• edge [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    If anything is worthy of worship, it’s the sun. It literally gives us life. All the energy you’ve ever had ultimately came from the sun.

        • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Real talk I used to make fun of astrology, and later I learned to chill out about it and not be such a nerd and let people enjoy things.

          But then recently I was part of a conversation that 2 people turned into a tangent about astrology and they went on and on for about 5 minutes about extremely detailed personal qualities of Scorpios, down to how they supposedly react to a long list of very specific scenarios, and how this was a good way to understand and predict the actions of a couple of specific people they knew.

          I realized I wasn’t actually ready to stop being really annoyed by astrology.

              • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                A lot of modern economists remind me, outside of their priestly function, of the court astrologers of Imperial China who would be like “My Lord, the stars tell me that you must reorganize the dispensation of the salt monopoly to my wife’s cousin’s son’s control, lest we should, in 2000 years hence, be ruled by Winnie the Pooh’”.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Yeah Astrology is horrible and all superstition should be ruthlessly extinguished, and I would get on with that if I wasn’t old, grey, and tired.

            Sucks being in a conversation and realizing you’re the only person who doesn’t whole heartedly believe in magic. No, please do tell me about how the big rock out in space decides whether or not you have a shitty day at work I am good at maintaining my composure my poker face is great and my confusion and disgust definitely will not leak through when I try to decide if you are harmless or one of those people who will make decisions that harm me and the people I love because you think your inner monologue is the voice of god.

          • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            The problem comes up when astrology people start arrogantly analyzing your personality based on that shit, come to a negative opinion of you based on that, arrogantly roll their eyes and pout and smirk at the fact that you obviously are such a libra/whatever by obviously not believing it, and then spouting that utter nonsense to people around you. They are actively essentializing people and shaping their behaviour with them according to literal insanity.

            Astrology should not be allowed to be published by public book publishers of any kind in a socialist society. If people want to believe insane bullshit in the privacy of their appartments, that’s their problem. But the moment you start trying to spread those beliefs and use economic resources to do so in a way that can undermine people respect for scientific thought then that’s definitely a problem.

            I’m sorry but it’s basically just phrenology for hippies.

        • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          I recently saw a hot take that being anti-astrology is actually a form of misogyny because astrology believers are predominantly women.

          Typical Libra, am I right?

          • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            The consequences of postmodern liberal thought and its obliteration of critical thinking abilities to the point of excluding basic logic or how concepts function in effective empirical and scientific thought continues to make a laughing stock of modern liberal intellectual culture.

            • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              Look, you can’t place the blame solely on the ‘post-modernists’ for this, the ‘post-modernists’ were usually very very particular in their critiques of the historical development of ‘scientific’ practices and ‘rationalist’ principles.

              If anything, most of the post-modernist theorists would see this as a full retreat into a form of commercialized simulacra, a full embrace of protagonist agency story-board logic attempting to fit itself within a post-producer rationalist framework that can only function in terms of either individual consumer paradigm, or as a mass marketing paradigm, where consumption is identity and thus criticism of consumption and product is a criticism of identity, when neither is the reality of the matter. Basically, instead of the post-modernist point that truth and identity are vast, complex and difficult to truly grasp, saying “Criticism of astrology is a form of misogyny.” is a whole modernist reduction of identity as consumption, a reversal on Marx’s modernist reduction of identity as production. For them, they are equally problematic, but for different reasons.

              • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                And quite frankly I have not time for Baudrillardian language or ‘theory’, given that not only his the theory of signs his thought is based literally incoherent, but his book on Marx displays page after page, paragraph after paragraph, sentence after sentence of misunderstanding of Marxism.

                You can pick up a book by Guattari and fine basic logical fallacies on every other page. It’s a disagrace honestly that these bodies of post-structural thought that display such ignorance of Marxism and science (like I’m sorry but if you pick of Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Irigay, Latour or even Foucault, they actually have very little to say of deep theoretical and historical importance on the nature of science) are commonly suggested as the ‘must-read’ philosophical texts of our time to young leftists, when they could be reading far more grounded, analytical (including Marxist) works of philosophy, history, economics, sociology, anthropology etc.

