A lot of great pantheons have disappeared as Christianity swept the world. Katie and Preston explore the details around the disappearance of the imperial and tribal traditions of Europe and North-Eastern Africa. Is it reasonable to expect monotheism to supersede polytheism? Is there really a scheme for the evolution of religion?
Life is a lot more complicated than restricting knowledge to empirical evidence. In a world with deep-fake technology, is it even fair to say that 'seeing is believing' anymore? We will always rely on trusted testimony, but the question remains: who do you trust? An awful lot of people have stopped believing that gods live on Mount Olympus--people have been up there plenty, but for those who have revived the faith, they rely on a less literal interpretation of the simple claim. New voices are bringing new mysticism to old traditions. Magic is renewing, and polytheism is being revived in places where it was formerly abandoned.
All this and more....
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[00:00:10] Katie Dooley: Special guests today, everyone Paige the dog is in on this recording.
[00:00:16] Preston Meyer: After a traumatic day at the vet.
[00:00:18] Katie Dooley: A traumatic day at the vet. Yeah, that's not your water, though. That's my water. Yes. Um, she's also very interested in our topic today, Preston.
[00:00:28] Preston Meyer: Is she? That's good. I hope everyone else is too.
[00:00:34] Katie Dooley: Today on the...
[00:00:36] Both Speakers: Holy Watermelon Podcast.
[00:00:38] Katie Dooley: We're talking about why and how these religions, these spent the last two and a half months talking about died out. So everything from the Greeks to the Celtics to the Norse to the Egyptians. Um... yeah, that's what we're talking about today.
[00:00:55] Preston Meyer: Yeah. Um, so there's a popular theory among religious scholars that there's kind of a natural progression to the growth and eventual death of religious traditions, that it usually starts with magic and then evolves into polytheism, then evolves into monotheism, and then just kind of gives out and is replaced by science. And I don't know if we really have enough examples of that sort of progression to validate the claims of this pattern. It feels a little bit weird. We're going to look into that as we go on. Um, and also when you say that magic gives way to all of these other models that also eventually disappear, that's kind of a pretty rude thing to tell a Wiccan that their tradition is too primitive and on its way out.
[00:01:49] Katie Dooley: Well, then we get into the debate of what even is magic. You know, is it any pseudoscience? Because there's a lot of people who have pseudoscience-y jobs.
[00:01:59] Preston Meyer: Well, and we keep coming up with new, weirder pseudosciences.
[00:02:04] Katie Dooley: Right. So weird.
[00:02:07] Preston Meyer: That's it's a mad world we live in. And I have a problem with this model that so many people are convinced is just the cat's nipples.
[00:02:17] Katie Dooley: Wow. Maybe we just Frigga would have like that. Um, Frigga, not Frigga. Freya.
[00:02:23] Preston Meyer: Frigga. It was Frigga.
[00:02:25] Katie Dooley: Was that the cat...?
[00:02:26] Preston Meyer: I'm pretty sure.
[00:02:27] Katie Dooley: No, I think it's Freya. They're debatably the same. So, um, maybe we'll just have this endless cycle of magic and religion and never, never offload to science.
[00:02:42] Preston Meyer: Uh, that would be really odd... I hope that science does continue to grow in popularity. We've got way too many people who deny science generally, categorically as a rule. I know that every one of our listeners knows somebody who fits into that camp, and it's really frustrating.
[00:03:09] Katie Dooley: Yeah, totally. I found this quote in an article from The Guardian when I was doing my research on how to religions die and the author of the article, Andrew Brown says "There is a sense in which I can believe in Thor without this for a moment meaning what it would to a believer. So blasphemy can kill deities and the measure of its success is that it comes not to be blasphemous at all." And I thought that was really interesting. Where the Thor movies are not blasphemous, but if you did the same thing to Jesus, it would be.
[00:03:50] Preston Meyer: Yeah.
[00:03:51] Katie Dooley: So ergo, the Norse religion is well and truly dead minus a few neopagans.
[00:04:00] Preston Meyer: Yeah. Pretty much.
[00:04:03] Katie Dooley: So I thoguht that was an interesting litmus test, if you will, of if a religion is still thriving.
[00:04:10] Preston Meyer: Right. Yeah, that's pretty solid, I like it. All right. So going back to this idea that there's a progression from magic to polytheism to monotheism into science. I want to look at a few things that look like they may be examples that validate this pattern claim. Naturally, I think we should start with Judeo-Christian monotheism. It's the thing that most of us are most familiar with. We know that anciently Judaism was either polytheistic or henotheistic. It's kind of tricky since we're mostly looking at archeological artifacts, but we do know that in Israel, before the exile into Babylon, there were a lot of gods worshiped in the land. There is a distinction between El Elyon and Yahweh, and there, of course, had a consort that, depending on the source and the and where they're finding their artifacts, this consort belongs to one or the other. Her name is Asherah, the mother goddess. And there's other minor gods as well. And so there's definitely multiple gods, but whether or not there's a relationship with them that's henotheistic or polytheistic is hard to tell from archeology.
