Mar 22, 2020, 5:39 PM
by Tim Beckley
I do see this as an essential insight. Christianity could never have maintained a monopoly in the Western market for religious goods and services (ritual, education, etc.). I think one problem preventing this realization in the West is that we were subjected to its belligerence for so long that we’ve largely forgotten what native European polytheism actually looks like in all its kaleidoscopic diversity.
The interesting thing is that Western polytheism has been developing in defiance of the One Church from at least the 12th century AD and has since, in large measure, conquered the world, but we simply don’t recognize it as such, don’t see our conquest as having a spiritual or properly religious component- an effect, I think, of the violence with which Christianity asserted its claim to exclusive and unassailable religious Truth. Most still view our native expressions of religious sentiment through a Christian filter that falsely renders them profane, even many who explicitly reject or never believed the claims of that faith.
Another complicating factor is that an equally anti-Western, authoritarian competitor to Christianity with the same fanatical aspirations to monopoly power is already well-established- what we call Judaism 3.0, or Christianity 2.0, or Marxism/Feminism/Postmodernism- and it’s been receiving Christian apostates (mostly women, underclasses, and betas) for over 150 years.
These new zealots also fail to recognize their conversion as a religious one, or as a conversion at all, and for the same reason that so few recognize the advancements of European polytheism in the arts and sciences- the old claim that everything non-Christian must be secular is still tacitly accepted by most. So it makes me wonder, considering their innate psychological differences, to what extent are the adherents of Christianity 2.0 faithful to its absurd doctrines simply for lack of a viable market alternative.
Also, as Christianity absorbed the best and most celebrated aspects of pagan religious belief and custom, so too has Christianity 2.0 been appropriating and subverting the best of modern Western polytheism, presenting distorted versions of our myths in advertising and entertainment, in Universities, in the diversity meetings of the business world- absolutely everywhere, so that the disorientation of the religious consumer, as well as any aspiring producer of a new authentically European religious or spiritual art form, is practically debilitating.
I see at least three general types of pre-packaged religious product being marketable in our circles.
The first is a kind of translation of the Christian Bible in P-terms in the way that James describes.
The second, for those who want nothing to do with Christianity, is a kind of an assembled canon of evocative and useful native European myths, from classical to contemporary times.
The third, and most interesting to me, is an entirely new creative myth that orients itself in direct opposition to the still amorphous yet ever-expanding Levantine church that threatens to engulf the whole of the Western world today.
This would be a counterpart of the grail quest legends and courtly romances of High Middle Ages which represented the reemergence of the European principles of individual judgement and rational thought and marked the beginning of the end of that first failed attempt to suffocate the West in Abrahamic ignorance and deceit.