Christians are always asking themselves, “What would Jesus do?” though there is no real evidence they ever answer the question; perhaps because they don’t want to know. It would likely oppose what they’re so eager to do.

How often do I ask myself, in a similar vein, “What would my ancestors do?” It’s a question that is bound to come up among those who adhere more strongly to historical standards in the reconstruction and revival of ancient religions. We tend to be very ancestor oriented and traditional minded, even as those traditions are being reconstructed and reinterpreted in light of the passing of a thousand years or more.

Of course, I’m not a reconstructionist but a revivalist, if I must take a label. Heathen reconstructionists are no more able to reconstruct the past than Christian reconstructionists. The main reason is that it’s gone and past. Many centuries have passed and the world has changed.

That’s just my opinion and you’re welcome to challenge it. I know there are some pretty strict reconstructionists out there. But look at the context of the past for starters. The climate has changed – twice in some cases, perhaps more if you go back far enough. We’ve had a Little Ice Age and a global warming periods and now an upward trend in temperatures that make a solid case for anthropogenic global warming.

In that respect alone the world is different. Some ways of living will be more or less difficult as a result. Whales are on the decline and protected and my Norse ancestors loved to hunt whale.

The world has also gotten smaller. Communications and technology have changed everything. The three-tiered universe has been discounted. There may still be people who believe the gods are up and the dead below and we humans are in the middle. I suppose a case can be made in a metaphysical sense that there are other ways to look at this point, or maybe multi-dimensional physics could take care of it.

We mostly live in larger communities. We’re not isolated by geography and climate. There is no place we can’t go, no influence we can entirely avoid. Things just aren’t the same.

We can’t even raid monasteries anymore. But then, on the flip side, those Christian reconstructionists, though they might want to, can’t burn us at the stake or pour molten metal down our throats to make us convert either, so there are some trade-offs I can live with.

But my point in all this is to say that I can say, “What would my ancestors do?” in a given situation except that the situation in question would probably never have arisen in my ancestor’s world and he would be ill-equipped to deal with it now, were he here.

We have no idea how our ancestors would have coped with some of the changes of the past ten to twenty centuries. We can try to imagine but there is simply no telling, not with any degree of certainty.

That’s not to say we should just throw up our hands and surrender to a world culture. We have our gods and we have our beliefs and we treasure the wisdom passed down to us by our ancestors. Across the centuries, they have something to tell us, some important things.

Like honor and ancestry, like family and clan, like courage and moderation.  Some of these things are timeless and will serve us as well as they served them. Our ancestors were a pragmatic lot, not given to violent swings of ideological or religious fervor. You might get outlawed like Hjalti Skeggjason, a proponent of Iceland’s conversion, for calling Freyja a bitch, but you wouldn’t get hounded into death and long-term persecution because you refused to abandon Christianity. The Norse ruled in Ireland and Norway and other places without forcing everyone to become Heathens like them.

Historical lessons like this tell us something about what our attitudes towards other religions should be. Respect and honor our gods and defend that honor, but do not impose your beliefs on others. There are other lessons we can learn, which give us some clue as to how our ancestors might respond today. For example, our Heathen ancestors practiced exposure of infants. It might be suggested from this that they would be pro-choice. It seems a reasonable assumption, since they themselves practiced what might be termed abortions after the fact.

But our ancestors also engaged in violent feuds and held entire families accountable for the actions of a single member. These are things most of us would likely not do today. In a small, isolated community such a practice might make sense. It kept social order by forcing clans to police its own. But in today’s world it makes no sense, and most governments discourage feuds. We have laws and courts for such things. So that would be an entirely wrong lesson to learn. My ancestor might draw his sword and kill the man who insulted him. I would not want to do that.

Sometimes you have to ignore the little ancestor on your shoulder. Sometimes you would do well to listen.

But that is largely why I am a revivalist. Our customs and traditions are important, but they must make sense in the context of the 21^st century, not the first or the seventh or the ninth. Even the Amish, isolated as they make themselves, have to abide by the law, and those who oppose being bound by the Ten Commandments or Sharia Law would do well to avoid proposing the enforcement of old Pagan law codes.

So ask yourself what your ancestor would do, but keep in mind when he answers that this is the 21st century America (or wherever) and not 9th century Norway, and if somebody tries to tell you what Jesus would do, remind them that this is 21st century America and not first century Judaea, the Romans are not our overlords and that neither of you are Second Temple Jews.

My new post is up on Pagan+Politics. See it here.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that made me laugh. It said, in bright readable letters: “God is Pro-Life.”

Really? I thought.

What are we supposed to go by? This assertion, so often made by the would-be moral police on the Religious Right? Or the assertions supposedly made by God himself and his followers and preserved in the pages of the Bible?

The Bible is supposed to be the inerrant word of God after all, and there is some pretty anti-life stuff in there. As religioustolerance.org summarizes, “These include religiously-motivated genocide, stoning non-virgin brides to death, burning some hookers alive, treating women as property, etc.”