[00:05:32] Katie Dooley: From 5000 years ago.
[00:05:33] Preston Meyer: Right. And so we rely on the biblical text, which of course was edited post-exile to be "We're strictly monotheistic now!" Tricky business. Um, and of course, the bulk of Christianity claims a Jewish origin and also claims monotheism. Mostly. We've talked about how this is tricky. And so that seems like honestly, the only strong basis for this model that people are really sticking to is that the Western culture, as we know it had an origin in polytheism, is more or less monotheistic and is giving way to science. And I can't think of any other really good specific example of that progression.
[00:06:21] Katie Dooley: No, I mean I, um. We've had this conversation. I just finished a really, really big book by Edward Rutherford called Sarum, and it's a historical fiction novel. But his citations... It was I listened to it. It was an audiobook. I saw citations for like an hour and a half long, like it's very well researched, um, and put into a historical fiction format, but and so Sarum is the entire history of the island of the United Kingdom.
[00:06:53] Preston Meyer: Oh, yeah.
[00:06:54] Katie Dooley: Like, it literally starts like in the Stone age as this book and goes all the way to the 1800s, which is why it's 40 hours long. But to this point, they start with worshiping the sun God and goddess in the Stone Ages. And then you get the druids and then they go to Christianity and Druids, you would say would, you know, would fall under magic. It's the opposite.
[00:07:19] Preston Meyer: Most magical traditions that we look at do have at least one God.
[00:07:25] Katie Dooley: Yeah I was going to say that as well.
[00:07:27] Preston Meyer: The polytheism doesn't disappear with the magic, but it does complicate the model.
[00:07:36] Katie Dooley: Yeah. And I, I mean, I'm no historian, but I don't know any civilization that was purely based in magic.
[00:07:45] Preston Meyer: Just magic with no gods. I can't think of any.
[00:07:48] Katie Dooley: Yeah.
[00:07:48] Preston Meyer: Even with all the research that we've been doing, I can't think of any at all.
[00:07:52] Katie Dooley: Harry Potter. That's not real.
[00:07:56] Preston Meyer: That's the trick. Fiction, you can come up with anything you want.
[00:08:01] Katie Dooley: Even the Lord of the Rings has deities. So yeah. There's... Again, if we're wrong, please put it in our Discord. But there's no one, no civilization at the top of my head that just dabbled in magic. Exclusive of a higher power.
[00:08:15] Preston Meyer: Yeah.
[00:08:17] Katie Dooley: Anyway. Anyway.
[00:08:20] Preston Meyer: Um, since we got Egyptian religious tradition fresh in our minds, if you've been listening to our episodes as they come out Atueism I thought.
[00:08:30] Katie Dooley: You should be. Sorry you were saying.
[00:08:34] Preston Meyer: Atenism is actually kind of interesting and it kind of looks like it might have almost followed this pattern. So Egyptian monotheism. It's such a weird idea when you look at what we know about the popular religion of the of the region. But it may have started out as henotheism, so it does kind of lend itself into this idea. Uh, partway through his rule Amenhotep the fourth announced that he was changing things up. He announced that Aten was the head of the National pantheon. Aten is kind of interesting. Most scholars just assume that it's another form of Ra because of its association with the sun. Even the name Aten is usually thought to mean just the disc, as in the sun disc in the sky. So if his people saw it that way, then it wouldn't really be a big deal. They would have just been like, yeah, it's Ra, okay. But I suspect that's not the case and it'll become obvious why in a minute. So the Pharaoh changed his name from Amenhotep to Akhenaten to recognize, hey, I'm fully devoted to this one god. His name previously had the name Amun in it, which was a different aspect of the Sun God. So this was a meaningful change for him.
[00:10:06] Katie Dooley: Wow. Yeah. Changing your name is always a big deal. That's why I didn't do it.
[00:10:11] Preston Meyer: Fair enough. After a little while, Akhenaten, the pharaoh, banned all worship of the old gods. This is a big deal for a country.
[00:10:24] Katie Dooley: Yeah. And we'll see more examples of that as we go on.
[00:10:26] Preston Meyer: Yeah. And then luckily for the nation, this only lasted until his son Tutankhaten reversed everything and changed his name to Tutankhamun. King Tut, the famous boy king. In fact, there was a time, probably only 20 years ago, where that was the only Egyptian pharaoh that most people could name, unless they were Bible readers and could name Ramses .
[00:10:57] Katie Dooley: Fair, I mean, if you put me on the spot. Yeah.
