Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson’s podcast this week is based on an upcoming paper called Paganism is Not a Religion: The Social Significance of the Ancient Gods.
The myths and stories of the pagan gods, are not “religious.” They are not “private preferences” but the very constitution of ancient societies. They are not “true” or “false” but rather the expression of the ancient world's conception of truth. They are the foundational texts of a society and are not literal beliefs. The ancient elite never believed in “gods” as they were never meant to be believed in as real people. The simple people might have believed in a literal Zeus, but the educated people did not.
"Gods" were always meant to be expressions of a society's identity and were primarily civic expressions. They are “gods” that were “worshiped” only in the sense that Superman is “worshiped” among young Americans. The statue of liberty is a “goddess” in the ancient sense. That is, she is an expression of the American conception of liberty and not seen as a literal woman. The Pledge of Alliance is not a liturgy in the modern sense, but it is in the ancient one. The “gods” are archetypes and symbols of very profound social truths learned from experience. They are not actual personalities.
Hesiod was not a “prophet of the divine” and no one treated him as such. The “gods” of ancient Rome are not analogous to the God of Christianity or even Islam. They refer to two different things confused by the use of the same term. “Religion” too has misleadingly been used to cover both sorts of phenomena.
The use of the term “religion” has reached absurd levels of elasticity and the term “god” likewise. If the devotees of the pagan myths were religious, then so are Eric Clapton's fans. Rock concerts have almost every mark of a religious liturgy, but no one would call it a religion.
GMA Grube's work on Plato makes the simple statement: “The Greek theos and the English word God are by no means synonymous.”
The debate between "pagans" and "Christians" make no sense. In the ancient world, it was a debate between Plotinus and Christianity, not the "followers of Zeus" and the "followers of Jesus." This modern debate is nonsensical. Paganism is not a religion.
Presented by Matt Johnson
The Orthodox Nationalist: Paganism is Not a Religion – TON 080217
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