the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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Barely attested religious practices from thousands of years ago are not European religion. Christianity did not erase white people's culture. Christianity did not colonize, imperialize, texturize, or homogenize Europe (excepting, very specifically, Lithuania). Homophobia is not Abrahamic - homosexuality as understood in modern culture and homophobia as understood in modern culture are both products of modern culture, with homophobia largely anchored in industrial revolution era notions of family, society, and patriarchy. Astrology is not "pagan", it existed the whole time and was an integrated feature of Christian societies. There was never some authentic primal real spiritually and emotionally satisfying Paganism (trademark llc all rights reserved copyright disney corporation mmccxxvi) that everyone was happy with before christianty ruined everything. Human cultures - including law, religion, sexuality, gender, food - evolve, change, spread, and syncretize constantly. They only very, very rarely disapear when an entire people is extremely thoroughly wiped out, which almost never happens. Missionary imperialism as we conceive it was a 19th century project. The hacienda colonialism that the Spanish employed in the Americas was it's own thing, with infuelnce on later religious imperialisms, that employed different theories and methods with different goalsm
I cannot emphasize this enough; magic isn't real, gods aren't real, religion is stuff people believe that does not necessarily correlate to an observable external reality. Christians don't do " pagan" stuff. They do christian stuff that in some cases was either adapted from the practices of other religion, or rose out of a syncretic (same "syn" as synthesis) mixing of religions and beliefs. Thoraboos all think Christianity came along and wrecked their sigma chad viking fascist whatever the fuck. Archeology suggests there was a long period where pre-christian northern european religious practices were practised alongside, and eventually merged with, christian practice.
All of this stuff is changing all the time! The christmas tree isn't some sacrificial wotan holiday log. It's not even the same thing as the christmas tree from 20, 100, or 200 years ago. Culture changes all the time. Even when culture doesn't seem to change that's often superficial - the fabric might look the same from a distance, but the dyestufss used, the method by which the fabric was made and transported, the method of sewing, all kinds of things are changing and so people's relation to their culture and the artifacts of their culture change, and in turn that culture and those artifacts change. There is never stasis. There are no ancestral traditions handed down unchanged through the centuries!
We live in modern times, and so did our ancestors, all of our ancestors, all the way back to monke! As long as there has been writing we have records of anxiety about the rapid, sometimes overwhelming changes in cultures, norms, and traditions. Yes! Postmodernism, futureshock, alienation, all these things are real, and their distressing effects are intense in our lives! But these feelings are not unique to us! You can trace changes in fashion on the walls of ancient tombs! You can read concerns for the well being of the youth written with iron gall ink on ancient vellum! The world has never been still or static! We have always danced and sung and warred and wailed and changed! Always, always, there is change!
theres a difference between what happened in europe to pagans and what happened in later imperialism, but you are ignoring a lot of very real and very violent cultural repression on the part of christians in this post. like theres documents where they talk about how they are going to infiltrate and break up local power structures. they hunted down and murdered religious and political leaders of the pagans. if you posted this about, for example, native americans losing large parts of their culture and heritage, it would be understood by everyone to be cringe imperialist both-sidesing.
'shut up about ur lost culture and genocided population! life is change! culture is change! move on and just accept whatever the current hegemony is, because everything changes!'
There's no meaningful equivalence between the US's deliberate and considered 400 year long campaign of extermination of Indigenous American people and the raucous brawling of dozens of different barely Christianized fratricidal ethnolinguistic groups with wildly different political and economic organizations haphazardly integrating, marrying in to, fighting, conquering, being conquered by, exterminating, or peacefully syncretizing with their neighbors. Europe did not exist until fairly recent history. Idk, maybe Napoleon or something. Christianity in the medieval period was a complete mess of idiosyncratic regional practices and petty heresies with very little central control and authority. Like sometimes the pope could flex, depending on the situation.
You want to talk about, idk, the Teutonic Knights being murderous psychos, we can talk about that. if we limit the discussion to like a specific handful of decades. But Europe and Christianity did not exist in the way they do now.
Like the Crusades? Absolutely not a genocidal campaign of whatever, and they weren't viewed as such by the people at the time. Arab writers of the time considered the invasion of the Franks as just politics as usual. The idea that it was an campaign of extermination waged between ideologically coherent factions is modern nonsense.
i already said that it is substantially different in many ways, but the fact that the cultural imperialism wasn't as unified doesn't make it not cultural imperialism. just because, for example, the christianization of scandinavia was headed by internal forces, doesn't mean it didn't involve some pretty horrific violent persecutions. it wasn't genocide in a physical sense but it was in a cultural sense, forcibly assimilating people into a belief system for political advantages. obviously what the US would do later to its indigenous people is much worse and more unified and insutrialized, but that doesn't make lesser crimes against humanity acceptable. idc about 'europe' or 'chrisitanity' as they are now, i'm just pointing out that it was at times a very forcible conversion. idc how people at the time would categorize events, if something like the crusades were to happen these days we would absolutely call it a war crime akin to genocide if not genocide itself, its the intentional destruction and repression of a culture.
edit: like the civil war in sweden between indigenous belief proponents and christians wasn't as horrific, bloody, and mercilessly efficient as america's ethnic cleansing of the native americans, but it was still obviously fucked up, and is similar in the sense that a socio-cultural hegemony is being violently established/maintained, where a less advantaged cultural/ethnic group is destroyed by a dominant cultural/ethnic group. it was based on different lines than the race realist science of genocidal america but it shares at least some qualities.
why are ancient/medieval paganisms more important than the cultural innovations of the society after it was christian? why not the celtic paganism germans replaced in central europe? or the hunter-gatherer religions agricultural communities replaced?