[00:11:01] Preston Meyer: King Tut and Ramses, if you can name more. You are an Egyptology nerd.
[00:11:06] Katie Dooley: Oh. You're an Egyptologist. You actually have your degree at that point. Well done,you.
[00:11:13] Preston Meyer: Yeah, so in the 1900s, scholars like Hugh Nibley and Sigmund Freud connected this short-lived religious phenomenon directly to the Israelite religious tradition in Egypt, which I thought was kind of interesting that this may not have been a local thing, but a religious tradition brought in from outside of Egypt. It's tricky and complicated. Hugh Nibley and Sigmund Freud are actually on opposite ends of how it was connected to the Israelites, but it's all still pretty interesting. There are a couple of different issues that I've seen scholars have with this idea. The strongest kickbacks I've seen are questions of the timeline. Or there's also a handful of armchair scholars who just refuse to believe that Moses was even a real person. And if Moses isn't real, then there's no reason to even have Israel in Egypt. Tricky scholarly stuff, right?
[00:12:12] Katie Dooley: For things that are so old, you can't prove it.
[00:12:15] Preston Meyer: Yeah, we've got stories. And the great thing about stories is you can either say, yeah, they're true or no, they're not, and you can do that pretty freely. Um, but since Atenism was terribly unpopular and very short-lived, there isn't really a lot outlining it for us. We know a little bit about their sacrifices, and that's almost it.
[00:12:41] Katie Dooley: This is the episode and Atenism right here. Last ten minutes of talking. Yeah, that's it, we're done.
[00:12:47] Preston Meyer: There's there's not a lot more to it. And so looking at Atenism I don't... Like it might fit well into that model of magic, polytheism, monotheism. It didn't get to science because they were the people largely reverted back to polytheism very quickly. But there's also that trick of if it was an external influence, you can't call it a natural progression from one form to the next. It was a replacement deal.
[00:13:16] Katie Dooley: Yes, and I know we're nowhere near the end of the episode, but I feel like my thesis is somewhere along the lines of that this is not a linear path.
[00:13:26] Preston Meyer: No, not so much.
[00:13:28] Katie Dooley: I mean, we don't know what's going to happen in the next 50, 60, hundred years, but some of these countries that are predominantly atheist thinking off the top of my head of Scandinavia, they might pick up a new religion or Christianity might make a comeback, like we don't know. Like they...
[00:13:47] Preston Meyer: We can't know the future that well.
[00:13:48] Katie Dooley: Also just the I mean, obviously I lean towards science and atheism, but... They're going to be around for thousands more years, thousands of more years to think that this is like their final state.
[00:14:04] Preston Meyer: Well, realistically, we've always had people who doubted the existence of the gods. And among those there was almost always at least somebody saying, you know what? I am so sure that these gods aren't real. But these traditions last anyway.
[00:14:24] Katie Dooley: I think we'll all be together forever in this confusing relationship of religion.
[00:14:31] Preston Meyer: Probably.
[00:14:33] Katie Dooley: Which is why we need to learn to get along people.
[00:14:35] Preston Meyer: Right? So and there's I did look up just broadly a survey of all monotheistic traditions throughout history. And there's a good handful of primal religions, little small native religions all over the planet that a lot of people keep calling monotheistic. And they're not a lot of them are henotheistic.
[00:15:01] Katie Dooley: I was gonna say...
[00:15:05] Preston Meyer: Um, and of the ones that are monotheistic, they've always been monotheistic. There's no evolution evidence at all. But of course, their records may be incomplete and maybe they were polytheistic beforehand, but those are just guesses that would be forced upon them by outsiders that I don't think could be legitimized. It's kind of frustrating.
[00:15:31] Katie Dooley: Yeah. Then we have animism. It definitely doesn't get covered a lot in academic discussion. Animism is common... It was common among underdeveloped civilizations. Primitive civilizations. It is actually the foundation of the Egyptian tradition. With all these animal-headed gods.
[00:15:56] Preston Meyer: Right? But they weren't just animal-headed. They were. They were originally animals. Wild animals interacted with people, and then people made offerings to those animals and/or made deals with the spirits that controlled those animals. So the Egyptian gods were, as far as I can tell, really likely exclusively animal or human, until after generations of ritual representation within the temple mystery schools where a priest mage would wear a headdress bearing the skull, either embalmed or painted of the animal being represented.
[00:16:35] Katie Dooley: Well, that makes a lot of sense if you think of the pairings of the animals with what the attributes of the god are.
[00:16:41] Preston Meyer: For sure.
[00:16:42] Katie Dooley: It makes perfect sense that they observe these animals behaviors. The one that stands out now I can't remember is the jackal.
[00:16:50] Preston Meyer: Anubis.