I mean, nasty stuff. Not pro-life at all. Since we can’t ask God and the prophet business has dried up over the past few thousand years, let’s do the next best thing and flip through the Bible.

Things don’t begin well for the pro-life argument. Ezekiel 34:31 states:

“And ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God, saith the Lord GOD.”

Yes, only Jews are human to YHWH. The Nations (Gentiles) – in a word, everyone else – are beasts. You remember what Jesus said about them, don’t you? Swine and dogs.

Now of course, the situation is complicated by the fact of three competing monotheisms, all claiming to be descended from Abraham.  Everyone knows the Jewish “Chosen People” spiel but there seems to be a lot of that going around.

Muslims point to Genesis 15:18 as proof that they got the prized covenant from Abraham via Abraham’s firstborn child Ishmael, son of Abraham and his second wife, Hagar. The Jewish claim rests on the assertion that God passed the covenant on to Isaac (Genesis 17:19-21), the son Abraham and main wife, Sarah. And of course, Christians believe it passed on to them via Jesus.

Which would be fine, but apparently this covenant is exclusive property. They can’t all have it.

And they hate each other for it. We’re used now to Christian attacks on Mohammed but in the Talmud, both Jesus and Mohammed are “dead dogs.” America’s Talibangelicals seem to hate Islam with the same fervor they once reserved for Judaism.

The result is the followers of the “god of love” have as much hate as the god they worship. If we judge the tree by its fruit, it’s clear that the god of love is no such thing. It is also clear that his stance is anything but pro-life.

Let’s climb up and look at the tree some more.

We don’t have to look far:

Exodus (22:20): “Whoever sacrifices to any god, save to the LORD only, shall be utterly destroyed.”

Ouch. Yeah, not so much pro-life.

And it’s not like Jesus steered away from this platform. Yes, old YHWH said you should hate your enemies (after all, he did) and Jesus said to love them, but for both the end-time scenario was the same.

Everyone else has gotta go. Off the planet.

It’s no wonder Christian conservatives feel comfortable saying the US is by and for Christians. That’s actually a step down from their God’s platform. Maybe we should be grateful they’re being so moderate.

It is really difficult to find this god who is pro-life in the pages of the Bible. It’s filled with atrocity after atrocity and many of them at God’s own command. It’s no wonder it has sometimes been called one long hate speech.

Look at Numbers 31:17, concerning the Midianites:

Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

The god of human sexual trafficking.

Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

This is not very pro-life. It obviously means everyone who doesn’t follow YHWH needs to be killed.

Deuteronomy 32:9-43 is white hot in its opposition to non-believers, as is Deuteronomy 13:6-10:

If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son, or your daughter, or the wife of your bosom, or your friend who is as your own soul, entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods…you shall kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.’

Is this pro-life?:

“If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. they must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads” (Leviticus 20:13).

And then there is always the pesky issue of human sacrifice. Can a pro-life god demand babies be sacrificed to him?

Exodus 22.29 literally, YHWH demanded human sacrifice as well: that of the first-born son:

Do not hold back offerings from your granaries or your vats. You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.

Ezekiel (20.26) certainly takes God’s command literally:

“I let them become defiled through their gifts – the sacrifice of every firstborn – that I might fill them with horrors so they would know that I am the LORD.”

The ever-reviled Baal and Moloch have nothing on this guy.

Of course, some apologists claim that this was not literally sacrifice but only consecration. Problems arise, however, when we see for example how in 2 Kings 21.6 King Manasseh “sacrificed his own son to the fire.”

And Levicitus (27.28-29) makes clear this is sacrifice, not consecration:

But nothing that a man owns and devotes to the LORD – whether man or animal or family land – may be sold or redeemed; everything so devoted is most holy to the LORD. No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; he must be put to death.

Then there is story of Jephthah, one of the Judges of Israel who lived in the time before the first king, who in fulfillment of a vow sacrificed his own daughter to God (Judges 11:29-39).

Did Jesus really change anything? No, not really.

(Luke 19:27):

“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them before me.”

Luke 14:26:

If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

The Bible has been used to support and justify all kinds of hate and intolerance and violence. Yes, the Bible gets misused and abused and misquoted and taken out of context but the ideas of hate are there; they are not invented. The hate is there and those who follow the Bible get as riled up by God’s speeches as people once did by Hitler’s.

But making statements like the one found on that bumper sticker is not based on any biblical evidence that I can find.  Saying it doesn’t make it so, however convenient the wish might be for the so-called pro-life movement (otherwise known as the anti-mother movement) and taking it upon oneself to speak for “God” seems a risky undertaking.