                As for Foucault, well we can see the useless theoretical and practical impasse his thought leads to in Negri and Hardt’s work, where vague, unclear theoretical fusions between the concept of ‘proletariat’ and that of ‘biopower’ lead to concepts of practice that were only really of influence during the 2000s, during the nadir of modern leftism, when the western left’s practice became deeply influenced by these anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theorists promoting new, nonsensical theories of spontaneous revolt by no longer opposing the processes of capitalism, but by inserting ourselves within them in a way that does not imply creating new alternative, ‘bureacratic’ institutions like that of the party. It also isn’t a coincidence that these come out of the Operaismo tradition of modern Italian ‘Marxism’, which came out of a pre-neoliberal alienation from classical and leninist marxism and burrowed a huge amount of ideas of spontaneity and voluntarism from Italian anarchism, and has consistently failed not only to from lasting movements labor, rejects party structures, but whose intellectual work is also far weaker than other traditions of Marxism. Ofc, they are not actually giving more theoretical understanding to the topic, in fact they are literally changing the meaning of the term ‘proletariat’, and so talking about something else, saying that the new definition is more useful. I won’t go into it but their work is actually contradictory and so incoherent. I’m bringing this up because this is the kind of failure to understand how to responsible scientific theoretical thought and concept use is supposed to be applied, especially in revolutionary ways, that has alienated so many intelligent young people from Marxism as a tradition. If you go into most, say, history, sociology or anthropology departments today, you will hear people talk in pseudo-emancipated language about how women had ‘agency’ (rarely carefully defined) in marriage contracts in medieval Hungary or in the media industry of modern Saudi Arabia, along with alot of other fetishistic bullshit that could only be concocted by overeducated bourgeois, but if you say you are a Marxist, you will almost certainly be treated with disdain, contempt and smirks. Why do bourgeois liberals embrace Foucault et al., but viciously reject any attempt to be explicitly Marxist? You can normally only get into a history department these days if you are very lucky and find a Marxist professor who is already there and willing to be your supervisor.

                But, at the end of the day, there is little explanatory utility or validity to the concept of biopower, and it’s main effect on thought has been to allow a cottage industry within academia to develop around it, so that petit-bourgeois people can intellectual masturbate for 3-4 years and then get a job at a corporate law firm. In practice, to turn people away from, and defang, the only body of thought that has actually posed a real threat to capitalism in the modern world: Communism/Marxism.

                If you want to read actual Marxists explain in more detail why the post-structural turns were intellectual embarassment, both Lefevre (in his writings on structuralism) and Perry Anderson (in Traces of Wester Marxism) do good jobs. Poststructural thought was, literally, positively perceived by the CIA as an intellectual development in Europe, specifically France, which would undermine the legitimacy of Marxism, and indeed, that is precisely how many of these thinkers understood what they were doing.

                But I also think (as someone who has read and studied this stuff) that it’s really irresponsible for self-proclaiming Marxists to suggest to people that they should go waste years of their lives reading these people, given that that this literally how much time you will need if you really want to study and digest what they read, and given that the level of genuine, grounded enlightenment about your world or about politics will be limited if any. In fact the result is normally negative, in that it reduces many peoples intellectual relationship to the world to one in which there is only discourse and abstract systems of signs (in Baudrillard and several others, including to a lesser extent in Lacan or Althusser, although these are strictly speaking structuralists). As Anderson points out, this explains why in practice this amounts to idealism. The reason these thinkers are popular amongst modern self-described leftists is because the latter are deeply susceptible to idealism, ultraleftism and anarchism in the current era of capitalism, although it is clear that over the last few years that there has been something of an alienation from this especially amongst young adult leftists and increased interest in Marxism and Communism, given the impasses the people in those lines of thought tend to fall into (e.g. out cult in our squat paid for by the bougie parents of two of our fellow activists has exploded for the 20th time because everyone was fucking each other, smoking weed and we don’t have any relation to real workers or working places or labor movements). I think it’s very sad that this is what people think of when they think of 20th century French intellectual life, when there was the school of Historical Epistemology (Bachlard, Cavaillès, Canguillem, Desanti, etc.) as well as the Annales school of historians (especially Bloch and Duby), along with Marxist thinkers like Badiou and Lefevre.

              • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                I’m not talking about just about particular thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?

                I am talking about postmodern culture in general. I am referring to a cultural ‘logic’, and more specifically to one that has become more and more in common in intellectual culture - both in bourgeois academia and outside. You see it above in certain departments, such as sociology and anthropology which, not coincidentally, are also filled, in proportional terms, with very high amounts of poor scholarship and outright nonsense which people will often still obtain degrees. Especially in anthropology, there are waves of deeply essentializing, fetishistic, and frankly racist works of no logical coherence or empirical validity fusing ‘ocean epistemologies’ of indigeneous people from one location with their deleuzian mysticism and that applying to another indigeneous peoples on the other side of the planet who also happen to live by the sea. I could go on endlessly with these times of examples, but frankly the main point is simply that if these fields were. Also, suffice to say that this level of investment of public economic resources into such bullshit would not have been allowed in the Soviet Union. The post-structural intellectual turn and the postmodern cultural transformations that it accompanied, and of which it is a part, has changed the intellehctual characters of the modern social sciences and humanities. It is not a coincidence that these became dominant in the Neoliberal era and that they drove out Marxism from these domains. There is basic lack of sytematicity, logical validity and empirical support throughout many of these works. Some of these thinkers, such as Deleuze, I think are more philosophically impressive, albeit deeply problematic. But even with the latter case, as with Christ, the problem is the Christians. As I’m talking about a culture, and in particular and intellectual culture, you cannot separate it from the participants in the culture, and it is striking that it seems to have become, at least amongst American or anglo ‘leftists’ (but really what Marx referred to sarcastically as ‘true leftists’ and what Lenin referred to ‘ultraleftists’) more common to refer to and read these thinkers than Marxist thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?

                Tbh the baudrillardian point your comment cites is an example of the kind of obfuscation that I’m talking about. ‘Whole modernist reduction of identity’ - what does this mean? What, in concrete, material terms, is a reduction of identity? Are you making a physicalist statement? Is this a metaphysical statement? Is this a statement about ideology, about thought, i.e. that we in the modern world reduce our concepts of identity to one of what one consumes? Baudrillard’s entire theory, to the extent is has coherence, demands an explicit rejection of Marx. In particular, is does so based on the hilariously wrong and reductionist idea that, as you put it, Marx carries out a ‘modern reduction of identity as production’. Also, you are saying that the correct judgement would be ‘“criticism of astrology is a from of misogyny” is a wholely modernist reduction of identity to consumption’, except that it is not clear why you are not yourself reducing this judgement to a fairly arbitrary interpretation. We can explain it far more simply, easily and clearly by just saying that saying that you think that the belief, that saying that that which is clearly nonsense is wrong, is also misogynist because it is, on average, is more commonly believed by women (I don’t know if this true, but anecdotally is seems to be the case and appears to be the reason for the judgement), is simply nonsensical because what women at any point in time happen to believe on average doesn’t really determine any nature of womenhood (why should it? Why do we need that in the first place? Why is this relevant?). And, in any case, because it is a criticism of a specific belief, not women as women. Otherwise we start doing another classic irrational postmodern move of saying that practically it is misogynist for the former reason. In other words it destroys the distinction between the meaning of what we can say or think and reduces them to a kind of sociological relativism. It makes thought passive and destroys the ability for analysis. I am not saying that this form of irrational thought has not existed plenty in the past. I’m saying that it has become even more common as a sociological product of neoliberal postmodern culture.

              • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Also, the ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructural’ critique does not seem to understand, again, that science is real. It is impossible to study the scientific method without understanding that certain key types of reasoning are involved in it. The only way you prove that something is not scientific is by Of course that leaves the question of what science is constituted of, by these thinkers do not offer much of anything practical in this line of questioning, otherwise there wouldn’t be the crises of methodology and reproducibilty which we see in the departments where this kind of thought predominates or is very influential.