[00:16:51] Katie Dooley: Anubis, right. So if you feed a jackal, they're not going to eat the dead people's bodies, right?
[00:16:56] Preston Meyer: Why would you work for bad food when you're receiving good food?
[00:17:01] Katie Dooley: Um, therefore, you want your body to be whole into the afterlife. So you give something to your local friendly jackals. Your body will go whole into the afterlife. Makes sense to me.
[00:17:15] Preston Meyer: Yeah. So I think animism is actually really interesting. And there are a good handful of scholars who have done a lot of really good work in that field, but it's not really addressed a lot when you're looking at how religious societies develop.
[00:17:31] Katie Dooley: Part of the reasons religions ebb and flow is the function of religion in society. And if it's not needed, which we're starting to see, overall religion worldwide is declining, though sometimes it doesn't feel like it.
[00:17:48] Preston Meyer: Uh, it's a religious people are getting louder, for sure,
[00:17:52] Katie Dooley: Fewer But louder. Um, so the ultimate pursuit of most religious traditions is to make sense of the world. Um, we've also talked in the past about organizing society and people. So, as Preston mentioned with the animism, many gods are personifications of natural phenomena, and understanding them encourages life-preserving behavior. So this is why everyone worships the sun in some capacity.
[00:18:19] Preston Meyer: You gotta pray for it to come back every summer.
[00:18:21] Katie Dooley: It's really important.
[00:18:22] Preston Meyer: Every morning.
[00:18:24] Katie Dooley: Right? Life would suck without the sun. There would actually be no life without the sun.
[00:18:30] Preston Meyer: Correct.
[00:18:31] Katie Dooley: That's a scientific fact. Wrapped in religion.
[00:18:34] Preston Meyer: So sun worship is scientifically validated.
[00:18:38] Katie Dooley: Oh, dear. Settle down.
[00:18:41] Preston Meyer: If you use both the word scientifically and validated loosely.
[00:18:47] Katie Dooley: Many gods are memories of ancestors, rulers, teachers. We talked about this a million years ago, it feels, in our worship episode. And understanding these people, guides followers to safety and knowledge. And when you venerate a person, it tells you that their teachings are really, really important and you should listen. As opposed to just your mom telling you something, right?
[00:19:11] Preston Meyer: You can get mad at your mom and stop listening. Getting mad at a figure that you don't get to interact with happens less. Not that it doesn't happen.
[00:19:21] Katie Dooley: Regardless... Most polytheistic religions combine the two the personification of nature and the ancestor worship. There are myths and religions are also used to explain the origin of things. In the beginning...
[00:19:40] Preston Meyer: Yeah, we got myths for the origins of humanity. The Greeks had that fun myth about the origin of spiders.
[00:19:47] Katie Dooley: The one about ejaculating water.
[00:19:48] Preston Meyer: Right? All kinds of really great stories on where things came from.
[00:19:53] Katie Dooley: Very creative, very creative.
[00:19:57] Preston Meyer: Yeah.
[00:19:59] Katie Dooley: And most religions discuss what happens to us when we die. Um, so again, this is just to help people organize their lives, and the world and society. And so we can see again, in societies where religion is declining, we don't need religion to help us organize things anymore.
[00:20:18] Preston Meyer: Right and sometimes we've got things that we just don't feel the need to explain. If you don't exist anymore after you're dead, you don't need an explanation beyond that. It's fairly simple. Of course, there are exceptions to the cosmological function of religion. There are plenty of examples of religions that exist just to gain control over people or to gain personal power. Scientology is a great example.
[00:20:47] Katie Dooley: I was going to say danger cult, okay. If you want to call it Scientology. I agree with you.
[00:20:56] Preston Meyer: And there's, there's loads of examples of these dangerous religious traditions and it's frustrating to to suss out the difference sometimes.
[00:21:09] Katie Dooley: Absolutely. And then I wrote a couple points on religious violence with the attempt to exterminate a religious group. I couldn't find any that were successful, which I guess is cool? And I actually couldn't find a lot of examples. I did read a little bit around the Buddhist being run out of India. Buddhism started in India it's a very minor religion there now. Um, and then of course, more recently, the Crusades, there were lots of crusades. That's probably an entire episode on its own, but it was basically predominantly Christians killing Muslims to spread Christianity.
[00:21:50] Preston Meyer: And vice versa, and Muslims killing Christians to spread Islam.
[00:21:54] Katie Dooley: All right.
[00:21:55] Preston Meyer: But for the most part, it was, hey, we need to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims.
[00:22:00] Katie Dooley: Well, when you hear the term the Crusades, you hear the Christian connotation. But you're right, everyone's been trying to kill everyone. And then even more recently, of course, the Holocaust, which killed far too many Jewish people. And it was only recently that the Jewish population recovered, like in the last, I think, what, 5 or 6 years the Jewish population is now what it was pre-Holocaust. So while they didn't. Kill off the Jewish population. There have been Jews around the world since the 1940s. They did put a big dent in it.
