FBXL Social

Only replying because this piqued my historical interest:

Aztecs had routine ritual wars where they'd go to war with client states or rival states in order to kidnap people for the purpose of their religious sacrifices. They'd capture such people alive so they could engage in routine murderous rituals in order to keep the sun coming up another day. It's one of the reasons the Spanish had such an easy time conquering the continent, because everyone was like "Oh, your Christian God doesn't ask for human sacrifices? I'm in."

Another good example would be the Assyrian Empire, which was famously brutal, based on their religious ideology which essentially made their king the instrument of the God of War and only doing their religious duty if they were brutally massacring outsiders -- not just defeating them, but being truly brutal such as forcing their enemies to grind the bones of their dead women and children and bragging about it on their carvings. In the end, the rest of Mesopotamia put their grudges aside for the sole purpose of wiping the Assyrians off the map. Some of the Assyrian actions would be considered genocide by the current definitions of such things, including mass killings. The destruction of Elam was absolutely brutal, and they relished their eradication of a people and their gods. While this is from the region from which Abrahamic religion would be codified, at this time they worshipped patron deities of particular cities and while the beginnings of that genealogy of faiths was starting to exist, it wasn't related to the Assyrians who were still engaged in the pre-axial age polytheistic fear-based religions.

One hypothesized reason for the total erase of the Minoan civilization during the bronze age collapse despite their advanced culture and large range of influence was that they practiced human sacrifices and the various tribes which were expected to provide human sacrifices as tribute. Under this hypothesis, when the various factors caused the collapse of the Minoan civilization, the people who fled from there refused to keep learning to read and write because those were tools for atrocity and so the only relic of the civilization was an ancient story of the golden fleece.

Two other examples would be ancient Egyptians who were already ancient at the time of the Assyrians, and the ancient Chinese (particularly the Shang dynasty), both of whom would bury entire retunes with their dead in the religious hopes that in the next life the powerful would have their servants.

As I understand it, ancient Hindu kings would also engage in ritualized warfare which would kill people.

Different religions had different purposes. Ancient religions were for dealing with the randomness and fear of a world ancient humanity had no tools to understand, and one of the ways of dealing with stress like that is trying to bargain with the primal powers of the world, sometimes by throwing a piece of meat to the tiger in the form of a human sacrifice.

Later religions tried something new, because the Axial age had a requirement that humans deal with routinely interacting with people beyond dunbar's number, but abrahamic religions would of course still have those fear-based attributes because a historical Abraham would have lived during that age of fear-based religions.

One final note about religions is that a religion without teeth dies, so some aspect of violence or sacrifice must remain. I like to use the example of Christianity in North Africa -- it was a soft and fluffy religion, and was wiped out by the spread of the Islamic caliphate as it spread from the Arabian Peninsula. Western Europe survived in part because it wasn't just soft and fluffy, it also had the strength of Nordic and Germanic warrior cultures and old pagan religions that are a bit spiky. Hindu religion had an incredibly powerful culture, but at its most decadent around the 9th century, India was conquered by the Muslims very successfully despite being outnumbered 100 to 1.

You are correct, the minotaur and the golden fleece are different stories, I mixed them up. It was Theseus who brought down the minotaur, not Jason. Oops.

One of the innovations in archaeology in the 19th century was considering that some parts of the old myths could be literally true in ways the fantastical elements could hide from our modernist eyes, so sites that were buried like the original city of Troy was found, and also the whole minoan civilization, and there are photos and videos showing the buildings with (what I assume are restored) artwork including bulls everywhere. Apparently their palaces were giant and maze-like for the day. In some ways myths can be like a multi-millennia old jpeg -- it has a lot of junk from the mythic compression, but still shows a real picture if you zoom out somewhat.

It's one of the things that makes me say we can't just totally disregard myth, because it might not be telling us things that are in forms we understand directly, but it is often telling us things that are nonetheless true in different respects, and not just about the sites of ancient battles.

In my lifetime I really want to get to Europe to see some of those sites myself.

I think a lot of what the author said can be true as well as what I said.

Post

I think you're smooshing together three ideas: ritualized warfare or sacrifice, spreading the influence of a particular religion through warfare, and spreading a particular religion to all the conquered peoples.

For ritualized warfare or sacrifice, you don't necessarily need the victims to believe what you believe, you just need them to die or be conquered. "I don't need you to believe, I just need you to die."

Back during bronze age Mesopotamia, every city has its own patron deity, and it it wasn't typical for religion to be spread through warfare per se.

Even much later during the Islamic conquest around the 7-8th century, the Islamic caliphate was grown through warfare, but in fact Islam was a religion of the ruling class and because Muslims were exempt from certain taxes, and were given additional protections by the religion and so it was contrary to the interests of the ruling class to have the ruled follow the same God.

So for this second thing, it's "I don't need you to believe, I just need to be your King who believes"

It really wasn't until the axial age monotheistic religions and particularly much later Christendom that you wanted everyone to necessarily join your particular religion, likely because it stopped being a way to feel in control of a world that's too random to fully understand and became a social code for people to agree on and live by to reduce the stress of having to deal with a bunch of people you don't know in big civilizations. In the East, multiple religions often coexist because they each were compatible with one another and provided something important, such as imperial China balancing Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, so monotheism isn't necessarily mandatory for the axial age social technologies to work, it just happened that a particular strain ended up highly successful in the West. Essentially, "I need you to believe what I believe, but you can believe other stuff too."

Judaism really didn't want converts per se, but it did demand exclusivity for those who did believe. It was a regional religion for people of a certain bloodline. Some people did convert, but it was never an evangelical religion even being Abrahamic. Christianity's innovation was opening the faith to anyone who was willing to convert, combined with the enforced monotheism of Judaism (or to be more accurate, the precursor to Judaism from around 0 BC). The combination of the two did make it a lot more aggressive than the polytheistic faiths that preceded it.

So in this final form which Islam also inherits, it's "I need you to believe what I believe, and nothing else"

"Whataboutery" for you is the main course for me. The history is more interesting than the specific theological debate.

If my understanding of history is wrong, well that sucks I'll have to study harder.