Smitty-48 wrote:TheReal_ND wrote:Smitty-48 wrote:Saying that you worship Odin is like a Christian saying they worship Santa Claus, Odin in of himself, is not actually the supreme being in the universe, the Pagan Gods were more like Superheroes/Supervillains than they were Cosmic Prime Movers.
It's like how Americans have come to "worship" Superman and Batman.
It's more about reappropriating European culture but it's pretty LARPy. Best to just stick to Christianity for your cultural heritage.
Pagan Gods are essentially anthropomorphism, nature-worship expressed as persona, whereas monotheism expresses a persona, as being nature itself.
Paganism is; The Gods Are Men. Monotheism is; Man is God.
It's impossible to make that large of a generalization about the entire segment of religions that fall under Paganism. I'm sure if you asked an Egyptian that believed in their pantheon that question they would conclude that some humans are gods while some are not. Meanwhile if you ask a Greek about their pantheon, they would certainly never say a humans fall under Gods.
Whenever I read books written by the Greeks with an emphasis on the interactions between Gods and humans like the Iliad, it always seemed like their was a deviation between the natural human state and what the Gods caused the Greeks to act as. For example, there seems to be an expectation that the natural human is a logical being that weighs actions to pick the one that makes the most sense at the time. However, when supernatural (otherwise godlike) forces come into play, such as fear, anxiety, narcissism, anger, that logical scale is corrupted into creating circumstances that should have never existed.
The perfect example of this is Panduras shooting Menelaus in Book 4 of the Iliad, an action which would have perplexed the audience of Homer as well as Homer himself. The Trojans were in the losing position at the time, the only reason such an illogical action would be taken by someone is when supernatural forces cause it to happen. Thus, even to an individual that identifies as pagan, there is still a division between what is natural and what is not.