The germans didn’t replace the celtic inhabitants of central europe, they WERE the celtic inhabitants of central europe. The tradition pictured on the article is an celtic tradition. Germanics in Central Europe had an hybrid culture with the celts they integrated, a lot of times the romans just put them into the wrong category and there are barely any other sources available, since the locals had an oral tradition (sound familiar doesn’t it?).
"Celtic" is an extremely sketchy grouping that encompassed many languages and cultures over a long period of time. It's just a big basket for a linguistic group and spreads across an enormous area.
Modern laypeople make a lot more of "Celtic" culture than they should. There's no meaningful connection between modern "Celtic" nations and the "Celts" running around in 0ad, not least because the "Celts" were a number of different linguistic and cultural groups, not a single culture. There's some linguistic connections in Irish, Welsh, and Scots, but that's it. AFAIK there isn't even a really good consensus on what "Celtic" should mean. Like we're literally basing all this on trends in 2,000+ year old pottery.
And the funny costumes are not "Celtic", that's ridiculous. It's modern people dressing in funny costumes and ascribing meaning to them based on the mythology created for 19th century romantic nation-state building projects. What is this, a Krampus festival or something? Krampus is only attested from the 1400s.
It goes right back to post-christianization cultural practices that have elements of folk Christianity and local flavor. Like the christmas tree, like any number of things. ReligionforBreakfast has some superb videos on this exact thing. He just did one on the christmas tree, and his one on Easter is fantastic at cutting through the BS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW06pWHTeNk
So many people want to put all their faith in Bede being honest and correct. It is absurd
So many things are like this. We have 1 source for this 500 sq km region in the entire period from 324ad-545ad, so that source is definitely a smart informed correct guy and not just some shitposter.
and germans replacing the language but leaving some allegedly celtic traditions in tact is fundamentally different from the christians doing similar because...?
Ecc. 1:9
Also see Ecc. 3 on the unity of opposites
I do not think that is a good reading of Ecclesiastes 3, since that's an crude, anti-dialectical belief that Dril is mocking.
Unity of opposites is core to dialectics, whether those dialectics are materialist or idealist.
Frank I love you but Id like to note that I said whiteness not Christianity. White supremacy has a very specific idea of what "culture" should be and very much alienates and supresses things outside it, including expressions of Paganism that arent just milquetoast things like wearing a Thor hammer.
Also this expression of tradition might recent rather than truly authentic but does it occure to you that thats because its all they have left to do now?
Some places in Russia were continually pagan up to this day even, there's some very interesting practices in the urals
the thesis is that there is not a 'truly authentic' that went away. this impression of lost and vanishing authenticity is just noble savage tropes turned from indigenous people to white people.
as a system racial hierarchy suppresses and shapes, but the contents of the ideology are still shifting and in competition. Yankee WASP whiteness vs. blanquimiento whiteness, is whiteness homophobic? patriarchal? is it catholic or protestant?
I dont see how the first part is relevant to the situation. This screenshot is of an American white nationalist making fun of Euros for doing the Krampus festival. Says in the replies that he hates pagans. Cultural expressions that dont fit his idea of whiteness clearly disturb him. This is worthy of mockery.
As for the second part, Yankee WASP whiteness is the whiteness that's relevant to my post. The rest is irrelevant and I dont know why youre talking about it unless youre just making a misguided attempt to embrass me.
Enjoy dunking on American Christofacists with me comrade.
i appreciate you're trying to stay on topic, i was just explaining/expanding Frank's post. i share his gripe about cultural narratives, it's not as relevant to the OP but more the conversation in the thread.
and in the same vein, white supremacy being unstable is a very important characteristic that's pretty relevant to the argument Frank was making, and the 'why' of the disconnect between the christofascist and european cultural expression. i apologize if you were already aware and it was unnecessary to talk about
Ah okay. I get where youre coming from then.
Nice comment, but I just wanted to say, the Christmas tree isn’t a sacrificial log, not because of anything else, but because there’s exactly no evidence to show that it ever was part of a Yule holiday or festival. In fact, Christmas trees don’t show up until a few hundred years ago, in Germanic areas.
And the idea that it was a pagan symbol is strictly from German nationalists in the mid 1800s trying to explicitly form a continuity for the German Volk. It is literal Ariosophy
Hell yeah. Love it. I fucking hate 19th century German nationalism.
