3 ms·
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that this is a cultural meme that originated with Christianity, and not an innate cognitive tendency that Christian
by dTal 5y ago
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that this is a cultural meme that originated with Christianity, and not an innate cognitive tendency that Christianity merely appropriated? "Paganism" doesn't really refer to anything coherent.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but you'll forgive me if I don't - ahem - take it as Gospel.
- coldtea 5y agoDon't take it as a Gospel. Can read the original sources, they're readily available - plus lots of secondary commentary. This has since forever been a topic of study in humanities, commented by historians and philosophers, and so on. It has been tagged as a negative of Christianity (this celebration of the victim, the slave, the weak, etc.) as early as pagan-apologists like Porphyry, Celsus, and as late as Marx (who considered "universal human rights" a christian-derived bourgeois concept, lacking in radical value for true communism), Nietchze, etc - and in modern times, from (Thiel's favorite teacher) Rene Girard to Tom Holland (of non-spiderman fame, the historian: https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/999890853505060864 https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/999890853505060864 ). >"Paganism" doesn't really refer to anything coherent. In this case, it refers to the Graeco-Roman ancestor civilizations of the western civilization. Though we could just as well include the Germanic tribes, all the way to the Mongols and so on. No much pro-victim mentally in the Mongol Empire either.