The arguments used to advance this pro-life point of view are weak and general: Nehemiah 9:6 that God gives life to everything; Job 12:10 that God’s hand is in the life of every creature; Deuteronomy 30:19-20 where God tells the Jews to choose life over death. The argument that because God creates life he is pro-life is a weak one. He obviously also created death and later, we are to believe, sent his own son to be killed. And while Deuteronomy is used to promote the pro-life cause, as we have seen above just a couple passages later God is expounding a very pro-death point of view (Deuteronomy 32:9-43). The most mis-used passage relates to a very special person, and not to all people. That is Jeremiah 1:4-5: The word of the LORD came to me, saying, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” A very special case, said nowhere to apply to humankind generally. In fact, it is a unique statement in the Bible.

You want abortion examples from the Bible? Hosea 9:11-16; Hosea 13:16; Numbers 5:11-21; Numbers 31:17; 2 Kings 15:16. You want the murder of infants? 1 Samuel 15:3; Psalms 135:8, 136:10; Psalms 137:9.

It would be more accurate for the bumper sticker to read: “God is anti-life” because if there is one thing God seems to love in the Old Testament, it’s murdering babies, inside and outside the womb.

INTRODUCTION

The gay/lesbian rights movement has been called the civil rights issue of the new millennium. Conservative Christian groups oppose granting the gay-lesbian community the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and they do so on the basis of a black and white moralistic dichotomy. Some Pagan groups do as well. I will argue here that opposition to gay and lesbian rights on a historical basis is misguided and – where not influenced by Judeo-Christian understanding of morality – is based on modern ideas of gender roles and categories. Homosexuality has not been universally seen as immoral; it has not even always been seen as homosexuality. As often happens, the truth is much more complex than the simple black and white model offered modern Western audiences.

We claim to live in an enlightened age yet we are trapped by our own understanding of gender roles and categories. We are brought up to believe that there are boys and there are girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. And there is nothing in between and it is obvious how the pieces are supposed to go together. And no surprise: we are brought up to see the world in this way.

But it is not the only way; other cultures and other ages have different ideas and understandings. In the industrialized West we determine gender categories based on plumbing. We don’t base these categories on gender roles; instead, gender roles have for a long time been determined by gender categories: men fight and hunt; women engage in domestic duties.

Likewise, if a boy makes love to a boy, it is homosexuality. You thus have a category called “homosexual” – those who engage in same-sex sexual relations. Both participants are labeled as homosexuals.

But homosexuality, few people realize, is a modern concept. The pathology of the 19^th century created the category from the male/female conceptualized as abnormal.[1] Ancient ideas about sex and sexuality are far more ambiguous.[2]

To claim therefore that modern distinctions and prejudices are simply continuances of ancient Pagan feeling on the subject is to misstate the case. As Marilyn Katz puts it, “the nineteenth-century notion of sexual pathology was unknown to antiquity.” As she goes on to say, “[T]here is a radical discontinuity between the ancient and modern discourses on sexuality.”[3]

This is a point upon which modern Pagans would do well to ponder. Will we appeal to the past, or to the present, or will we find our own way? And if we appeal to the past we must have a care that we do not impose our own prejudices on our interpretation of history. As Beate Wagner-Hasel observed in 1989, the debate over the status of women in ancient Greece “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”[4]

Archaeologist Joan Breton-Connelly speaks of “presentist” assumptions – arguments based on or colored by “late twentieth -century political sensibilities.”[5] With regard to genders as “fixed” categories Breton-Connelly appeals to Judith Butler’s questioning of “woman” as a fixed category in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) in which she “exposes the ways in which traditional feminist constructs decontextualize individuals from their historical, political, and cultural settings and identities.”[6] The same can be said of homosexuals as a fixed category.

OTHER PARADIGMS

But what if gender was based on gender roles instead of plumbing?

Take for example my own Norse ancestors. While a boy might be born with male sex organs, that simple fact did not in itself make him a man. Gender categories were not fixed and manhood was something that had to be earned – and maintained – through the activities normally associated with that gender category. This meant that while a boy and his penis could aspire to manhood, so could a woman. By laying aside one set of gender roles and embracing another, a woman could become a man. Conversely, a man could become a woman.

Critics – many of them Christian – and Western – say “you confuse gender roles with gender categories.” The answer to this claim is that such a viewpoint is ethnocentric and of little help in understanding the complex nature of gender issues both temporally and spatially.

“This is a world in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman,” writes one scholar.[7] It was “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.” Because women had no theoretical ceiling and men no theoretical floor, gender categories were flexible and movable.[8]

Like the Norse, the Romans and Greeks lacked a modern understanding of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Once again, it was not what a Roman “was” but what a Roman “did” that determined things. A Roman male was supposed to be a penetrator, the “active” partner in sexual activity. It was manly to penetrate; it was feminine to be penetrated.