[00:22:37] Preston Meyer: Yeah. All right. So looking again at how some of these religions that we've been talking about have successfully been wiped away, mostly it involves Christianity.
[00:22:53] Katie Dooley: Good old J.C..
[00:22:55] Preston Meyer: Uh, Christianity enforces strict adherence to monotheism in most situations. Most traditions don't really want to talk about the Trinity today, but there will come a time. It doesn't really allow for a lot of syncretic amalgamation like we saw among the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, but we'll talk more about that later, too, that there is a little bit of syncretic work going on. Part of the problem is that these ancient polytheistic religions were very syncretic. They were cool with Jesus. If you say that you have another God, cool, let's talk about them. But the Christians weren't very cool with sharing that light.
[00:23:38] Katie Dooley: So there's a reason monogamy and monotheism start with the same prefix.
[00:23:45] Preston Meyer: Yes. Just one.
[00:23:49] Katie Dooley: It's just one forever. One dick for life.
[00:23:54] Preston Meyer: Yes.
[00:23:57] Katie Dooley: Preston's very uncomfortable with that comment. I'm so sorry.
[00:23:59] Preston Meyer: The Christian God did want an exclusive relationship. "No other gods before me" very often quoted part of the Old Testament. That's really the deal.
[00:24:12] Katie Dooley: So we're gonna get into each of the five that we've talked about over the last few months and what happened and dates and people and events, but it's really hard to pin a solid date down, um, because so many of these had small regional traditions that kept going, um, after the urban centers were Christianized and Syncreticism allowed a blending of traditions, um, old traditions with new traditions. So it was a very gradual Christianization of the world. And then there's always the did any of these really die out? That kind of comes back to my Thor point at the beginning. But also we have, you know, records that there have always been small pockets of these pagans. Basically forever. And then with the internet, they get even more popular.
[00:25:02] Preston Meyer: Yeah. All right. So let's start with the Greeks, just like we did a couple months ago. We know that there was this strong Polytheistic tradition. Don't know why I blanked on the word for a second. I guess I've said it too many times.
[00:25:17] Katie Dooley: We've only been talking about it for three months.
[00:25:20] Preston Meyer: Uh. All right. So. Interestingly enough, there's this fellow named Xenophanes of Colophon who was a Greek thinker, and he just didn't really believe in the popular pantheon. Uh, and he said a few things that looked vaguely monotheistic sometimes, if you're inclined to interpret him that way. Kind of tricky business. And though, of course, there were a lot of other Greek philosophers and even oracles eventually started talking about a sort of pantheism behind the Olympians. So the trick with this is that it's I. I'm just not inclined to think that it's a fully naturally Greek phenomenon, because it all happened after exposure to Judeo-Christian monotheism. Which kind of undercuts the homegrownness of the idea.
[00:26:22] Katie Dooley: Yeah. I'm picking up what you're laying down. So for the decline of the Greek and Roman religions, I've actually lumped them together Bbecause one led to the other.
[00:26:38] Preston Meyer: Well, and in Rome and under the Roman Empire, they basically were one lump by the time that they disappeared, they were one lump.
[00:26:47] Katie Dooley: Yeah. So the the Roman Republic conquered Greece in 146 BCE, which led to the synchronization of their pantheons. So already the Greek, I mean, I'm sure there are still people who called, um, Jupiter, Zeus and...
[00:27:04] Preston Meyer: Oh, absolutely. If you spoke Greek, it was Zeus. It doesn't matter whose god it was but if you were Roman, it was Jupiter, no matter who we belong to.
[00:27:12] Katie Dooley: But because of this event, their declines are now the same. So their traditions came roughly to an end in the ninth century, when the last believers were converted to Christianity. Constantine the First was a Roman emperor and the first of the Roman emperors to convert to Christianity. In 313 CE the Edict of Milan was passed, which allowed Christians to live relatively peacefully in the empire.
[00:27:41] Preston Meyer: Well that's nice.
[00:27:42] Katie Dooley: So big deal. 300 years, uh, after Jesus, now they are allowed to. It's not the official religion, but they're not.
[00:27:52] Preston Meyer: They're not officially persecuted. They were persecuted for a long time, sometimes harder than other times. But it's nice to have the government say, hey, it's okay to be Christian.
[00:28:03] Katie Dooley: Right? After Constantine, though, several emperors waffled back and forth. There was like 3 or 4, and it was basically like, this guy reversed it, and then this guy reversed that. And so and several emperors reversed or waffle back and forth with how tolerant they were of Christians until Theodosius the First began to actively persecute pagans in 381 CE, so about 70 years after the Edict of Milan. So even after this was passed and they were actively being persecuted again, the pagans who believed in the old pantheon it lasted for another 500 plus years in small regional ways. Or did it disappear and never disappear entirely? We'll never know.
