I mean, didn't those cultures also sacrifice babies by throwing them into a burning garbage pit? Didn't most polytheists think death was both the ultimate evil, and completely inevitable, so it wasn't a matter of if you were damned, but when? Even if religious fundamentalists seem awful to me and I want nothing to do with Westboro Baptist Church either (the one cult that everyone can agree is worse than
) I think we've made a lot of progress by giving up on those religions. People used to believe things like if there was an eclipse, of course someone would die. Now the Moon and Sun definitely have some kind of influence, but saying eclipses always correlate with deaths is like saying lightning will definitely burn down your house in a thunderstorm, just a lot of superstitious fear-mongering with no basis in reality.
Also, look at modern Jewish people. Modern Jewish people accomplish way more than ancient or reconstructionist pagan people. Other Abrahamic religions fare pretty well too, as well as modern religions in general. The transition from ancient to modern religions seems like part of the path of advancement in general. People like Plato already believed in the Monad, so it wasn't much of a transition from believing in the Monad to believing in the God of Abraham. Indeed, many religious philosophers heavily cite classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle because of the same impression I get, that it was more of a gradual transition than a big revolution when people started believing in modern religions like Christianity and Judaism (Islam in its current form came hundreds of years later and that would be true even if Jesus and Moses are counted as Muslim in some broad sense as Muslims tend to do,) and even Hinduism and Buddhism, rather than believing in pantheons of ancient deities who were basically like superheroes in just being people with powers and longer lifespans.
When you look at modern paganism and pseudoscientific religions (e.g., Creativity Movement) a lot of it is a death cult where you're considered to not be worthy of life, only of death, and your death is like a sacrifice to the gods or to your race, even though those are considered doome as well, just on a much longer scale than you are. I'm glad we've moved past that way of thinking. Even something like transhumanism never would have taken off without the Abrahamic idea that individual souls really are worthy of eternal life (Abrahamic because of the founders' backgrounds, not because other modern religions like Buddhism all lack this idea,) because people would still consider themselves like animals despite the human intellect clearly showing we are not the same as beasts.
Originally Posted by Coeruleum Blue
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