The Case for Polytheism PART ONE

Religion kills. Religion is the root of all evil. Religion is a delusion, a fable, a fairy tale. Religion is a relic of a more primitive time in human civilization, where we needed divine explanations to attempt to understand the natural world. Nowadays, especially on the internet, we see more and more people arguing to do away with superstitions that are holding us back as a species and enter into a glorious golden age of science and reason.  But is this true? From a certain perspective their logic seems to be unassailable. Science has brought us gifts in abundance; no other discipline has brought as much benefit to the quality of life for the entire human species. And what has religion gotten us? Persecutions, holy wars, inquisitions, and violent acts of terrorism, not to mention unfair treatment of women and LBGTQ communities. On the surface, it seems like an open and shut case. Get rid of religion, and support science. Then the future will be bright.

However, we have a problem; we are unfairly categorizing all religion into the same boat. Many atheists are guilty of this. Though often highly educated about so-called mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam, often to an even higher degree that the practitioners of the religion themselves, they are not equally knowledgeable about other non-Abrahamic traditions. Accordingly, they make the gross generalization that all religions are the same, none are worse or better than any other. However, I find this point shockingly inaccurate. In these essays, I will argue in favor of the polytheistic world view as a legitimate logical and moral position, lacking most of the negative characteristics that the secular world decries in religion.  I will be writing this from the perspective of a Priest (or Kohan) of the Canaanite Polytheist tradition, but one with reasonably good knowledge of History, Science, and other religions.

Point one: Religion kills. This is unambiguously true. Religion makes good people do bad things, and gives bad people a justification to do bad things too. It is hard to imagine a world with suicide bombings without Islam, or the horrors of the crusades without Christianity. But do all religions provide a justification for such evil? Certainly the Abrahamic religions do. The bible justifies the wholesale slaughter of men, women and children of many cities during Joshua’s conquest of Canaan. In fact, the first king of Israel, Saul, is shown to be punished not for killing, but for showing mercy to the captured king of the Midianites, whom God had wanted exterminated. Truly the biblical god is a god of Genocide. In Islam, we have the prophet Muhammad’s example to justify murder as well. When Asma bint Marwan, a local resident of Medina was criticizing the prophet in her poetry, Muhammad had his blind follower kill her, even as she was holding her newborn baby. When he began to feel pangs of conscience for what he had done, the so-called prophet of peace told her, “No two goats will butt heads over her”.

But can we say the same thing for all other religions? Of course not! Some are peaceful to a degree that is shocking in and of itself. In India there exists a sect called the Jains, whose founder Mahavira taught them the dogma of “Do no harm”. Observant Jains therefore eat no meat, because the animal would have to be killed, wear masks and sweep the streets with brooms to avoid harming insects, and some of them even avoid eating any plant food that would require the plant to be killed. Needless to say, these people do not even think of killing another human being, much less doing it for religious purposes. On the contrary, their religion makes them peaceful and virtuous, and as a consequence of their frugal eating habits and trustworthy ways, they have become extremely successful and wealthy entrepreneurs in India, almost as if they were shown divine grace.

                As for my religion, we do not advocate killing and violence. As our god Baal Hadad says in his own epic, “Offer in the earth war, Place in the dust love; Pour peace amid the earth, Tranquility amid the fields.” Even though Baal justly uses violence against his enemy, Yam, the tyrant king of the gods, killing him, he is not shown as celebrating or praising his action. On the contrary, the text says, “Verily ashamed is Aliyan Baal”. He doesn’t find killing a moral act, even it seems to be justified. Later, when he fights Mot, god of death, he does not kill his enemy, but instead makes peace with his foe (who had in fact killed him in the past). With Baal’s example, the Canaanites pursued more often the peaceful path of being traders and scholars instead of warriors and conquerors. Of course, this relative weakness lead them to being easy prey for less enlightened powers, and were often enough put in the position of being written about by the same people who committed acts of genocide against them, hence the peculiar propaganda about such nonsense as temple orgies and child sacrifice, which I shall write in depth about another time.

                On a whole, religion that seeks to spread by the sword, and conquer the world seems to be an invention of the Abrahamics. Of course many polytheistic nations had empires, but we do not see them use “God wills it” statements to justify crushing their enemy and destroying their culture like the Abrahamic religions do. Ultimately, this type of religion was a revolution in and of itself, a revolution of evil. If we look at the case of the Roman Empire, we see a religiously and culturally diverse Principate. As long as religion did not harm the state, all religions were tolerated under the empire. Even the religion of the Carthaginians, the people who gave Rome their worst defeats and were ultimately massacred by the vengeful romans, was tolerated and even promoted. The Romans even had a dynasty of Emperors descended from Carthaginian stock, the line of Septimus Severus, that promoted the worship African goddess Tanit as a state cult.  However, the Romans were mistrustful of mystery religions, especially ones with sinister sounding beliefs and practices. Hence, we see the romans persecuting a suspicious, cannibalistic (Which is how the romans perceived the Eucharist), arsonistic, women hating and rabble rousing religion from the region of Galilee, known best today as Christianity. The Romans, however, showed clemency to their scapegoat; all the Christian would have to do is perform a sacrifice to the emperor and they would not be harmed. Most captured Christians took this option, and modern estimates say that no more than about 2000 Christians were killed in the whole history of the Roman empire.  Even this light persecution was only performed by a few emperors. The vast majority of them tolerated all religions and all gods. This situation continued until the rise of the Emperor Constantinius, who was the first Christian emperor. Though later proclaimed a saint by later Christians, he was anything but. He executed his own son, then his own wife. During his reign Christianity became legal. Before long, it was the only religion that was legal. Pagan sacrifices were banned, and temples were looted, destroyed, or converted into churches. This policy continued under his sons, who fought each other and back-stabbed until the roman empire was at the brink of falling, until his nephew, Julian, called the Apostate took the reins of state. He punished corruption, restored the temples and sacrifices (Which would have included that of the Jews at Jerusalem), and won victories in the east and west. He was a Philosopher; he promoted wisdom instead of the instead of the dogmatic drivel the church called learning. He would have restored Rome to glory, if it wasn’t for his untimely death (of which the modern and ancient scholarship are at loggerheads over who was responsible). Rome after his death became more corrupt, more chaotic, and Christian. Christianity would spread over the whole world like a deadly plague (Not to mention spreading more than a few actual plagues too) until it became the religion for 2 billion people. In that time we see brutal atrocities throughout. The verdict of Verdun, where the Christian Franks massacred 4500 pagan Saxons who refused to give up their religion. We see the crusades, where millions of Jews, Muslims, and even other Christians are massacred. We see the bloody conquest of the Americas, and the indoctrination and cultural vandalism by Spanish, English and American colonizers. More recently we see the atrocities of the Halocaust, which was both motivated and justified by the Christian religion (Hitler was neither Atheist nor Pagan, but a lifelong practicing and pope-endorsed Catholic). Similar atrocities in the name of Christianity continue in Africa but get far less attention from our biased media than the equally outrageous acts of Islamic terrorism and cultural vandalism.

 

                In conclusion, the Abrahamic religions are uniquely  violent and savage in the name of their religion, a condition not present in Polytheistic religions. Next time, I will argue for the logic of claiming a multiplicity of gods rather than none or just one.