[00:28:53] Preston Meyer: Tricky stuff to know for sure, right? All right. As we talked about before, the Norse also suffered because of Christianity. Um, the North Germanic tribes were often at war with the Romans, and there was definitely some intellectual conflict, or at least the Romans saying, hey, the Germanic people's religion is no good, but not as bad as we'll see with the Celts. Um, the Norse religion lasted longer than the Greek and Roman religions, probably mostly because of their distance from the imperial core. Um, the decline in the Norse religion began in the 11th century.
[00:29:35] Katie Dooley: Wow. Much later.
[00:29:37] Preston Meyer: And it was mostly missionaries rather than a real conquest, which is kind of cool, kind of impressive that it it worked out that way, I guess,
[00:29:46] Katie Dooley: Just talking to people nicely.
[00:29:47] Preston Meyer: Yeah. Mostly. Mostly.
[00:29:52] Katie Dooley: Tell me about your mission, Preston. What do you mean mostly?
[00:29:56] Preston Meyer: I mean. I didn't...
[00:29:57] Katie Dooley: Did you shake a few people down?
[00:29:58] Preston Meyer: I didn't get to carry a sword as a missionary, so it was definitely the power of the word or nothing at all. By the 12th century, Christianity was the dominant religion in Scandinavia. And it was after this mass conversion that we received the written Eddas that we have. So historians believe that the Scandinavians would have been in contact with the Christians much earlier, probably like the sixth century, but their beliefs didn't change until good old Bluetooth.
[00:30:35] Katie Dooley: Are we air-dropping things?
[00:30:36] Preston Meyer: Sure.
[00:30:37] Katie Dooley: Okay. Are we air-dropping Christianity?!
[00:30:42] Preston Meyer: Not in this forum.
[00:30:46] Katie Dooley: Fair.
[00:30:48] Preston Meyer: Uh, Good Old Harald Bluetooth is where we get the Bluetooth name from. The logo that we all have on our phones is a Norse rune. So his goal was to convert the Danish to Christianity. And other leaders in Norway and Sweden also worked to convert their people. But it took about another 200 years after Bluetooth started his work in Denmark. And of course, the Viking Age that most people associate with all of the Scandinavians were Vikings. That's not how that worked. But the Vikings were a class of people, a professional group that went and did great things. The Viking Age coincided closely with the conversion to Christianity when Scandinavians were traveling a lot, usually taking slaves and whatnot. So Christianity also said, "hey, maybe don't do that that way". Anyway, converting to Christianity often opened doors for people in marriage and trade. Whether they believed it or not, it was convenient at the time to be Christian, and more and more people just kind of jumped on the bandwagon.
[00:32:01] Katie Dooley: I mean, you know, we briefly touched on the Holocaust. I mean, that was a time where it was convenient to be not Jewish.
[00:32:07] Preston Meyer: No kidding.
[00:32:08] Katie Dooley: Right? So if it meant your safety to convert to Christianity, this is how part of the reason how religions die out.
[00:32:18] Preston Meyer: Well, there was before the Holocaust. There was so much persecution against the Jews all over Europe. And the Jewish religion, the Jewish tradition, the Jewish identity persisted. And then it got really, really bad. And. I think overall there wasn't a lot of people that said, oh yeah, I'm not Jewish, because they had, up to that point been persecuted and yet stuck with it anyway.
[00:32:51] Katie Dooley: Yeah, it's such an identity piece. And it's I mean, it's in all of their stories, this idea of persecution.
[00:32:59] Preston Meyer: Yeah. The Hebrew Bible is full of it sucks to be Jewish, but it's a lot better when we've got God on our side.
[00:33:07] Katie Dooley: Yeah. You're God's people, yeah.
[00:33:09] Preston Meyer: So we can't deny it.
[00:33:13] Katie Dooley: Onto the Celtic religion, also a victim of Christianity.
[00:33:17] Preston Meyer: But there's more.
[00:33:18] Katie Dooley: But wait, there's more. So as early as the first century, with the Roman conquest of Gaul, so Christianity having spread yet.... JC is still warm in his grave. Wait. Nevermind.
[00:33:32] Preston Meyer: I think he was only warm in his grave for a couple of days.
[00:33:36] Katie Dooley: There was an aggressive undertaking to eradicate the Celtic tradition. So the the Romans hadn't accepted Christianity yet, they still did not like these Druids. Uh, Druidism in particular was forbidden and many important temples were destroyed. But there was a resurgence in Celtic paganism until Christianity.