The poet Horace put it thusly:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

As one author puts it, for a free male citizen of Rome “to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned.”[9]

The Norse understood things in the same terms. “Anal penetration constructed the man who experienced it as whore, bride, mare, bitch, and the like – in whatever guise a female creature.”[10]

To put it bluntly: A hole was a hole was a hole, and quite literally, since the Roman word “vagina” (which means sword-sheath) applied equally to vagina and anus and certain Norse words served the same dual purpose.[11]

The evidence suggests that for the Norseman’s “character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to week, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser.”[12]

To be called a man was the highest compliment a man could pay a “woman,” as we see in Laxdaela Saga when Snorri of Helgafell says of Gudrun the Fair, “Now you can see what a man Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

To be a man was to be hvatur – bold, active, and vigorous – and this was to be admired, whatever sort of plumbing you had. Likewise, to be blauður – soft and weak – was to be despised, whatever sort of plumbing you had.[13]

CONCLUSIONS

In our world of assumed certainty, things are far less certain than we like to pretend. As it turns out, gender roles and categories are nebulous, shifting things. In the end, they are what we say they are from age to age and culture to culture. We decide man = x and woman = y but x and y are neither fixed nor universal.

The moralizers in some ancient pre-Christian societies decided that men were penetrators and women were penetrated. The old ditty about Caesar demonstrates this, that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.” In contrast to today’s paradigm, by sodomizing another man Caesar would not be seen as effeminate; but being sodomized was another matter altogether.

Christian moralizers, following Jewish Law, presented the Western world with a new paradigm: Not only did men “insert” and women “receive,” but men could only be insertive with regards to women and women could only be recipients of men. Any toying with this equation was an abomination that had unhappy results for all concerned. And the derision of your fellows (in Pagan cultures) and a relatively quick death (in Judaism) was replaced in Christianity by an eternity of hellfire.[14]

And so it remains today.[15]

Except that these distinctions are all artificial. In mathematics numbers added to or subtracted from other numbers have certain, unchangeable results. But nature – and life – don’t work that way. There is homosexuality in the natural world outside of the human species – or at least we label it as such (we can’t possibly know how the animals involved would think of it).[16]

It is the human-imposed synthetic categories of “moral” and “immoral,” “normal” and “abnormal” that is unnatural. They are not universal; they are not constant and unchanging. They are what we say they are. And if we want, we can say they are something else. The irony is, for the West, that it is a religion that distances itself from nature that has decided for us what is and is not natural.

Some Pagan moralizers sound like conservative Christians; they like to say that homosexuality is immoral but they have forgotten to change their moral filters. For a reconstructionist religion making this determination isn’t reconstructing the past; its imposing modern prejudices on their model of the past (which had an entirely different set of prejudices).

On reconstructionist grounds alone, there is no basis for 21^st century ideas about gender roles and categories; you cannot reconstruct what did not exist. It seems the pathology of the 19^th century can capture those who escape the clutches of Judeo-Christian moralizing.

The monolithic and universal category of male/female is a myth, the determinants differing for every culture and/or religion. For one group to say “our way is the True way” is not only arrogant but wrong-minded. Just as every ethnic group or culture has a religion that is true for it (true because it works) so every culture has gender roles that work for it. We may not approve of them, but then, who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong? Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you feel about it.

Once we start imposing our particular views, once we start categorizing our local views as universal, we open ourselves up to a world where might makes right, where the dominant culture (which in recent centuries has been Western and Christian) determines in a blatantly ethnocentric manner what is right for everyone: this is what a woman is, this is what a man is. These are the rules permissible for men and women; conform or die.

But ancient Church Councils aside, universal truths are not attainable by popular vote. One book, developing out of one culture and society (and religion) no matter how popular, cannot dictate for everyone what determines gender roles and categories. Such an understanding is only one out of many thousands of possibilities.

If we are going to come to a new understanding of these matters, we have to set aside our arrogance and our ethnocentrism; we need a new paradigm…and a new discussion.

---

[1] Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and ‘The Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 92. With regard to “homosexual” or “gay/lesbian,” and the effect of using one term over another see Steve Williams, “Gay and Lesbian or Homosexual? What’s in a Word?” http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/gay-and-lesbian-or-homosexual-does-it-matter/

[2] See Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (Continuum, 2009), 84-86 for a discussion of views of “homosexuality”in the Roman world.

[3] Katz (1992), 92.

[4] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 2 (1989), 19.

[5] Joan Breton-Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.

[6] Breton-Connelly (2007), 22.

[7] Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993), 372.

[8] Clover (1993), 380.

[9] Anthony Everitt, Augustus (Random House, 2006), 149.

[10] Clover (1993), 375.

[11] Clover (1993), 378.

[12] Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), 74.

[13] Brown (2007), 74.

