I’d like to point out that I’m an Evangelical, and this particular point of comparison applies to Catholics a lot more than it does to me. With that being said, I do realize we’re on a Catholic forum, and the larger point stands for the majority of anyone who’s going to see this. For the record though, I’d be interested in seeing what you’d come up with if you were going to do my people more specifically.
Let me try a different tack on this then.
Many of these Axial Age religions tend to do something that, at least in my limited knowledge of pre-Christian religious traditions of the West (for the record I’m Indian), was not undertaken by the Polytheistic Graeco-Roman tradition nor the Celtic/Norse/Eastern European varietals of the thing which gets labelled as paganism.
Namely - they offer up a Moral Code.
While the justification for said moral codes tend to be different based on the metaphysical approaches of the religions involved (Jesus dying for One’s sins is a meaningless statement to a Daoist. Reincarnation is a meaningless term to a Christian etc), the actual values offered up tend to be encompassed in what modern ethical theorists like to dub as
virtue ethics.
Although dependent on the Christian denomination, it is to my understanding that many Christian groups accept the virtue ethics outlined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle as being congruent with Christian beliefs. The criticism that often gets leveled at it is that lacking Revelation, the Greek philosophers only had an incomplete portion of the truth.
I would contend that if one actual sat and did a full-on breakdown of the ethical systems of mainstream Buddhism, Hinduism, et al. one would find similar emphasis on things like traditional family values, a belief in an orderly universe which reflects/effects the understanding of what human beings should be doing with their lives, homosexuality as a disordered passion, etc.
It is the metaphysical specifics where you’ll come to butt heads with each other.
Ancient Western Paganism doesn’t really seem to offer such moral guidance - that role seems to have been taken up by the Hellenistic philosophical schools like Stoicism, Neo-platonism, et al… which some members of the Early Church found approval with - although again to a limited degree.
Modern Western Paganism seems to be an odd fusion of Progressive/Leftist values tacked onto renovated ancient beliefs. Those values are generally informed by some sort of Modified Utilitarianism which tends to be at odds with many mainstream religions.
This is all very true, and atheists, on average, put in the most work and get the best results in terms of understanding the widest variety of religions.
I wonder about that.
When many religious folk interact with an atheist these days, what many of you are thinking about are that crop of atheists who came out of the early '00s during the Hitchens/Dawkins/Dennett/Harris heyday of New Atheism.
And well… they are very…shall we say… motivated.
So they are very into arguing visciously with you folks, gaining “converts,” and saving you from yourselves so to speak… And in many ways the conceive of themselves as a movement of some sort.
Well that’s all well and good…except there are a lot of atheists (myself included), who think of themselves more like Neil Degrasse Tyson does —>
youtube.com/watch?v=CzSMC5rWvos
And i think the difference between the two groups comes down to the fact that the recent “crop” of New Atheists are well…
rejectors of religion - and specifically Christianity. So you have all these people who at some particular point in time where active members of some Church group and learned certain behaviorial patterns…which they carried with them even after exiting the religion.
I would make the analogy of a Computer Operating system that once hosted “Christianity.exe” but now hosts “Atheism.exe”… Program may have changed the Operating System is still the same.
So yeah…Those people are really into dissecting things like the Bible or the Koran et al because the refutation of religious belief is a prime motivating factor in their lives.
For most other atheists…Meh.
My own motivation is simple - i visit Catholic Answers,
Ummah.Org, and all other religious websites out of sociological curiousity.
I’m not sure if we’re really all that familiar with paganism,
let me amend my statement then.
Perhaps… familiar with a caricature of paganism?
