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The Journey To...North America, Part Two
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7739440" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Both the Romans and the Greeks had the habit of assuming that all local deities where actually just their own deities under different names. Religious scholarship of the day consisted of going around studying local myths, and figuring out what 'real' deity was being honored under the local superstition. The Jewish god represented a particularly thorny problem, and it was eventually decided that the Jewish god was the Titan Typhon - the dread enemy of all the gods that wanted to drive off all the new comers. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>That's because prior to the development of Christianity (and in the East, Buddhism), there weren't really any widespread transnational religions. Prior to Christianity, there were plenty of wars being fought by one side in the name of their gods, against another side fighting in the name of their gods, but it's misleading to classify these as religious wars because to that point ethnicity, nationality, and religion were all basically one and the same. Only when you could start uniting multiple nations and ethnicities behind a single religion would you really start having religious wars because only then do you have a separate religious identity. But even before that, you have plenty of evidence of cultures in conflict because one is importing 'foreign gods' to the other as an act that is perceived as a sort of cultural hegemony and a way of subordinating and eventually assimilating a national identity. That is, if they stopped worshipping their own gods, and started worshipping their gods, pretty soon they'd no longer be a separate people. Heck, even Socrates was put on trial and sentenced to death for the crime of introducing foreign deities. </p><p></p><p>Interestingly, Rome's own native religion had been more or less completely absorbed by Greek religion, to the extent that by the Imperial era many of the gods of Rome were known to the Romans themselves only by name, and no one could say anything definite about the deity. The ritual and the station of the priest had been preserved, but even the priest couldn't tell you anything about the deity he worshipped.</p><p> </p><p>Rome didn't just have this problem of religious patriotism with the Jews though. They'd encountered basically the same problem on the other end of the empire with the Druids. And they did ultimately resolve the problem with the Druids by genocide, wiping them out so completely that we now know nothing at all of historical Druidism. There is absolutely no historical record of it other than the Romans wiping them out. Ultimately, they tried to do the same thing with the Jews when the Jews kept revolting. The Romans attempted to erase the religion and the national identity of the Jewish people, wiping them out, removing the name of their nation from the maps, and dispersing them in an attempt to utterly eliminate the identity. What I think we can presume is that this behavior was more or less normal in human prehistory. What differed is that both the Romans and the Jews had books, not only do we have records but cultures with books prove a lot harder to erase.</p><p></p><p>As for the Aztecs and the Incans, they were both closer to the Nazi end of the nationalist spectrum than the Romans were. Both were actually fairly recent empires that had arisen by conquering and enslaving their neighbors. Both were thoroughly hated by their neighbors. Both engaged in 'Hunger Games' style tributes from conquered peoples - the Aztecs on a massive scale that would in modern times be considered genocide. Both ended up collapsing when nearby conquered peoples allied with European mercenaries to overthrow their oppressors. Of course, this ended up exchanging one jackboot for another.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7739440, member: 4937"] Both the Romans and the Greeks had the habit of assuming that all local deities where actually just their own deities under different names. Religious scholarship of the day consisted of going around studying local myths, and figuring out what 'real' deity was being honored under the local superstition. The Jewish god represented a particularly thorny problem, and it was eventually decided that the Jewish god was the Titan Typhon - the dread enemy of all the gods that wanted to drive off all the new comers. That's because prior to the development of Christianity (and in the East, Buddhism), there weren't really any widespread transnational religions. Prior to Christianity, there were plenty of wars being fought by one side in the name of their gods, against another side fighting in the name of their gods, but it's misleading to classify these as religious wars because to that point ethnicity, nationality, and religion were all basically one and the same. Only when you could start uniting multiple nations and ethnicities behind a single religion would you really start having religious wars because only then do you have a separate religious identity. But even before that, you have plenty of evidence of cultures in conflict because one is importing 'foreign gods' to the other as an act that is perceived as a sort of cultural hegemony and a way of subordinating and eventually assimilating a national identity. That is, if they stopped worshipping their own gods, and started worshipping their gods, pretty soon they'd no longer be a separate people. Heck, even Socrates was put on trial and sentenced to death for the crime of introducing foreign deities. Interestingly, Rome's own native religion had been more or less completely absorbed by Greek religion, to the extent that by the Imperial era many of the gods of Rome were known to the Romans themselves only by name, and no one could say anything definite about the deity. The ritual and the station of the priest had been preserved, but even the priest couldn't tell you anything about the deity he worshipped. Rome didn't just have this problem of religious patriotism with the Jews though. They'd encountered basically the same problem on the other end of the empire with the Druids. And they did ultimately resolve the problem with the Druids by genocide, wiping them out so completely that we now know nothing at all of historical Druidism. There is absolutely no historical record of it other than the Romans wiping them out. Ultimately, they tried to do the same thing with the Jews when the Jews kept revolting. The Romans attempted to erase the religion and the national identity of the Jewish people, wiping them out, removing the name of their nation from the maps, and dispersing them in an attempt to utterly eliminate the identity. What I think we can presume is that this behavior was more or less normal in human prehistory. What differed is that both the Romans and the Jews had books, not only do we have records but cultures with books prove a lot harder to erase. As for the Aztecs and the Incans, they were both closer to the Nazi end of the nationalist spectrum than the Romans were. Both were actually fairly recent empires that had arisen by conquering and enslaving their neighbors. Both were thoroughly hated by their neighbors. Both engaged in 'Hunger Games' style tributes from conquered peoples - the Aztecs on a massive scale that would in modern times be considered genocide. Both ended up collapsing when nearby conquered peoples allied with European mercenaries to overthrow their oppressors. Of course, this ended up exchanging one jackboot for another. [/QUOTE]
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