What Could (Ideally) Replace Christianity?

If Christianity dies in Europe, what religion could replace it that isn't retarded?

It’s no secret that I have a lot of problems with Christianity. However, we’ve reached a bit of an impasse over the past 250 or so years. Christianity is dying in the west. Christians will deny it, but it’s true. And it has been a slow, grueling process, but it’s happening. While people are remaining nominally Christian, you are seeing people take the religion less and less seriously. Less church attendance, more Bible-contradicting views on religion and morality, more doubt. Similar things happened in Egypt and the Roman Empire. People still may have practiced the rituals, but there was increasing mockery and doubt in the Roman religious institutions. More people fell into the pull of cults and less decorated philosophical disciplines. Somehow, most of my least favorite elements of Christianity survived, while many of those I was more partial towards died out or actually were replaced with a “contra-belief” against them. You know, the famous example Nietzsche gives us of Christianity vanquishing Pagan Perspectivism, leaving nothing to stop Relativism from replacing Christian Absolutism once Christianity is done away with.

Some people will say, “Oh! But Christianity is growing!” Yeah, among who? Not Westerners. Not among educated, White Westerners especially. Just because China will be 10% Christian in 2100 as opposed to 1% Christian, doesn’t mean your grandchildren aren’t gonna be Atheists (if you’re lucky enough to have grandchildren, I suppose).

Despite this, certain conservative viewpoints are growing among more secular audiences. In fact, Christian devotion among Trump voters is pretty strongly associated with warmer feelings towards minorities, and laxer views on immigration. In Europe, we are also seeing the rise of an Identitarian right-wing which is not nearly as religiously oriented as the American GOP is. It isn’t surprising — church attendance is abysmal in Europe.

Clearly these people are moralistic and ripe for conversion to… something. But, they’re just not entranced by Christianity anymore. So, you would think, given I am the “Great Pagan” of iFunny at this point, I desire a takeover of traditional Paganism. And… This is half-true. I’m going to explain two paths I see that can be taken to varying degrees of success, depending on which part of Europe we are talking about.

Option 1: “White Shinto”

I don’t remember where I first heard the term “White Shinto”, but I think it was fairly popular on 4chan for a while. It doesn’t actually entail White people converting to Shintoism — this is retarded and doesn’t even make sense under a Shinto framework. Shinto is the religion of the Japanese. White People, in this scenario, obviously would revert to their national pantheons and rituals. However, what it does suggest is a religious infrastructure similar to the Shinto infrastructure in Japan. Heavily centered around ritual, and heavily polytheistic with animistic elements.

This, I think, could work to great success in Eastern Europe. The Communist suppression of Christianity has left a large religious crater in the common culture that can be filled, and Balto-Slavic Paganism was around much more recently than people give it credit for. Rodnovery and Romuva have shown promise. Germanic, Greek, and Italian Europe also show some promise for this sort of system, as they have relatively well-preserved religious systems and a coherent ethnic identity dating back to the Iron Age. Albeit, they were Christianized earlier and have a very strong Christian common culture. In these places, for a thousand years, religion has been viewed as a dichotomy between having one God, and having no God or gods. This is a very big issue. Although I myself am a Polytheist, and an Animist, and believe Polytheistic worship is very desirable, I am not sure if Westerners will ever be fully capable of returning to a Polytheistic mentality. Yes, Catholics do have some Polytheistic activities like praying to Angels and Saints… But they strongly insist that they aren’t actually doing that. I’m not sure if most Western Europeans can bring themselves to feel strong devotion towards an entire pantheon of gods, it’s just very alien to them at this point. Ritual-based religion is also alien to them, Abrahamism has made it all about dogma and beliefs.

The situation is more dire for ethnic groups without a well-preserved tradition or who formed after Christianity formed. Frenchman are Gauls who call themselves Franks and speak Vulgar Latin. Gallic religion in itself, apart from Roman religion, is not very well-preserved. Celtic Mythology is well-preserved but it’s a bit hard to truly understand the inner functions of a religion when its leaders, the Druids, were forbidden from writing any of their traditions down. Whites living outside of Europe are not only regularly mixed between Germanic, Celtic, sometimes other things, but on top of that are detached from the European soil their ancestor’s deities inhabited. Which brings me to option #2…

Option #2: “White Zoroastrianism”