[14] And in Uganda, with the support of extremist American Evangelicals, we are seeing the return of the death penalty for homosexuality. See “Human Rights Impact Assessment of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill,” The Zeleza Post, January 17, 2010 http://www.moveon.org/r?r=86439&id=18903-6770804-EYlalox&t=5

[15] See the discussion at ReligiousTolerance.org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_legis.htm

[16] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5550488/Homosexual-behaviour-widespread-in-animals-according-to-new-study.html

(This is a continuation of my debate with Scholar, begun two posts ago – “The Myopic Christian” – Hrafnkell)

You wrote “I spoke specifically of Mr. Douthat and those who think like him – there was no blanket condemnation of Christians made or implied” and “As for specific Christians and/or groups of Christians, I identify these when addressing the topic in question”. You ought to read your post again because you have not identified specific groups of Christians in your post; you write about one particular Christian and then proceed to speak of “Christians” as though to imply a unity. You do, indeed – in the post that I commented on – imply that Christians as a whole are intolerant.

I think it’s quite clear from the context who I was speaking of. To the extent I was unclear, I apologize. If you are a all familiar with my blog, you will have seen me say often enough that I do not include all Christians. I have said many times that my own family is Christian and I have the utmost respect for their toleration of other forms of belief. But you enter onto the stage, apparently unacquainted with me at all, and presume to know me. You don’t.

You wrote “Indeed, I carefully cite my sources when I write”. I missed the source that you cited when you proclaimed what “Christians” would say and that “Christians” initiate conversations about religion. Nowhere did you say that you were writing only about Christians who think like Mr. Douthat.

Would you like me to cite every personal encounter I’ve ever had with a Christian? I happily invite every Pagan who drops by to comment upon their own experiences. I can guarantee you they won’t be any different than mine.

You wrote “I’m sorry, but this won’t do. This is an old excuse and I’m quite frankly tired of seeing it trotted out. The crimes committed by Christianity since the fourth century cannot be wished away by simply waving a magic wand…” Indeed, this won’t do – I did not say (and here you are putting words in my mouth) that Christians have not committed atrocities. Clearly they have. No need to elaborate. I was referring to Christians now, not Christians then. (But I think that you have difficulty differentiating…).

Not trouble differentiating at all. I was quite clear in pointing out that these crimes continue today in the form of cultural genocide. The basic premise of Christianity is one of intolerance. There is a difference between that and what individual Christians think and do, but as I made clear, the religion is itself intolerant by its very nature – as are Judaism and Islam, both being monotheisms.

Please see (in no particular order): Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History (Morning Star Books, 1995), 136 n. 103. Ellerbe’s position is that the Christian legacy fosters sexism, racism, and intolerance; Karen Armstrong, The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity’s Creation of the Sex War in the West,” (Elm Tree Books, 1986). Armstrong condemns what she calls “Christian sexual neurosis” and argues that Christianity’s traditional hatred of women and of the body still cripples woman’s self-image today;  H.A. Drake, “Lambs into Lions: Explaining Early Christian Intolerance,” Past and Present 153 (1996), H.A. Drake argues that Christianity is not inherently intolerant while making allowance for a certain level of intolerance endemic to monotheism in general; David Lochhead “Monotheistic Violence” Buddhist-Christian Studies 21 (2001); Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997); R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed., The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006); Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (University of California Press, 2005); Charles Freeman, A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans, and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State (The Overlook Press, 2009); Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Harvard University Press, 1997);  Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Let’s try a little test, shall we?  We’ll play “Who’s God is It?” (and remember, these passages are are part of Christian SCRIPTURE – the word of God, and these scriptures are spouted every Sunday in churches across the world and nobody bats an eye:

The virulent hatred and intolerance of monotheism for polytheism is astounding.  See YHWH’s threats espoused at Lev 26.14-17; they are enough to chill anyone’s blood. As R. Joseph Hoffman observes, the God of Abraham “has always threatened vengeance of cosmic proportions for not keeping his laws…The Abrahamic god must be understood in terms of two words: exclusivity and judgment.”[1] Schwartz notes the manner in which the biblical narrative paints “inclinations toward polytheism” as “sexual infidelity” and how Israel itself “is castigated for ‘whoring after’ other gods, thereby imperiling her ‘purity.’” The land itself must be kept clean “or its inhabitants will be ejected, ‘vomited’ out of the land…when Israel is not monotheistic, it is filthy and it pollutes the land” (Lev 20.22-25). When Israel worships a foreign deity, she is a harlot, the land is made barren, and she is ejected from the land” (Jer 3.2-3).[2] The God of monotheism is made the “True” God and the “gods” of polytheism are false. The result, when the opportunity offered, was slaughter, pure and simple. See as examples, 2 Kings 23:20-25 and Deuteronomy 13:13-18 for chilling examples of what happened to those as, George Carlin has put it, “gave the wrong answer to the God question.”

You wrote “you won’t find any such list of polytheistic intolerance”. Wrong and wrong. There is plenty of indication of Roman intolerance (despite your careful waving away of it with the magic wand of “Christian bias”). Read Josephus for some of the description of Roman treatment of the “Other”. Consider the Chanadala and associated groups trampeled by Hindu society… I am sure that if you were interested in having a real ecumenical view you would investigate the dark sides of polytheism as well.

