So I read somewhere recently, that christianity's defining trait is forcing out paganism. And I thought about it, and how true it was. All of the holidays are superimposed to replace pagan holidays, often appropriating their elements, but giving them different names. A lot of the rules, like 'worship only one god' and 'don't worship icons' go directly against the pagan worship of multiple gods, and valuing icons and sculptures.
I remember specifically a story in the bible that featured people being punished for making and worshiping a statue of a golden cow; it declared how blasphemous and wrong it was. I assume now, this was just to make a little detour to point out how hinduism was bad too, because there's nothing inherently wrong about worshiping animals, or multiple gods, or to connect to and treasure icons and sculptures. All of it comes more naturally, more easy and less forced than bowing to one imaginary male who tells you that everything but that is wrong.
Remember all of the stories of m*n being jealous when women are paying attention to their own children, or to their pets, or to any other people in general? I think that's exactly what the message of the christian god is. Hey, you can only pay attention to me, no animals, other people or art, because that, makes me feel sad :(. I am a poor little meow meow. So that's why it's all wrong.
But, in retrospect, I don't think this was the only reason it was so important to exterminate paganism. Paganism was based on worship of nature, the gods we had were those of the sea, wind, thunderstorm, rain, soil, sun, moon, trees, mountains, water, animals, powers of nature. For slavic people in particular, it was connected to the land and the life it had given us, it was connected to the cycles of light, fertility of the soil, the life given to us by the trees, the weather, the productivity of our gardening. We had trees that we considered holy, and we planted them as a religious practice. I read once, that our forests had carved statues of gods in them! To think there was once a time where you could step inside of a forest, and stumble on a statue of a goddess, I will never get over missing out on that. The christians destroyed all of them.
And by forcing us to sever our connection to nature, and turn it to a single attention-hungry, self-diagnosed all powerful male, gave him the final word of what the nature signifies now, and according to him, it's all just a resource. Trees, animals, soil, mountains, everything that was sacred, lifted up and celebrated, became degraded, humiliated, and demoted to only a resource.
And I believe this is what paved the road for capitalism to cause this amount of mass destruction. This is why we're having a climate crisis, and are able to ignore it, because we're already so far in this brainwashing, to us it's still all 'resources'.
How would any pagan tolerate destruction of numerous forests and grasslands, had they still been holy and sacred to us? Would we close our eyes while the sacred sources of water were getting polluted? Would we not lose our minds at the amount of animals treated like non-living objects, forced to live only to be exploited maximally, and then killed? If we still worshiped trees and planted them as a holy practice, taking them down for capitalistic profit would be illegal. The entire capitalistic endevour was enabled by christianity, by tearing up the connection between the people and the nature, destroying our spirituality, and in the end, our ability to keep sustaining ourselves in the environment that we are no longer bonded to.
The attention hungry god doesn't care. He just wants more worshiping for himself.
Turning our back on him, and going back to spirituality is the way out of this. Maybe we were right to make trees sacred. Maybe making art of gods and nature, and feeling fulfilled and connected to them, is a natural way to live. Maybe animals are supposed to be sacred, maybe if we went back to seeing something admirable and divine in them, we would find ourselves in a land that supports life again. Maybe there is religion in how the wind feels before the storm, or the rain sounds hitting the top branches of a tree, or in the stars that appear when the city lights aren't shining. Maybe how we feel when we sit together looking at the sunset, outdoes anything a male god has given us.
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