🔥 The conversion of Russia to Orthodox Christianity
oligopsoneia-deactivated2018051:
the only thing i know about this (and i’m not looking up to see if this is misremembered, remembered correctly as a fable, or a thing that actually somehow happeend, because i’m not going to give up the one thing i got here) is that the king gathered jewish, christian, and islamic scholars together and officially converted the country to whoever had the best arguments, which is pretty cool, again at least as a myth
but wait! i guess that’s not super controversial. okay here’s an vaguely related controversial opinion: as far as I can tell, almost nobody has been intellectually convinced of traditional polytheism of any sort; they didn’t really try to convince each other, once intellectuals started discussing the topic the monotheists almost always won out even prior to seizing state power there are multiple independent lines of thought where attempts to systematize pagan religion led in a monotheist direction, and as best i can tell all modern neopagans are just doing it for the aesthetics, or at most as an aesthetic gloss on their being intellectually convinced of “some kind of weird thing that’s hard to define but would be inappropriate to aesthetically dress up in the kind of monotheism i was exposed to.” i guess there’s julian the apostate but he seems to be in violation of a clear trendline, and there are probably ways in which terms like “pagan” are not super useful but it seems the same claims translated into more sophisticated langauge will still be correct. ofc if i’m wrong here i’d love to be pointed to sources that point out how
@multiheaded1793 suggested i ask @anaisnein re: the intellectual foundations of /arguemnts for neopaganism, and i super respect both of them so i remain very curious!
The Infamous Brad is an intellectually-committed Greek pagan reconstructionist. As far as I can tell he believes in the historical existence of his deities, like for serious.