You haven’t even begun to advance an argument. I give you a list many pages long citing specific, documented examples, and you throw a vague reference to Judaism at me and a comment about Hindus (I’ll give you some Josephus in a moment).

As I said, there is a vast gulf of difference between finding the notions of a religious group (or even its practices) ridiculous, abhorrent, foolish, or what have you, and actually putting an end to those practices. I think Christianity is a ridiculous religion – it offers nothing new, nothing original – but I don’t deny your right to practice it.

The Romans did not oppose the Druids so much because of human sacrifice but because the Druids were at the center of resistance against Rome. That was their crime – they threatened the peace of the province (Gaul, and later, Britain). I’ve read Josephus many times over. Do you want a list of all the nice accommodations the Romans came to for Judaism, just as one small example?

Let us take a look here at some of the concessions and privileges granted to the Jews by the Roman state (and compare and contrast, if you will, American treatment of the Native Americans in the 19^th century – a supposedly enlightened “Christian” century):

• No Quartering of Troops on the Native Population (Ant. 14.10.2 § 195). Nor did the Jews have to generally even see Roman troops, except on holidays such as Passover, when they were present in Jerusalem to keep the peace. The Roman garrison appears to have been stationed largely in Caesarea, a Greek-speaking area.[3] One might think back to the situation in the American Colonies in the days leading up to the revolt and the role quartering played on American sensibilities. This was one annoyance spared the Jewish population of Palestine.
• Tax allowances (Jews allowed to deduct out of their tribute every second year the land is let (in the Sabbatic period), a corus of that tribute (Ant. 14.10.5 §201)
• The Jews allowed to live “according to their own customs” (Ant. 14.10.8 § 214).
• Jews excused from military service by Prefect of Asia (Ant. 14.10.11-12 §§ 223-228) “on account of the superstition they are under” (Ant. 14.10.14 § 232) in other words, Sabbath restrictions on travel and fighting, etc. Note that this does not mean that Jews could not, if they wished, serve in the military, and also that it is a far cry from excluding Jews from military ranks by the Christian Roman Empire (C. Th. XVI.8.24).[4]
• Roman acquiescence of Jewish ban on images customarily observed by procurators (Ant. 18.3.1 §§ 55-56). This included the re-routing of Roman troops (no doubt at great expense) due to the Jews finding the images on the standards offensive when paraded anywhere on “Jewish” soil, as shown by the incident with Vitellius described by Josephus (Ant. 18.121-122). The Romans went so far as to omit from coins struck in Judaea “any sign or symbol that might be offensive to the religious feelings of the Jews…”[5] It is interesting to compare the coins of Herod, which while also observing the ban on images, do bear Pagan religious symbols, for example a coin of 37 BCE which portrays the tripod of Apollo and on the reverse, the Dioscuri cap topped with a star.[6]
• Augustus confirmed Jewish privileges conferred originally by Julius Caesar (Ant. 16.6.1 §§ 160-165) “that the Jews have liberty to make use of their own customs, according to the law of their forefathers” See also Philo, Leg. ad Gaium 309-319.
• The Sacred Money was not to be touched (Ant. 16.6.2 § 163) – This was violated on several occasions, including, allegedly, by Pontius Pilate (Ant. 18.3.2 § 60) and on one occasion the proconsul of Asia, L. Flaccus in 62/1 BCE confiscated the temple contributions from his province (Cicero, Flacc. 66-9) but his action was not repeated.[7] See also Ant. 16.6.3 § 166, where Augustus commands the recipient, the proconsul of Sardinia, to let the Jews “send their sacred money to Jerusalem” freely and a similar letter from Herod Agrippa to the Ephesians (Ant. 16.6.4 §§ 167-168). There is also an example from Berenice in Cyrenaica, where the local Jewish community commemorated a Roman official for his part in seeing that the sacred money was not diverted from the Temple to pay the tax levied on resident aliens.[8]
• Anyone stealing the Jewish holy books will be deemed a “sacrilegious person” and his property confiscated (Ant. 16.6.2 § 164). We have duly noted the punishment meted out to a Roman soldier (by Roman authorities) for profaning the Torah. By way of contrast, the United States is continually being accused of mishandling the Qu’ran but the US Government pretends it never happens and so far, no American soldiers have been punished.
• Exempted from participation in the imperial cult and allowed to make prayers in their own temple on behalf of the emperor (War 2.10.4 §197; Against Apion 2.7 §77) instead of to the gods in Pagan temples.[9] Philo tells us that the cost of these sacrifices was born by the Roman government and not the Jewish people (Spec. Leg. 157).
• Gentiles were not allowed into the sacred precincts of the temple (Tacitus, Histories 5.8; Josephus, War 5.193; Ant. 12.145, 15.417; cf. Philo, Leg. 212). This prohibition (of which Paul runs afoul Acts 21.28-29) has been proven by archaeological findings.[10]
• Far from persecuting the Jews, the Roman government served as their advocate: “The Romans appear at times to have chosen to put their influence behind Jewish communities in dispute with their neighbors…and did not even cease after A.D. 70.”[11] For examples, see Josephus, Ant. 14.10.12-26).
• Jews exempted from court on the Sabbath.[12]
• Claudius renewed the edict of tolerance issued by Caesar and renewed by Augustus, making it empire-wide (Ant. 19.5.3 §§286-291). The edict is not specific; Rajak argues “that Claudius is not doing much more than expressing his good will towards the practice of the Jewish cult and establishing a lead for Greek cities to follow.”[13] If, as Rajak argues, this falls short of a Jewish Magna Carta, it still illustrates the extent to which Rome permitted self-rule and represents a general good will not mirrored in Europe for the fifteen centuries following the end of Pagan rule.