The second path is what I like to call “White Zoroastrianism”. This path is based loosely off of Zoroastrian religious institutions, but like Shinto do not confuse it for a plea to convert White people to Zoroastrianism proper. There are a few tenets which I must stress in this scenario. Firstly, worship is focused much more heavily on one particular “greatest god worthy of worship”. This does not simply mean the acknowledgement of the Monad, or a desire to “self-immolate” or achieve ecstatic union with it. It requires the worship of a qualified being, one with identifiable characteristics and its own will. Ahura Mazda satisfies these conditions. He is the creator of life and the world, a subduer of evil, but is not “The One”. I would also say that the “Supreme Personality of the Godhead” in Hinduism is like this in a lot of ways as well, at least based on how Hindus percieve them. Zoroastrianism does not deny “The One”, it is left ambiguous and subsequently affirmed in the later Zoroastrian sect of Zurvanism. Zeus fulfills this role in Greco-Roman mythology, and there were some Classical thinkers who certainly gravitated towards henotheism with their Zeus-obsession. The second tenet is the inclusion of “scripture” which defines certain attributes of the religion and its structure. Zoroastrianism has its Avestan scripture, and by the Sassanid period the Zoroastrian clerical strata was becoming increasingly crystallized. I would say… Polytheism is still acceptable within the parameters of this system, it just revolves around a more monotheistic and dogmatic premise. Zoroastrianism has other characteristics in common with Abrahamism (I suspect, some or most of them influenced Abrahamism, while others were influenced by Abrahamism).

The important element is that this religion is not proselytizing, nor does it explicitly contradict Pagan religions which may operate more on the aforementioned basis. But it is very much characterized by a theology. Also, before I forget, the third obvious takeaway from Zoroastrianism is that it is an ethnically conscious religion. Furthermore, it is a pan-ethnic conscious religion which was viewed as something the various Iranic peoples are entitled to. It was centered around the story of the Iranic people, who by the Achaemenid period had become scattered and distinct. It is not a universalist proselytizing religion like Christianity. Nor is it an “ethnoreligion” like Judaism, in which everyone who accepts it magically becomes a new ethnicity. No, just because Armenians brought Zoroastrianism into their own religious system did not make them Iranic. On the other hand, Iranic leaders regularly expressed disappointment at the non-Zoroastrianism of peoples they considered Iranic, such as the Scythians.

I don’t know if any “White Zoroastrianism” really exists in a nice form today… Maybe Templism?

Hehehe, I kid… I kid… Templism I think is not actually that focused on God, but it’s Aristotelian so I suppose it believes in it. I don’t know. I should probably read the Templist stuff and stop dogging on it.

Historical examples… Hmm, it becomes more common in Late Antiquity when the old religious system of Rome and Greece starts to fall apart. Neoplatonism lays a philosophical backbone for a lot of these movements, identifying a supreme being either in the demiurge (below The One) or as a sort of apparition of The One itself. Plato attributes the role to Zeus, as do many other Platonists (“but Zeus was… Le born by his mom and shit nigga!” That’s a discussion maybe for another time, on the true nature of Zeus). The cult of Sol Invictus, especially under Julian who syncretized it with Neoplatonism, could be considered an attempt at Pagan henotheism in the West, but it was frankly snuffed out in its embryonic stage. The best example might be Plethon’s secret wishes for the Byzantine Empire, to adopt a new Hellenism on a Neoplatonic chasse. Plethon was directly influenced by Zoroastrianism, so that only adds to my argument, and he was very much looking into the ethnic component. I mean, Julian was something of a “race realist” but I don’t know of any ethnocentric undertones of Sol Invictus other than that he is Roman in name. The Positive Christianity of Alfred Rosenberg could be considered a very weak version of this. Obviously, Rosenberg intended for the religion to morph more into its own thing as time went on, shedding a lot of the Christian drapes.

Zoroastrianism is a very hard religion to “get”, because it has been obscured by a certain reddit obsession with it. They’ll insist it is “like Christianity but earlier and not heccin’ meanerino!” and there is maybe some truth to this. In some ways it is a backlash against the warrior-class by the priestly class, and so has some passive elements. And it rejects a lot of deities as “daevas” which were probably once not daevas. I don’t think I like this, but in most religions there are already the rejected deities consisting of the “enemies of the gods” (ex: The Jotunn, Giants, Titans, Asuras, Fomorians, etc etc) so in framework it is not that bad. But Zoroastrianism is not actually reddit religion. Heroic warriors are praised, sodomites are hated, and negroes are considered less than human. Ahh, just brilliant stuff… Hmm… Yes, very nice… fapfapfapfapfap oooooh…

Sorry guys, I cannot elaborate further. I really have to get my levels up on fortnite, I only have a day left. But comment whatever