                For instace, there is nothing in Latour which gives any real understanding of how science produces genuine knowledge. When you speak to people who are influenced by Latour - in particular many sociologists, unfortunately also under the influence of Bourdieu - they have frequently expressed to me that they think that neoclassical economics is ‘just as scientific’ as, say, physics or mathematics or biology. They say this because they have often a purely ‘external’ as opposed to ‘internal’ view of sciences, meaningly that they look simply at the, at times very superficial and in any case partial, sociological activities such as conferences, networking, team, lab and research group organization, discourses, apparent types etc. They do not take an internal view of the subject where they ask: “what are the internal logical relations of the key principles, axioms, propositions of this science? What are the relations with experience, with the data of experience? To what extent are the theoretical concepts we inherit culturally imbedded deeply in even the most apparently immediate perceptions we have of objects?” I am not interested in any epistemology or theory of science if it cannot contribute to the question of how it is that science as a process or social institution is able to produce a particular kind of very powerful knowledge. If it cannot explain the mechanics that allow us to answer that normative question, then it is useless imo. It’s a luxury that falls in a yelling alarm the moment you have to do actual theory or explain things in a way that matters. Sociology and much anthropology in particular, when I read papers of theses in these topics, have often basically abandoned any pretence of presenting models of reality in order to explain a particular type of phenomenon, which is what every science does. I have read literally nonsensical word salads which have gotten people in ‘top universities’ on the western model, when that quality of work would almost certainly never be accepted in several other disciplines.

                Capitalists do need engineers to actually know how they objects of study work in order for them to be of value. In the social sciences this is not necessary. In fact, the opposite is to a very high degree necessary, because obfuscuation and mystification is part of what capitalists are paying for when they fund, say, economics departments. In the other social science departments the situation is of course somewhat different, but, especially in Western anthropology and sociology, there is a crisis of methodology which has intensified since the post-structural turn. There is of course still good anthropology and sociology that gets done, but it is a relatively small proportion imo and is in general and exception which proves the rule I’m highlighting.

                • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Interesting. I pretty much agree with all of this, though not as aggressively. I mean, there is a very good reason that I chose not to pursue (despite having the recs and qualifications for) a doctorate in anthropology, because pretty much all of it felt like complete horseshit, particularly if you have lived, worked and read Marx and all of those descended from that dialectical materialist mileau.

                  God if you think the anthropology department is bad, you should read the scholarly dog shit that comes out of communications departments. I was told once that I wrote a exemplar paper for a class, I think it was on art criticism. I was absolutely black-out drunk and do not remember writing at least half of it, and upon re-reading it, it was some of the most pretentious bullshit I have ever written and really made me despondent that this was considered the best paper I had ever written, but I was already in my senior year and all of my scholarship stuff was tied up in this very stupid degree, so I finished it anyways.

                  Thank you for all these recommendations though, I will absolutely look into them when I get a chance. I am actually going back to school for a hard science degree soon, funded by my manufacturing career, but I will absolutely buy and read your recommendations.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        No, my plan to build a continent sized rocket booster and yeet Mercury in to Andromeda so the little fucker never retros it’s grade again is Astrology erasure.

  • NeelixBiederman [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I’m in the first or second chapter of graeber 's Dawn of Everything, and the unearned arrogance the Europeans display to the indigenous Americans is constantly thrown back in their faces.

    “You don’t feed the hungry, even when when you have food to spare?”

    “The only reason your men obey you is because you compel them with fear of violence?”

    He goes on to argue that “enlightenment” ideals of human freedom and equality entered the primitive European brainpan through their experiences with truly free people who actually embraced equality. It’s a fun read

    • star_wraith [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Dawn of Everything is the first book I would hand to a lib if I was going to try and turn them into a Marxist. Gotta shake those “west is best” and “muh human nature” brainworms first before you will get anywhere, IMO

    • Vncredleader@hexbear.net
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      I’ve been reading “The Many-Headed Hydra” and it covers a similar idea. However it is focused on the Northern Atlantic and Anglos. They go into some detail about the wreck of the ship Sea Venture and the mutiny to stay free on Bermuda rather than return to class based rule. That wreck actually inspired The Tempest

  • M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    It’s honestly still a mystery to me how they managed to brute force their way into hegemony, time and time again. Joyless, drab, unappealing…and yet they somehow got the numbers to pull this shit off in the first place.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Guns, manufactured goods, liquor, guns, sugar, medicine, guns, and guns.