It is important to note that these edicts of toleration were not general and empire wide, but seem to have been issued on a city by city basis. Though these senatus consulta were ad hoc in nature, they also served as legal precedents to which future governors and emperors could appeal. Leonard Rutgers makes an important point when he notes that “Rome did not have a standard policy toward the Jews: Roman magistrates responded to situations.”[14]

Momigliano, not along among scholars, takes note of the fact that “the members of the ruling class of Rome were ready to transact business with people who worshipped different gods and were used to different political traditions. Roman polytheism could adapt itself to, and indeed merge with, what we may call the provincial traditions.”[15] Provincial traditions = ethnic religion. Roman polytheism was itself an ethnic religion. Barriers translated.

But, it is clear that you are a thirty year reactionary against a bad experience from your youth. This is clear when you write “I speak from three decades of experience as a polytheist and before that an upbringing as a Lutheran (ELCA) – from birth to age 22″. You throw this out as some kind of claim for authority about what you are saying – and it is a common trope used by reactionaries against religions – but being raised in a tradition is no guarantee of sufficient knowledge of it. Perhaps you have sufficient knowledge, maybe you have studied Lutheran theology in depth – I don’t know; what I do know is that the claim which you make carries little weight.

Yes, right, because only your experiences as a Christian are relevant. Those of a polytheist are irrelevant. And you have yet to show that the claim I make carries little weight. In point of fact, you have offered me very little at all.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not interested only in defending Christianity. I am defending it here because you are attacking it with rather specious arguments. If you were attacking polytheism, I would be defending that. But, in your rebellion against your previous religious tradition (which was no doubt thrust upon you authoritatively) you craft your own Other against which you demonstrate very little tolerance. You contradict your own claims for polytheism.

I invite you again to show where my arguments are specious. You have yet to do so. And please, the old “saw” that it is a “rebellion” against my previous religion…Christians trot that out EVERY time. Ask any Pagan. We’ve all heard it. But it says far more about the Christian in question than it does the Pagan.

I would think that a real ecumenical position would seek to rehabilitate all religious positions to be tolerant of the Other rather than seek to brand some inherently and irremediably intolerant and therefore not worthy of regard.

Universal intolerance is a logical impossibility. We cannot be tolerant of intolerance. You have a right to believe what you believe. You do not have a right to coerce others (and I’m not saying you specifically are). But Christianity, since the fourth century, as a whole, has done so, and continues to do so. And it continues to spout hate for the “other” through recitation of biblical passages in churches and confirmation classes and Bible study meetings. The Bible itself, as I said, is one long anti-Pagan diatribe. Christianity is a religion of condemnation. It is not Pagans who seek to brand some religions as unworthy of regard, but Christianity. I recognize your God is real; can you say the same?

But you have already crafted your own vision of Christianity and have declared it to be the only viable one (and you make use of similarly ideological representations) and thus you cannot take into account any nuance that can be legitimately read in Christian scriptures.

But I have not done so. I am representing Christianity as a historical religion – one that existed then and one that exists now. Are we going down the old “Only a believer can understand the Bible?” road now? Please tell me we are, because I love that argument.

I am sure that if you read any polytheistic writings the way that you read Christian writings you would find intolerance of Others (whether or not these Others are differentiated according to religious view or according to some other criteria).

I’ll just let Jan Assmann speak here:

Does not every religion quite automatically put everything outside itself in the position of error and falsehood and look down on other religions as “paganism”? Is this not quite simply the religious expression of ethnocentricity? Does not the distinction between true and false in reality amount to nothing other than the distinction between “us” and “them”? Does not every construction of identity by the very sane process generate alterity? Does not every religion produce “pagans” in the same way that every civilization generates “barbarians”?

However plausible this may seem, it is not the case. Cultures not only generate otherness by constructing identity, but also develop techniques of translation. We have to distinguish here between the “real other,” who is always ther beyond the individual and independent of the individual’s constructions of selfhood and otherhood, and the ”constructed other,” who is the shadow of the individual’s identity…

He goes on to  argue that polytheism (which he calls cosmotheism) functioned as a means of translation between cultures, translating across cultural and ethnic barriers.

