). I mean you flirt, in these posts, with some kind of genuine spiritual belief in Indo-European paganism that goes beyond just ‘it was good social technology’.
It basically boils down to "it was good social technology" but why it was good social technology is important. Like the Hebrew bible, it was not just about moral lessons it was about cohering the identity and racial consciousness of people who followed the religion. And using that racial consciousness to change the world. Worshipping Apollo was worshipping a racial ideal just like it is with Yahweh.
I also think humans are innately religious, and religiosity is essentially a personality trait. I do think having some pro-European and pro-Civilizational religious revival is essential, and that means moving beyond Yahweh and Hebrew lore. I don't think that revival will be a reform of Indo-European paganism although I think it would have some similarities in spirit and aesthetic.
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I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?
The attempt of medieval European royal houses to appropriate Yahweh as a symbol of their lineage falls flat precisely because of the Hebrew bible. If Exodus entailed God choosing the lineage of Alfred the Great, then it would absolutely be cogent to identify the God portrayed in that mythos as representing the people chosen by him. You sure as hell wouldn't be saying "oh the worship of that god started because the Saxons claimed that god selected them as his favorite among all the nations, who knows what the god is supposed to represent! Nothing, probably."
You aren't recognizing the difference between the mythological impetus for the cult itself being the Moasic covenant, whereas it has not been in any single other case you have tried to cite as a point of comparison. You have just continued to point out that gods representing people is a thing that happens all throughout history, except for Exodus I guess! Yeah right.
The Yahweh cult is rooted in the Mosaic covenant. Yahweh is a symbol of that people. If some other cult emerged on the basis of a blood covenant between a god and a people you would certainly recognize that as plainly obvious.
Except it is true that countless Christian countries, particularly in Europe, and countless other Christian movements believed that they were chosen by (the Christian/Jewish) God for greatness, for fortune, for special favor. What’s more most also believed that the Jews had lost his favor and/or were now heretics, and that they were their inheritors.
The only way you seem to suggest this is untrue is in the argument that there is some kind of inherent, intrinsic spiritual bond between Abrahamic religion and the Jewish race, despite the fact that for the overwhelming majority of the last 2000 years the great majority of believers have had a negative view of practicing Jews. Some Christians do believe this (like Evangelicals), but that’s because they believe deeply that the whole thing is real. Since you don’t believe it’s real, I don’t really understand why you think that connection is so inherent and so immutable. Clearly it hasn’t prevented antisemitism or guaranteed philosemitism, in either the Christian or Islamic worlds.
I don't think Judaism would have survived without the Christianization of Europe. With all the incessant complaints over historical antisemitism, it's pretty remarkable that Indo Europeans just allowed Jews to live in their territory and maintain the Jewish religion. That almost certainly boils down to an impact of the Christianization of Europe. And Jews would not have allowed the same for pagan Indo Europeans if the tables were turned in some counterfactual. Not that it's going to stop them from always claiming to be the victim rather than treated very well by any reasonable historical standard.
There is an inherent, intrinsic spiritual bond between Yahweh and the Jews. This is so incredibly undeniable. Even Christians and Muslims believe this.
If anything, Europe under Christendom was uniquely religiously intolerant compared to most other peer civilizations, including in much of South Asia and even for most of Islamic history. Jews were very regularly pogromed (hence the 109 or whatever number it is me) and Catholics and Protestants fought brutal, hugely consequential religious wars over what often seem to outsiders to be relatively minor theological disagreements. In the Islamic Middle East countless tiny religious sects that were neither Islamic nor Christian survived through to the 20th century, and in South Asia there were also periods of relatively broad religious tolerance for Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and so on.
I think there’s every chance it would have survived into modernity as the Copts, Zoroastrians, Druze, Mandaeans, Yazidis, Samaritans and others have.
If Copts, Zoroastrians, Druze, Mandaeans, Yazidis, Samaritans had migrated to Europe they would have been obliterated. Jews have always been given special treatment. My understanding is that none of those are a diaspora people that have migrated to the territory of a foreign population that is comparable to Jews migrating to Europe. A continuity among indigenous people is very different than a diaspora being allowed to establish themselves in a foreign land.
I expect they would probably have been treated similarly to the Jews.
Zoroastrians certainly have, that’s what Parsis are.
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And yet you yourself actually seem to deny it. You answered one of Rafa’s other comments about your own spirituality by saying you believe religion is merely social technology. If this is the case — if there is no actual divine entity who has real and revealed demands and preferences — then it what sense can it be true that Jews have an inherent, spiritual bond with Yahweh? (Or with any other nonexistent deity?) At best you can say that pious Jews sincerely believe that they have an inherent spiritual bond with Yahweh, even though in actuality that Yahweh is merely an ancient literary device.