      One of the common tactics was to pick one ethnic group or whatever to be the “civilized” group, then give them guns and tell them that if they want to continue to get guns they’d better get the rest of the region under control, quick, or the guns would stop. YOu make one group really powerful, but not as powerful as your troops, then use them as a club to beat the rest of the region in to submission while also making your aid contingent on wearing clothes, drinking tea, producing export crops, etc.

      • M68040 [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Going back further, I wanna know how they even managed to secure enough power to pull off shit like the crusades – How Christianity became an institution in the first place. I need to look into that at some point.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          It had the advantage of the pre-existing structure of the Roman Empire. Religions catch on fast when there’s a ton of money, swords, and land already associated with it. Also helped that the Roman religion didn’t care too much about heresy or adopting new gods, so the average Roman citizen didn’t care that Jupiter is now Jehova. A lot of early Christianity was like madlibs, just changing the names of various polytheistic deities into various Christian things.

          Some early Christians in England for instance would emphasis the similarity of Jesus on the cross with Odin dying on the world tree.

          Also material reasons

          • Vncredleader@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            A similar process took place in the Americas. Amerindians during colonization mixed their own traditions with Christianity, Creating essentially folk Christianity. Same thing happened in Ireland. Like worship of the Virgin Mary became super important in the Spanish colonies, somewhat eclipsing Jesus, and once it became something the natives claimed for themselves, the missionaries could hardly target the worship of their own religion effectively. Not that they didn’t try

            I wish more people where familiar with the story of Juan Diego. The whole interplay between native religion, christianity, and the emergent local traditions and identity are not clear cut. Nice little blog post about it

            I recently went to visit the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City with my host family. As we walked around the massive campus of the basilica, my host mother explained to me the background of this immensely important religious site. In 1531, in the midst of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, there was an indigenous man named Juan Diego who claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in the mountains on the outskirts of Mexico City and instructed him to build a church there. He went to tell the local Catholic bishop, but the bishop told him that he must bring proof. According to the story, Juan Diego returned to the place of the initial sighting, and the virgin appeared to him again. Following her instructions, Juan Diego collected some roses from the garden, wrapped them in his tilma (a type of indigenous cloth), and took them to the bishop. When he unfolded the cloth, the roses transformed into an idol of the Virgin Mary. The religious community heralded the event as a miracle and built a basilica near the place where the sighting took place. Since then, a new basilica and a number of other churches and shrines have been constructed, creating an entire campus of religious attractions. Every year, millions of people visit the basilica from all over the world. While there, I saw elderly women coming from miles away on their hands and knees, a sort of pilgrimage of suffering to honor the Virgin Mary.

            The story of the Virgin of Guadalupe is more complicated than it might seem. After my host mother explained everything to me, her two adult children pulled me aside to clarify a few things. They told me that, according to many historians, the Spanish crown fabricated the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe in order to help convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism. The hill of Tepeyac, where Juan Diego supposedly saw the Virgin Mary, was originally a pilgrimage site for honoring one of the indigenous gods, Tonantzin. Many believe that the story was a way to draw the indigenous away from their old gods and encourage the Christian faith. If this is true, then the Spanish executed the plan masterfully. The Virgin of Guadalupe was and always has been known in Mexico as “La Morenita.” Morenita, which literally means “little brown girl,” is a term of affection that connotes the virgin’s racial identity as a mestiza, a mix between Spanish and indigenous heritage. Thus, the Virgin of Guadalupe is the ultimate symbol of religious syncretism and mestizaje in Mexico. The virgin symbolizes the successful, and of course forced, integration of Spanish Catholicism and local indigenous religions. In addition, she is the champion of la mestizaje, the mixing of races that resulted from the Spanish colonization.

            On one hand, the Virgin of Guadalupe has been a positive symbol for Mexico. She was an icon of the movement of independence from Spain. In 1810, Miguel Hidalgo and his army chanted “Death to the Spaniards and Long Live the Virgin” as they marched into battle. In more recent history, the virgin has become a symbol of unity for the Mexican people. She is Mexico: Catholic, mestizo, faithful, rooted in tradition.

