Shall we name them Captain Obvious?
If the contemporary practice of indigenous and polytheistic religions is so obvious, then why is Christianity still claiming everything religion as being synonymous with everything Christian? Westerners try to say that all of religion is Abrahamic, at least most claim that all practiced religion is. This simply isn't true.
Most people I talk to about religion aren't aware of my own polytheistic spirituality. Usually I'm assumed to be an atheist because of how obviously not-Christian I am. Then I say that I'm a heathen and almost everyone didn't know that we exist. Even someone who says "I believed in all [of the gods and goddesses]" didn't know about the active and growing but minority pagan and polytheist communities.
Then if the people in discussion know about these gods, for the majority of the time they view them as relics; something that silly, ignorant, godless heathens made, along with the pottery and other archaeological finds, categorized in what is now called
mythology (which has incorrectly been assumed to mean "anything fake goes here" and to have no relation to the Lore in the Abrahamic holy scriptures, no matter how similar they are via comparative mythology nor if the Abrahamic mythology is just as abstract or ridiculous as the pagans). The gods and Pre-Christians are studied with a colonialist lens, sometimes with laughter. The scholars who are the colonialists as well also say how these "primitive" peoples didn't know about science, stuff we're gifted to know as 21st century Westerners, and they came up with stories to explain the suns movement across the sky or the rain, because they
didn't know any better, said so patronizingly.
Given the current world population and the number of super geniuses like Einstein or Michio Kaku, we're slacking, and they were doing much better in science than how I hypothesize we would, at least without great minds Pythagoras, Socrates or Aristarchus native to that time.
Even in this forum I see things like what is listed. I'm seeing the assumption that monotheism means religion and vice versa and the colonialist perspective that polytheism is a relic of the past; something silly but interesting.
Our deities, Lore and rituals aren't "primitive". They're rich, complex and the product of thousands and thousands of years of language, ancestry, culture and tradition. They're not silly (not any more silly than the mythology of creationists at least), they're abstract and symbolic with deep meaning and insightful wisdom.
It's time to make ourselves known, so the natural polytheists (those who know about the gods but aren't aware of the community) and the Monotheists, Atheists, Christians and Agnostics in The West can no longer claim ignorance to the honor and veneration of Thor, Zeus, Isis and all the pagan gods. Of the gods who receive worship, God's not alone. God's not the only god and his temple isn't the sole place of worship.
