How do you distinguish pagan vs Christian?

[Bear Wild]

In looking at the written sources which originally at least in northern Europe were all written by Christians, how do you distinguish what was pagan vs what was Christian of does it not matter?

 

[The Hammer]

You can't distinguish them 100%. I use cross comparison. Do these ideas in the stories and myths that were copied down have any counterparts in other indigenous and polytheistic societies, that make them more likely to be accurate or at least partially true.

 

[Bear Wild]

You can't distinguish them 100%. I use cross comparison. Do these ideas in the stories and myths that were copied down have any counterparts in other indigenous and polytheistic societies, that make them more likely to be accurate or at least partially true.

I agree. There is a strange tendency for Christianity to claim everything because it had the written form. You know the one that sets everything into a stone tablet. It almost fell like a virus where everything it touches becomes Christian. The goddess Bridget becomes saint Bridget because they were in control of the writing. In the other topic I had even the cailleach becomes Christian because the first reference in writing associated her with an older devout woman. Every festival becomes Christian because they say it is so in writing. But I agree one must be careful and comparative information definitely helps.

 

[Quintessence]

Whenever it comes to "what makes something X instead of Y," there's a certain importance to recognizing that putting things into buckets is always something of a human contrivance or projection. What makes something X instead of Y is because some human says it is X instead of Y - we're the one designing the buckets and putting stuff in them. Especially when we're talking something as nebulous as ideas rather than concrete things.

In part because of this, I sometimes don't concern myself with whether or not something can be put in bucket X or bucket Y because that's not consequential - what is X and what is Y on its own merits, how do I understand X and Y at present, and what is my relationship to X and to Y? Does X and/or Y feed into the spirit of my religious tradition or not, and if so, in what ways?

 

[Bear Wild]

Whenever it comes to "what makes something X instead of Y," there's a certain importance to recognizing that putting things into buckets is always something of a human contrivance or projection. What makes something X instead of Y is because some human says it is X instead of Y - we're the one designing the buckets and putting stuff in them. Especially when we're talking something as nebulous as ideas rather than concrete things.

In part because of this, I sometimes don't concern myself with whether or not something can be put in bucket X or bucket Y because that's not consequential - what is X and what is Y on its own merits, how do I understand X and Y at present, and what is my relationship to X and to Y? Does X and/or Y feed into the spirit of my religious tradition or not, and if so, in what ways?

That is a very polytheistic answer. It is not a very Christian answer in so many of the discussions I have been involved in this forum. I believe that as Christianity got established in Rome and migrated throughout Europe it absorbed pagan practices as clearly in the case of the "goddess" Natura or the Cailleach. However, ask most Christians does their religion has any previous pagan aspects and I think you will get a denial and a claim that Christianity is not contaminated with pagan residuals. I have seen the argument that there was no significant evidence of wide spread worship of a mother nature in pagans. This argument of course does not recognize the fact that in indigenous cultures there was no separate "nature" and the world was sacred. It was Christians wanting to recover this "pagan" aspect that created the term mother nature as a goddess but of course had to make her subservient to a superior supernatural god. This is a fallacy of a supernatural monotheism.