[00:34:01] Preston Meyer: Good old Saint Patrick.
[00:34:03] Katie Dooley: Good old Saint Patrick. So Saint Patrick was one of the first missionaries in Ireland, uh, and began in the fifth century. So right around the same time as the Greek and Roman conversion and he was basically not him personally, Uh, but the conversion was basically done by the seventh century in Ireland, was a very Catholic nation after that.
[00:34:31] Preston Meyer: Yeah. Yeah. All those stories of Saint Patrick getting rid of the snakes of Ireland. Pretty sure it was just talking about druids.
[00:34:39] Katie Dooley: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is also an interesting one in particular, how the religion, the Celtic paganism became stories and folklore instead.
[00:34:53] Preston Meyer: Mhm. Which is interesting that the stories persisted, that the priests. We talked about this before, that the priests wrote the stories down so that they weren't lost. Kind of interesting. All right, next we have the Egyptians. Again, we're going to blame this on Christianity.
[00:35:13] Katie Dooley: Jesus Christ, I'm so sorry. If you don't get that reference, please join our Discord.
[00:35:20] Preston Meyer: Even before Constantine the First and the Edict of Milan, Egypt was already becoming a hotbed of Christian activity. There was a pretty sizable Jewish population in Egypt already. The Jews there produced the Septuagint, which is, of course, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And so things got rough for them. They, the Jews, were never popular outside of their home. And so this social position made Christianity pretty appealing to the Jews there. And many Christian writers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, spent their lives in Egypt, and the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria is the largest and oldest church in Egypt, founded in 42 CE by Mark the Evangelist. And eventually, all of these forces, all of these great Christian thinkers in Egypt, gained enough popularity that they kind of just forced out what was left of the Egyptian amalgamation with Greek polytheism in Egypt. Kind of messy, but it was definitely the Christians.
[00:36:32] Katie Dooley: Yes, this one. Messy, but the most peaceful.
[00:36:37] Preston Meyer: I guess. Yeah, you could say that. It was definitely an intellectual conquest.
[00:36:43] Yes as opposed to let's kill the Druids.
[00:36:46] Preston Meyer: Yes.
[00:36:48] Katie Dooley: You know, what'll get rid of this religion? Dead priests.
[00:36:53] Preston Meyer: I mean, it worked. Not that the goal was good, but the mission was a success.
[00:37:02] Katie Dooley: Um, yeah. So messy. But exactly. I like your the way you spun that intellectual conquest. And the Coptic Orthodox Church is beautiful, and I want to go visit one day and massive.
[00:37:15] Preston Meyer: Actually my first. Hold on. My first non-family connected job when I was living alone as an adult was with an awesome Coptic Orthodox Egyptian Orthodox family at a pizzeria.
[00:37:31] Katie Dooley: That's amazing. I want what pizzeria is it still around? Is it in Saskatchewan?
[00:37:36] Preston Meyer: It's in Alberta, but the pizzeria has since gotten new owners.
[00:37:42] Katie Dooley: Oh.
[00:37:43] Preston Meyer: Yeah, but super cool family. I really enjoyed hanging out with them.
[00:37:49] Katie Dooley: So let's get down to the real point of this podcast, Preston, is that science is just superior.
[00:37:58] Preston Meyer: The great thing about science is that it is easy to prove a point with sufficient evidence, which is the basis of good science. You can argue all you want about theology. We've got loads of evidence of that if you go into any university library. But science is the bee's knees.
[00:38:24] Katie Dooley: You do this thing. You do it 15 times. You get the same result.
[00:38:27] Preston Meyer: It must be a solid, reliable fact. Religious behavior does satisfy needs, but it's not the only thing that can do so. We don't need to have a river God to explain why the river has stopped feeding our community or to hope that a dry river will flow again. We've mapped the world. We understand the water cycle. We don't need gods for that. We get it. We don't need to personify the lightning and thunder with good old Thor to understand the deadly power of electricity. Just maybe don't go outside in a thunderstorm holding a giant metal rod.
[00:39:07] Katie Dooley: But you can lick a battery.
[00:39:08] Preston Meyer: Yeah. That's fine. That's probably the safest way to learn about electricity, other than rubbing a really old TV right after you turn it off.
[00:39:17] Katie Dooley: Oh, that was always fun when it was like fuzzy.
[00:39:19] Preston Meyer: Yeah, yeah, I've. I've played with electricity so much that when my wife tries to shock me with static, I feel it half the time.
[00:39:31] Katie Dooley: Wow. That's concerning. Are you?
[00:39:33] Preston Meyer: It's probably not a good thing.
[00:39:34] Katie Dooley: So Electra? Electro?
[00:39:37] Preston Meyer: Those are two very different Marvel characters. Only one of them uses electricity. And I would say, no, I am not Electro or Electra.