            But the Virgin of Guadalupe, and what she stands for, is also a lie. The myth seeks to champion Catholicism, while hiding the legacy of violence on which the process of conversion was built. And the unifying mestiza identity that she represents obscures the existence of other marginalized racial groups in Mexico. If you ask a Mexican about race, most will tell you that it’s not a problem because everyone is mestizo. But pure-blooded indigenous groups continue to live in the south of the country and continue to suffer from racial discrimination. They represent a reminder of the violent Spanish colonization that the Mexican government seeks to forget.

            The Virgin of Guadalupe is a Mexican celebrity. She comforts people in times of need, and she gives a sense of pride to the Mexican people. For that reason, I would never challenge her existence or her symbolism to someone like my host mother, who I respect and care for. But I think it’s important to acknowledge the ways the Virgin of Guadalupe is harmful for the country. She represents a religious and racial identity that has been forced upon the Mexican people, and she is an example of how the Spanish colonization continues to plague Mexico even today.

          • StalinForTime [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            I think Christianity was somewhat different to alot of the other religions which the Romans easily assimilated out of realpolitik and by the classic interpretatio graeca. Like Judaism, adherence to Christianity precludes (in theory) adherence to any other source of divinity than the one true God, and the more metaphysical, moral and emotionally intense (in some respects) relationship that Jews and Christians imagined themselves as having to God were very distinct from the more formally legalistic and communal relationship that normal Romans understood as the relation to their gods, especially earlier on, in the Republic and early Empire, prior to the deepening of Greek, Egyptian and Semitic mystical influences on Roman religion. As institutions in Rome were understood to be, by their very nature, sacred (instituted by the constant will of the many gods and by Aeneas - son of Venus - and Romulus - son of Mars - to not recognize, for instance, the divinity of Roman gods of the Emperor, or of the sacred institutions was understood as a political challenge to the Empire. When you read Roman Latin texts about the Jewish rebellions it often sounds very similar to the way that modern imperialists speak about liberation or ‘terrorist’ movements.

            Once Christianity started becoming popular, it was not perceived by the more traditionalist Romans as equivalent to the assimilation of other Gods, because it could not be assimilated to their religious ideology. It was often very scandalous when not only slaves, but aristocratic women would be found to have secretly converted to Christianity. Of course we’re talking about a long period of time, i.e. from the death of Christ to 313 AD, before Christiantiy achieved something like a priviledged or dominant position in the Empire, so we shoudln’t generalize about this whole length of time as if the relationship of different changing sections of the Roman social body were not themselves understanding relationships to eachother and to religions, themselves changing (notably when Christianity became less Jewish and more gentile). You are of course correct that culturally Christians translated many figures and symbols into analogous Christian ones, most obviously certain festivals and the saints, as has always happened when Christianity was been introduced or imposed on non-Christian groups such as in Africa or the Americas.

            This is why the Jews and Christians had a uniquely controveral status within the Roman Empire. The Zealot revolt was the most spectacular example of this against Rome, and in many was a genuinely revolutionary movement. The Essenes and Christians who followed represent a less violent revolutionary opposition to Imperial Roman power, but were still very controversial, hence the repeated (albeit often exagerated) purges of Christians. It’s not to difficult to understand why Jesus would be controversial if he was saying anything like what he’s presented as saying in the New Testament.

            I had forgotten the Odin example but that’s really fascinating. I think similar syncretic cases have been found in Scandinavia. From what I understand, it seems that the Scandanavian aristocracy were, similarly to Rome, the immediate force behind the conversion to Christianity, in that it seems that there was something like a domino-effect in which the aristocracy came to see it was in their interest to convert to Christianity, which further increased the incentives for the remaining pagans aristocrats, the reasons likely meaning economic, military and political. Given lack of sources and data it’s impossible to say to what extent this was also due to a pressure from the lower classes due to conversion of farmers, artisans, builders and slaves to Christianity, whereas in the Roman case we know that it seemed initially to have been most popular amongst the lower classes and the subaltern.

    • BodyBySisyphus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Immunity to smallpox is a good way to ensure you’re the last one standing. Never underestimate the power of poor hygiene and living in close proximity to livestock.

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    The guy on the ground is holding a staff, but in the thumbnail it looks like he’s pointing his thumb at the missionary “get a load of this bozo” style