The Mosaic distinction was therefore a radically new distinction which considerably changed the world in which it was drawn. The space which was “severed or cloven” by this distinction was not simply the space of religion in general, but that of a very specific kind of religion. We may call this new type of religion “counter-religion” because it rejects and repudiates everything that went before and what is outside itself as “paganism.”It no longer functioned as a means of intercultural translation; on the contrary, it functioned as a means of intercultural estrangement…the new counter-religion blocked intercultural translatability. False gods cannot be translated.[16]

I would like you to prove that all polytheisms have been perfectly tolerant to all Others. After all, your silence suggests that you deny my claim that polytheists do not escape the dark, intolerant side of human nature.

I would like you to prove that polytheism is intolerant; prove Jan Assmann wrong. The Pope tried (Truth and Tolerance, 2004) but he failed. Maybe you can do better but you’ll have to try harder than this. You have yet to done so, unless I am expected to take your word for it, that such is the case. I’m sure you can understand in light of the mountains of scholarship to the contrary, if I decline to do so.  I have provided you with evidence; you have offered me nothing in return. The burden of proof is not on me, but on you. I have offered not only these two posts, but every post I’ve published here since 2005, and all the sources I’ve cited in that space.

I would also like to know what silence you speak of? I have answered you in some depth; I am unaware of any gulf of silence.

I have made an argument that polytheism is by its very nature tolerant. It does not construct others (as Assmann said, you must distinguish between “real” and “constructed” others. The Greeks and Romans saw people as barbarians but this was not a religious distinction. They saw an unreasoning fear of the divine as superstition, but they did not treat these people like monotheists treat Pagans.

Your final point is not even part of the equation. I have nowhere argued that polytheist do not commit crimes. Criminal activity, the “dark side of human nature” has always existed, and it exists just fine outside of the religious spectrum. And as I said, you might claim the Romans were intolerant because they laughed at Egyptian religion, but they didn’t exterminate it, did they? One guess who did? (and that answer will be the same for who exterminated Roman religion – and all other ancient religions, and indeed, every indigenous ethnic religion in Europe and the Middle East and many in Africa, South America and in other parts of the world. Just one guess Go ahead.

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[1] R. Joseph Hoffmann, ed. The Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, & Islam (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 10-11. Among this god’s enemies are, as Hoffmann identifies this group’s composition, “a blend of idolaters, foreigners, sorcerers, heretics, homosexuals, drunken sons, dismissed wives, disobedient slaves, and above all the catch-all remainder of ‘those who do not do his will.’”

[2] Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 18, 63.

[3] Maurice Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome, 103.

[4] Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Roman Policy towards the Jews: Expulsions from the City of Rome during the First Century C.E.,” Classical Antiquity 13 (1994), 58.

[5] F.W. Madden, History of Jewish Coinage (London: Bernard Quartich, 1864), 135.

[6] See David M. Jacobson, “Herod the Great Shows His True Colors,” Near Eastern Archaeology 64 (2001), 100-104. As Jacobson states in relation to the cap of the Dioscuri, “such an image might have been offensive to the Jews.”

[7] Tessa Rajak, “Was there a Roman Charter for the Jews?” JRS 74 (1984), 107; cf. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem, 399.

[8] For the example of Cyrenaica see Martha W. Baldwin Bowsky, “M. Tittius Sex.f. Aem. And the Jews of Berenice (Cyrenaica),” The American Journal of Philology 108 (1987), 495-510.

[9] It has been demonstrated that sacrifices in the Imperial Cult were generally made on behalf of rather than to the emperor. See S.R.F. Price, “Between Man and God: Sacrifice in the Roman Imperial Cult,” The Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980), 28-43. For this reason, the Jews had no difficulty accommodating the needs of the Empire just as they had in the past accommodated other foreign rulers. They simply prayed to their God to watch out for the emperor rather than to the gods of the State; the Romans, quite sensibly, were also satisfied with the arrangement since there was no rejection of YHWH implicit in polytheism. Claims that the Jews (or Christians, for that matter) were required to worship the emperor miss the mark.

[10] The warning inscriptions would have been difficult to miss: They were inscribed in Greek and Latin in red-painted letters on white limestone. Discovered by Clermont-Ganneau in 1871, the inscribed stone reads: “No foreigner may enter the forecourt beyond the barrier rail around the sanctuary; Anyone who is caught will have himself to blame for his own death.” See Elias J. Bickerman, “The Warning Inscription of Herod’s Temple,” JQR 37 (1947), 387-405. Bickerman compares similar inscriptions found at Pagan temples and notes that “The pagan visitor of the Temple however was shut out not because his hands or his heart were unclean but because he was an alien.”

[11] Rajak, 107.

[12] Jerry F. Daniel, “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,” JBL 98 (1979), 45-65.

[13] Rajak, 115.

[14] Rutgers, “Roman Policy,” 58-59.

[15] Arnaldo Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 123.

[16] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (Harvard University Press, 1997), 2-3.