There were crusades not just against Lithuania, but against Frisia, Russia, the Baltics, Slavic peoples in the Balkans, East Germany and Pommerania, as well as Ireland and Finland. Hell even charlemanges Saxon wars where he literally mass-slaughtered the native leadership and burned down their holy places could be counted under erasure.
To compare medieval europe and the colonization period is wrong. But saying that whiteness and whiteness fostered through „Shared Christian Values“ didn’t erase indigenous European cultures is distorting history and strengthening white supremacy.
Yeah, no, there were no equivalent groups or organizations or states or entities or religion equivalent to modern European nation states, nor any programs or projects akin to 16th century Spanish Colonialism or 19th century Missionary Imperialism, prior to the development of those things. Equating the spread of the Christianity in the late classical and early medieval period to shit going on in the 1500s or 1800s is ahistorical.
There barely were "Shared Christian Values" until like, idk... God, when did they start to homogenize the religion? Because for like a thousand years it was just a mish-mash of idiosyncratic practices, small religious communities, weird schisms, warring factions of scholars. There wasn't a single coherent centrally organized Christianity until probably the Crusades, and even that was a complete mess. Like yeah, they were mostly using Bibles that were at least similar, and a lot of the Priests were at least able to read Latin, but there wasn't much standardization. Treating "Christians" as a single religious group, or ethnoreligious group, or nation in the medieval period does not reflect the societal practices and systems of power at that time.
"Whiteness" as we conceptualize it didn't exist until like the 16th century at the absolutely earliest, and didn't really solidify in to it's modern form until a while after that. There was no "Whiteness" in medieval Europe. Tribes, towns, linguistic groups, allegiance to various secular or religious lords, sure. Religious societies, sure. But there was no whiteness, nothing we would recognize as Nation States. The Christians that replaced, violently or not, pre-Christian Europeans weren't an organized or monolithic body. It was dozens of different cultures and language groups, some of which were only barely practicing the same religion, acting according to their own material interests. There was nothing equivalent to the US genocide of Native Americans or the Spanish conquest and mass slaughter in South America.
The closest I'm aware of would be the Teutonic Knight's crusades in to north Eastern Europe. And those guys fought other Christians as much as they fought non-Christians, and were, iirc, widely considered psychopaths by all their neighbors Christian and non-Christian alike.
Also, genuinely curious - Crusade in Ireland? I have never heard even a suggestion of anything like that, except that silly nonsense about Patrick violently expelling Pagans from Ireland.
I agree on the principle that we can’t “retvrn” to more satisfying practices, because it has nothing to do with time or change and everything to do with how much Protestantism sucks ass. America specifically has like 0 fucking collective practices that encourage people to interact outside of their nuclear family group and (Covid aside, because this is good in that context) honestly Christian norms are really boring and dominant. I have nothing against change, just Christian ideals of domination and, well, boringness. Being boring is good if you’re Christian. And regardless of what Reddit atheists tell you, they’re still Christian at heart. They still fear an all-powerful god and worship their supposedly infallible messengers, it’s just that they don’t logically believe the god itself exists (except when they do, see singularity nerds).
I think reddit atheists maintain a lot of the bad of religion in their mindset, but they importantly lack any sense of community or self-sacrificing. It is like american protestantism removing all the difficult and challenging parts of faith
That’s exactly what Protestantism did, except I would actually say it’s somewhat worse; It maintained a lot of the ideas of self-sacrifice, but divorced them entirely from their material and communal base, instead making self-sacrifice in and of itself righteous. Secular asceticism, done not out of an obligation to one’s community or even to serve a spiritual nourishment, but out of obligation to an invisible god that one often believes doesn’t even exist.
What sucks is there is plenty of good social change pushed for by the pre-protestant reformationists. groups like the Anabaptists
Yeah reddit atheists are just secular Calvinists.
That's not Christianity, that's almost entirely capitalism post 2007. There was lots of shit to do back in the day. Like they still have fireworks wars between cathedrals in Greece or Turkey or somewhere over there. People dress up in wierd outfits for processions. There are literally saints days for every day of the year if you want to have feasts. There are flagellants who march through the streets whipping themselves bloody. There's Dia del muertes, there's santeria, like I cannot even begin to begin to begin to list all the weird funky shit Christians do in various parts of the world. Even in America.
This is a really recent phenomena. Like 21st century. There's an old book called "Bowling Alone" from like 20 years ago that looks in to the decline of community in the late 20th century, and it's gotten much worse much much faster in the 21st century.
I think you might be conflating big picture Christianity with like Baptists and Mormons and Christian Fascists and idk, maybe Lutherans. Christianity as a whole is fucking nutty. Like Carnival, with all the beautiful people in the sequins and feathers, and the drinking and the dancing, all that? That's a Christian festival where people are basically getting it all out of their system before Lent starts.
Like back when I was a kid we'd all go to the local Catholic church and sing "traditional" Irish songs and folk music and rebel songs and shit while everyone go drunk.
There's an old Joke that Protestants are allowed to fuck but don't fuck, and Catholics aren't allowed to fuck but fuck all the time. Like Protestants tend to be boring Calvinist shits, but other denominations party.