[00:39:45] Katie Dooley: Okay, disappointing, but I'll keep you guys posted if I see anything weird from Preston. Yeah, so science has helped us move past the utility of a lot of specific traditions. If like if we've mentioned a few times, if you don't need it to organize or explain things, and there's better ways to organize and better ways to explain. Humans, at their core are lazy as fuck.
[00:40:17] Katie Dooley: Right? It took us forever to climb up Mount Olympus, but when we got there, there were no gods.
[00:40:25] Katie Dooley: But my point is, we're so lazy. We are very efficient.So again, if there's a better way to organize or explain, we will do it.
[00:40:34] Preston Meyer: Mhm. It took us forever to fly. Found out that there's no angels in the clouds. Otherwise, we'd have a much messier plane to clean when it lands. I mean.
[00:40:46] Katie Dooley: I'm sure we hit the odd bird.
[00:40:48] Preston Meyer: Oh for sure.
[00:40:49] Katie Dooley: I don't want to know. I feel like I'd be really... I hit a bird with my car once. I was very upset.
[00:40:54] Preston Meyer: No kidding.
[00:40:55] Katie Dooley: Yeah. I don't do well with that. Um, yeah. So that's why religions die. Because science is knowing.
[00:41:04] Preston Meyer: If if any religion relies too much on a thing that is objectively a matter of fact, and then you can prove that fact wrong. If that's the basis of the religion, the religion must die and other than that, it's mostly a replacement thing. There's no I still don't think there's enough evidence for the model of magic into polytheism, into monotheism, to science, because most of the religions that we look at that eventually end up as or most of the populations we look at that end up as monotheistic. It didn't evolve from polytheism to monotheism. It was a hostile takeover in almost every situation.
[00:41:53] Katie Dooley: Well, and to my point of, you know, science being more efficient and more accurate, 2000 years ago, Christianity was more efficient and more accurate than these big pantheons of gods, right? It worked better for society. Whether you believe Jesus is the Messiah or not, in a very violent time in our history, hearing love your neighbor probably was a lot more effective and efficient to get things done.
[00:42:23] Preston Meyer: For sure.
[00:42:26] Katie Dooley: [00:42:26]So I think for any of [00:42:27] these it's just whatever moves society as a wholem forward the best. And I think that's why secularism is becoming so popular, because we can't satisfy all these different religious beliefs. That a secular path satisfies most people's needs is where we're headed. But I could be wrong.
[00:42:55] Preston Meyer: Yeah, we've talked about secularism before, and the reality is that if we have any one religious population ruling over all of its neighbors, everyone's going to have a bad time. We need secularism. We need to have a society built on what is good for the whole, not just what fits the religious doctrines of one group.
[00:43:22] Katie Dooley: Yeah. Any other final thoughts?
[00:43:27] Preston Meyer: I think we've pretty much nailed down how most of these groups that we've been talking about have been kind of cleared out, mostly by Christians. But there's always a little bit of complication to that too, especially, for example, the Celts, where they were villainized before the Christians hit the stage. That's that's kind of the deal. That's where they went.
[00:43:54] Katie Dooley: Away. Just went on vacation, little Timmy.
[00:44:01] Preston Meyer: Well, the vacation is a fair enough word since we see resurgence of a lot of these ideas.
[00:44:10] Katie Dooley: Yup. Thanks, internet.
[00:44:13] Preston Meyer: Yes, being able to help people communicate across vast distances and share ideas no matter the quality of their goodness, because there's a lot of bad ideas being spread out too. There's a lot of interesting ideas becoming more popular.
[00:44:31] Katie Dooley: Yeah. Hey, Preston, speaking of the internet.
[00:44:34] Preston Meyer: Oh, man, we've got such a great presence on the internet. We've got Discord where you can chat, share memes. We post pictures of a lot of the things that we talk about, so you can have a visual representation of what's going on.
[00:44:47] Katie Dooley: Preston's going to post cat nipples this week, apparently.
[00:44:52] Preston Meyer: I've already posted cats and almost had one with nipples for our last episode. And my last episode. I definitely mean a few episodes back. Time is weird since the recording time versus release time. Uh, anyway, we've also got YouTube, we've got Facebook, Instagram. We've also got Patreon where we would love to see some of your support. And we've also got a shop on Spreadshirt.
[00:45:25] Katie Dooley: With some new releases.
[00:45:26] Preston Meyer: Oh man, I'm so excited for our newest release!
[00:45:30] Katie Dooley: Do you want to see what we're talking about? Check out our Spreadshirt.
[00:45:33] Preston Meyer: Good old Saint Bernard.
[00:45:36] Katie Dooley: And we will see you in two weeks time.
[00:45:39] Both Speakers: Peace be with you.
