Paganism was the set of original ancient religions around the world. They all had plenty of gods, loved nature, sometimes sacrificed things, and so on. Then the Big Three religions came along and took over. But today paganism has come roaring back!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What is paganism and its significance?
Yeah. So we're talking about paganism, everybody. And hats off to Dave, too, first of all, for helping us with this. This is a huge, big lump of a topic that almost every one of the things we're going to talk about could be broken out into its own episode. Right. So we're going to have to summarize in a lot of ways. We're going to get a lot of stuff wrong.
So apologies already to all of our pagan listeners out there. And let us know, correct us about what we do get wrong, but we're going to try our best not to get stuff wrong. Because it's a really interesting set of religions. We should say that's what paganism is. It's not a religion.
It's a set of typically nature-based religions that before the original ancient paganism predated any of what we call the Abrahamic religions, the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And that's my definition of paganism.
Can we stop there?
Yeah. We haven't gotten anything wrong so far, so yeah.
Yeah, well, you mentioned those religions, and it's pretty key to mention the Abrahamic religions because basically anything else outside of that was considered pagan historically. The word pagan actually was pretty much an insult at first when Christianity was on the rise, and we'll talk a lot about that here in a second.
In the Roman Empire, if you did not convert to Christianity, you were called paganus, which is Latin for country dweller, which is basically like, hey, if you're not a Christian, you're a bumpkin, a.k.a. pagan, which is interesting.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely interesting. It's funny because that means that at some point in time, and we'll talk about when that happened, Christianity suddenly leapt forward as like a sophisticated thing. So the tables basically turned because originally some of the Greek and actually Roman Christians, Pagans were very suspicious of Christianity and said all sorts of libelous things against them.
And then as Christianity rose to prominence, it used that same playbook against pagans. But yeah, it makes sense that it's like you were considered a hick or not up to date if you were still a pagan once Christianity became a thing in the Roman Empire. Yeah.
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