Why not convert to Syncretic polytheism or just good old Hellenic Polytheism?>Prometheus and Dionysus made everyone cis het and LGBTQI>no original sin, instead your soul is a fragment of Zagreus and all humans have good in them>Tartarus exists as does Hades and Elysium but most people go though reincarnation cycles>no racism, skin color just reflects distance from the equator and that time Helios' chariot got too close to Earth. >still have rules but its mostly about being a good person to those around you and respecting the Gods
>>18391229>why not LARP with some bullshit people gave up 2000 years agoIdk, because I'm not autistic?
>>18391229You can't convert to a religion whose theology was lost or intentionally destroyed 1500 years ago.Its over, bro.
>>18391276This is a lie. We have a wealth of firsthand sources on Hellenism that predate the Christianization of Rome and many of that predate the Christianization of Rome and many of which predate even Christianity itself such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns, Theogony, Works and Days, the Shield of Heracles, Prometheus Bound, Medea, Oedipus Rex, the Bacchae, Timaeus, the Argonautica, the Greek Magical Papyri, De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, the Aeneid, the Fasti, the Metamorphoses, the Thebaid, the Achilleid, the Bibliotheca, the Fabulae, the Golden Ass, the Enneads, the Isagoge, the Posthomerica, the Orphic Hymns, the Orphic Argonautica, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, the Elements of Theology, On the Gods and the World, the Dionysiaca, etc. Sure, certain texts were lost such as the Chaldean oracles and Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum, but enough sources survive that we know the core beliefs and practices of the Greeks and Romans (and even regarding the lost texts, we know most of their contents via summaries and quotations in other surviving works).
>>18391236SEEENIIIOOOR!
>>18391298Honestly the only stuff we really know that we are missing are the rest of the Homeric (Troy) poems and pre Homeric Hellenism. So much survived compared to most other faiths hunted to the edges of society
>>18391298Honestly the only stuff we really know that we are missing are the rest of the Homeric (Troy) poems and pre Homeric Hellenism. So much survived compared to most other faiths hunted to the edges of society >>18391236There were still polytheist schools open until Justinian and the last known one from the Byzantine empire survived it albeit in secret
>>18391298You have lore, not ritual. Those are different things. Knowing about Jesus and the disciples won't teach you how to pray or how a Christian Church works. No one knows how actual Greco-Roman religious practice was performed.
>>18391525Libations, animal sacrifice, incense burning?We have hymns lmao
>>18391525We do actually. They made daily offerings of grapes, bread, milk, wine, and honey among other things. They would recite hymns such as that of the Orphic and Homeric Hymns. When praying, they would:>Wash their hands before praying to purify themselves. >When praying to Ouranic (sky) deities, they would stand with their hands raised to the sky. When praying to Chthonic (underworld) deities, they would kneel with their hands to the ground. >They would address a deity by their specific titles or epithets, remind them of favors that they have done for the deity and that the deity has done for them, and then state their request to the deity.>They would make an offering and give thanks to the deity.None of this is lost knowledge, we have detailed ritual instructions from their texts. The only things that are lost are the mystery cults and remember, the mystery cults were never intended to be public religions for the masses or for their practices and beliefs to even be public knowledge.
>>18391236FPBP
>>18391229sounds like a larp t bh
All polytheists burn in hell
>>18391229Because the reason anybody gives up Christianity is because they stop believing in the existence of gods entirely. There's no point in following an equally false religion.It serves as a foundation for society only when people actually believe it's real. But so long as people remain educated (which is essential to the modern world) they will be athiests.
>>18391229The greek and roman religion as you think of it was basically dead centuries before christianity even came about, replaced by mystery cults and religious philisophies like platonism, epicureanism, pyhtagorainism, and stoicism. The world had moved on from local thunder gods wrestling with sea serpents and raping random women to create legendary founder demigods, to religions promising universal personal salvation and knowledge of divine nature like the cult of isis. The change really happened during the hellenistic period. If you read Statius' late 1st century AD epic The Thebaid you can see a subtext of deep discomfort and even criticism of the olympian gods as capricious, pointlessly violent, and stodgy relics of the past.Compare that to the contemporaneously written gospels and book of acts which are brimming with enthusiasm and energy that the most important that has ever happened or ever will happen has just happened, and the world needs to know about it right now.
>>18391872>the most important thatThe most important event that*
>>18391833Thats not true, went to a Hindu temple as part of field trip set up by my Catholic school when I was a kid. Talked to a few people there about faith and realized immediately I didnt have to stay Catholic if I didnt believe it and then became a polytheist, it just took a few more days >>18391872Everything you listed in your first paragraph is Hellenism and polytheism you dorkYou dont even need to get to Statius the Bacchae play and many others get into people's changing perceptions of the gods>New testament Oh hahahaha you almost had me there, I thought this was anything but a dumb sales pitch.
>>18391895Its not a sales pitch.
>>18391872Nice quads but this is a late Christian piece of propaganda that flies in the face of what both pagans and early Christians said. Early Christian were extremely concerned with genuine religious devotion to the pagan gods, by both commoners and the elites, they fully believed that people not only worshipped them fervently but that there were real divine beings receiving those prayers. They explicitly said that demons were receiving pagans' sacrifices and giving them oracles, e.g. Justin Martyr around 150 AD.Pagan intellectuals explicitly defended common religious practices. Celsus' book against Christianity was a learned polemic by a Platonist, which defends the reality of the Olympian gods and figures like Heracles. Porphyry of Tyre was called the most learned of all the pagan philosophers by Augustine, and he defended public religion, consulting oracles, and so on.It's a false idea that there were was a hard dividing line between the stupid masses who believed in the gods and the elites who thought it was all nonsense. In the 2nd century AD you can see Pliny the Younger and Celsus genuinely concerned that Christians not worshipping the gods will lead to disaster as the empire would lose divine favour and social cohesion, which were inextricably intertwined in the "pagan" worldview.
>>18391960Where does pliny say this?
>>18391872Not a Christian nor a statuefag. However, it wasn't 'dead' as you put it. There were trillions of belief systems but they all participated in the same empire-wide rituals. You would believe in some Arabic god, or philosophize about stuff with the neo-Platonists but you would still have to share a public framework. Better yet you could be Statius, or a ballsier guy like Juvenal with the "Not even children believe in the Styx unless they are stupid." line and the situation wouldn't change. Christianity is different because it did not accept participating in the rituals without accepting the doctrine.
>>18391962Did somebody say Pliny?