Obviously in that comment I'm treating Yahweh as a mythological figure rather than a literal figure. Spirituality is a human behavior and expression. I said in my previous post that religiosity is a personality trait and it seems important and even necessary for people to have in some form. It is certainly possible for people to feel a spiritual connection with mythological figures.
Yes, Yahweh is an ancient literary device for Jewish identity. But even many secular Jews feel a strong connection with their Jewish identities. Even if they don't literally believe in the truth of the myths they still identify with what is represented and created by the mythology.
Certainly, but this isn’t about Jewish identity or Jewish belief. It’s about the identity of Christian and Muslim believers in Abrahamic religion and whether they have consider Jews to be special, better, above them, closer to God in some spiritual way, and that simply isn’t true with the exception of a small number of very modern movements in Christianity.
Actually this thread is indeed about Jewish identity and belief, if you go back to the very beginning of the thread. OP said something along the lines of "the Hebrews believed themselves to be Chosen, but that rule over the earth belongs to Yahweh." So the fact that to Jews, Yahweh is a symbolic representation of themselves undermines his argument that Jews have maintained a "humble forbearance" in the face of conflict with external tribes and civilizations. It could not be further from the truth. And certainly the book of Isaiah is not a representation of Humble Forbearance, it's an example par excellence of how Jewish identity politics manifests in the Hebrew Bible as it portrays conflict with Civilization.
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I still can't discern a single argument that any of the gods discussed is supposed to symbolise the people that worshipped him or her. You just keep asserting that it is so and must obviously be so, against a wealth of literature that is replete with claims of those gods symbolising all sorts of things but people, and not a single example of anyone ever understanding worshipping the god to entail worshipping the associated people. There is of course a trivial sense in which they do, in that people who both believe in the god and in the story that a particular group of people are the god's chosen necessarily will treat that group in a special way, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the latter belief follows from the former, or that this amounts to worshipping the group as synonymous with the god.
Ask any adherent of religions in the Judaism-derived family and they will probably tell you that yes, they worship the exact same god as the Jews do, no, that god is not a symbol for the Jews, and no, they definitively are not expected in a symbolic way to worship the Jews. They will probably also tell you that the thing about the Israelites being god's chosen for some reason or another does not apply to modern-day Jews, and they are just confused. Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.
The Jews do require Gentiles to follow the Noahide laws and the 10 commandments, which is accomplished by Islam and Christianity. The very first 3 of the commandments:
The ordering indicates prioritization, and the first three all demand sole worship of the Jewish tribal god Yahweh above everything else. They do require Gentiles to follow those laws.
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And interestingly God in the Torah makes a promise to both of Abraham's sons, but the Ishmaelites are definitely not considered Jewish. God, in the Jewish conception, is clearly bigger than merely a God of the Jewish people, even in the earliest parts of Hebrew Scripture.
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You know I was actually typing up a reply that argued against @SecureSignals's thesis, as it runs somewhat contrary to the conception of Judaism that I've traditionally held, but then when I referred back to Maurice Samuel's You Gentiles I found this (pg. 74):
which does seem to lend support to his position.
It is worth remembering that Samuel was essentially a troll who delighted in the criticism of his arguments by other Jewish intellectuals in the Jewish press, from Dissent to Commentary.
In any case, it is certainly true that Samuel and SS agree (somewhat) about this, but that’s exactly the interesting thing, since Samuel was otherwise very far politically removed from him.
Do you have any further sources on this? Not doubting you, just curious.
I think his book is great, so if it was written to troll people, that would be unfortunate!
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I essentially agree with Samuel's critique of Christian anti-semitism. Christianity makes anti-Semitism totally incoherent, regardless of the feeling of any given Christian towards the Jews. And regardless of whether or not the Christians understand the actual symbolic meaning of Yahweh, which they like OP do not. They are actually unequipped to properly analyze these works because their own religion is so deeply rooted in the mythos itself.
Christians have no idea what they are reading when they read the Old Testament, if they ever do so.
...Provided you are correct, and "properly analyzing these works" means agreeing with you. Alternatively, they have their own analysis, and while you can dismiss it at your pleasure, we are equally free to dismiss you at ours. There is little point in discussion where agreement with your bespoke interpretations is set as a precondition for engagement.
Sure! But at the end of the day there is a correct answer, the people who put the pen to paper did so for specific reasons. I think Christians are forced into a wrong interpretation. Of course they believe their interpretation is correct, although frankly speaking they mostly just ignore the Old Testament except as setup for Jesus.
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