I know what the scholars say which is why I have my current opinion, if you actually cared to engage you would bring up the arguments yourself like everyone else did instead of hiding behind references.
Is the decline of polytheism inevitable?
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If you know the arguments or evidence they use then just mention them, no reason to point at books and say "read this", no actual conversation can be had if you are not yourself aware where those scholars come from.
Interestingly enough particularly orthodox sunni movements like wahhabism have also accused shias of being polytheist for making shrines to the imams or asking for imams intercession during prayers.
Yannerk
Banned
Hardly. Polytheism is on the rise today, and monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam are in decline. Christianity much more so than Islam, but Islam is just beginning its state of decline, I would argue. Salafism and Wahhabism are to Islam what Protestantism was to Christianity - that is to say, literalist movements that strip all mysticism from the religion, eventually resulting in its downfall as the religion loses its spiritual appeal with time. The difference between the Christian World and the Muslim World at present is that the Christian World is rich and the Muslim World is poor, so Muslims cling to their religion a little harder. Christianity right now is in serious trouble in The West, as I would argue it doesn't really answer ANY of the questions posed by the modern age, and because the mysticism has been removed, its doctrines are just too rigid and lifeless to be appealing to anyone.
So I got pinged because well I am a polytheist, the deities I largely honor are the Greek deities though some Indian ones(ie Ganesha) are among them. Anyways. to answer the question No. the various polytheistic faiths declining is not inevitable, not in the slightest IMO.
In regards to Mystery Cults, the thing to understand is that many of the religions we are talking about were not religious exclusive like the Abrhamic faiths are. Someone going to visit the cult of Isis for fertility might then make an offering to Demeter for a good Harvest without seeing any conflict in the two.
In regards to Mystery Cults, the thing to understand is that many of the religions we are talking about were not religious exclusive like the Abrhamic faiths are. Someone going to visit the cult of Isis for fertility might then make an offering to Demeter for a good Harvest without seeing any conflict in the two.
I fail to see it. In the West perhaps, but polytheism started from low point there, after being almost gone. Meanwhile in Africa Christianity and Islam spread at cost of local religions.
It is worth noting that modern Shinto is a product of state policy of the nineteenth century - (more precisely, in its current form it appeared after the Second World War). Prior to this, "folk faith" existed in the shadow of Buddhism, and it is extremely difficult to separate them.
It seems like we have evidence - for example, the rejection of homosexuality by magicians is associated with attacks on the ritual practices of Iranian-speaking nomads.
How so? I myself see little functional difference, but I am always willing to be proven wrong.
It's more of an assumption than evidence IMO.
Catholics don't worship saints, it is a misconception coming from a outside view, saints aren't gods, they're righteous humans that earned a special place in heaven for their piety and act as bridges between the believers and God. Catholic believe there only one capital G God and as such worship only Him.
They didn't call saints Gods, they called them gods- small g. So far as worship goes- saints aren't worshipped in the Catholic sense, but in the pagan one, they are. (In a pagan sense, a god can effectively be summarized as any spiritual being greater than humans, which saints would qualify as.)
Yes, officially this is all true, but there's a very important distinction in reality between what doctrine says and what people actually believe, or in this case between what doctrine says and the sociological role that a doctrine has. In the former case, it has been proven again and again that people very often hold unorthodox beliefs about core doctrines (in all churches and religions), especially in a case where there is a very delicate and subtle difference between totally orthodox beliefs and completely heretical ones (it's not for nothing that there were so many early schisms over Christology, to take a different example). In the latter case, it is absolutely and abundantly clear that saints (along with a variety of other, culturally-specific figures) fulfill a similar role to that of minor or lesser gods in polytheistic societies, that is of figures that are in-between humans and capital-G Gods (or God) and who are easier to appeal to, particularly for limited or minor needs.
Can’t find the link now, but some guy once made the point that the vast majority of human beings, historically and presently, are not religion nerds. In the context of the United States today, an enthusiastic Protestant missionary, a liberal Catholic trying to reconcile her faith with her progressive political views, a lapsed Christian who has gotten really into neopaganism, and even the hardcore atheist are all equally religion nerds in the sense that they have thought deeply about the topic, developing strong opinions about various moral, ethical, and doctrinal issues. By contrast, most human beings live in a state of vague shamanism - they identify with whatever religion they grew up with, and have some vague belief in a higher power and such, but really have not thought about the topic in a systematic way, wrestling with the content of their holy texts.
As such, I don’t think it’s helpful to appeal to a layman’s understanding of the faith when discussing whether and Christianity and paganism are different in practice, because by that logic, most religions that exist today aren’t that different in practice. For the vast majority of their adherents, it all boils down to being nice to people and platitudes like that, no?
As such, I don’t think it’s helpful to appeal to a layman’s understanding of the faith when discussing whether and Christianity and paganism are different in practice, because by that logic, most religions that exist today aren’t that different in practice. For the vast majority of their adherents, it all boils down to being nice to people and platitudes like that, no?
I do not agree - in the sense that the vast majority of the inhabitants of "developed countries" have a pragmatic attitude to religion (in the sense that they select faith based on their needs). The most religious people lived in the Middle Ages. In addition, it is completely absurd to call atheism a religion - it's like calling a vacuum a thing.
I didn’t call atheism a religion, I simply said that, in their conscious rejection of religion, most atheists have given much more thought to the topic than much of the general population.
I think this is in fact very helpful, precisely because of the last point. The fact that ordinary believers of most religions (or, to put it more succinctly, folk religious practices) are quite similar is rather important when you're discussing whether certain religions are "fated" to decline or not--since they are rather similar, this suggests that they are not fated to decline, as after all their replacement does not really change that much in reality.
Yannerk
Banned
Christianity started out as a minority religion that was practiced in the home once upon a time. In fact, Christians are kind of the ones who coined the concept of the separation of religion and state and the idea of private spirituality. Beforehand, religion was generally a public matter. Polytheism is growing rapidly in the West at present.
Polytheism is growing in the west, because it (re)started practically from zero. And now, with religion in general being in decline, it is atheism/agnosticism taking the lead anyway
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