Why are abrahamic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam so hateful against polytheism?

[HoldAll]

yea no both of them have semitic DNA and you cant ethnically cleanse your own race without killing yourself + this is off topic or something

A lot of the posts in this thread are off-topic. It's monotheists vs. polytheists, remember, not monotheists against each other. Which just goes to show what a non-problem this really is.

 

[PolishTruthSeeker]

Let us continue this discussion.

 

[MorganBlack]

Hellz yeah! I'm a pantheist, but just for you, today going TradCath.

The Crusades were peak medieval bro-code. Catholic Church flexing against the infidels, reclaiming Jerusalem like a boss. Manly AFK - knights, armor, epic battles, zero soy. Built Western unity, spurred trade, tech boom. Holy wars? More like holy gains. Deus vult, chads!

Post automatically merged: Nov 11, 2025

Dammit folks. I'm having a really hard time finding current IRL examples of evil dastardly TradCaths persecuting IRL pagans.
Post away, But until then I'm using a made up one.

You had me a 'pray - kill'. No need to convince me.

 

[Ananda]

Polytheists are have no moral high-ground to stand on. Indian polytheists killed up to a million "Abrahamists," by some estimates, in the Partition of 1947. I see no evidence Polytheism make you any less violent, and they killed tens of thousands of people in recent history . For instance, in the 1983 Nellie Massacre, around 1,600 to 2,000 Muslims were killed by their Hindu village neighbors. I am also not making a truth claim Indians are any more or less violent than anyone else.

We can go on , but my real point is that religion is not a very good metric to measure the human potential for violence. All it takes is for any number of triggers for a civilization to enter Mass Psychosis and become violent.

Indian polytheists did not kill a million muslims during partition. Most of the bloodshed during the partition of India & Pakistan was between the adherents of the monotheist religion of Sikhism and Islam in the province of Punjab. The muslims began the massacres and rapes and forced the Sikhs out of their ancestral lands in the muslim dominant parts of the Punjab, and the Sikhs retaliated. The numbers killed were less than a million and likely equally divided.

The 1983 Nellie massacre was in the indian state of Assam, which is being encroached upon by muslim bengalis from Bangladesh even now. This was an ethnic conflict driven by fears of their language and culture being subsumed. Go to any Assamese forum and you'll find that most of them still want the muslim Bengalis to GTFO because reportedly they don't integrate, despise the polytheist religion, are responsible for a large amount of crime, their predatory behaviour toward women, child marriage and breeding hordes of children. Even now the polytheists are being persecuted in Bangladesh by the innocent muslim angels. There is no surprise why the neighboring ethnic groups would fear them.

Usually the pattern is, the Muslims fuck around, then find out (where the polytheists have the numbers to fight back), and then cry victim. Note the recent issues in Gaza. You don't know anything about India.

Polytheists in general do not brand people who have different ideas as devil worshippers and evil. Islam and Christianity most likely worship egregores, given their strong motivation to increase numbers by conversion or breeding hordes of children and taking over the world.

 

[MorganBlack]

Ananada, thank you for mentioning the Sikhs!

I thought the game we're playing here is to take cultural tribal conflicts that are often religiously encoded, including resource or territorial warfare , assign maximum blame to the other guy, de-contextualize and generalize all of them into an even more abstract category we made.

Since we are NOW doing nuance, sure, other estimates range from 500,000 to 800,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus and Sikhs in India during the 1947 Partition.

Post automatically merged: Nov 12, 2025

Look, I'm temporarily playing as a TradCath in this game.

You really don't have to convince me to go on a crusade, jihad, or dharma yuddha. All good.

 

[Ananda]

I'm not even going to address how deeply fuuuuucked UP and tragic we now have unironic legit neo-Nazi pagans are (if you don't know, check Telegram for their knumbskull racist, anti-Jew, anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-Catholic vile idiocy. ) - but to make the claim that violence is exclusively on "the Abrahamic side" is, to put it mildly, counter-evidential.

You're right, not all 'pagan' religions are equal. Christianity was an improvement over the older Nordic religion. There is nothing in the Nordic religion which compares to the ideas found in Vedanta or Mahayana Buddhism.

 

[MorganBlack]

Thank you, Ananda!!

TradCath game off.

I should have qualified that I have Norse pagan friends whom I love and respect, and they are not represented by those evil dickweeds.

I tend to side with Kashmiri Shaivism, if I understand it, that "God" - the ultimate ground of being "is" Shiva (I call "Him" The Nous, and the Demiurge) and is so caught up with Shakti so He's not minding reality much, so we get all sort of crazy shit going on - torndoes, swarms of murder hornets, and people running around being pretty terrible. Men have nipples.. and come on, the platypus!

Nobody is minding the store. So we all sort of have to figure stuff out, and what our values are together. It's just taking us all a few millennia to do it. Until then we are all pretty shitty pretty often.

 

[lumineth Realm Lord]

As an aspiring occultist, I want to know the political implications of it.

Control. Monotheism fits everything into boxes of absolute good and evil. Good is based around submission to power and affirmation of orthodoxy. Evil is when you think for yourself and of yourself. It's either risk being isolated, and then going to hell, or get back in line.

It's much harder to have that much power over people when you have multiple gods around, some espousing different values to yours, or even making direct opposition to your authority. And they are not only considered just as powerful as yours, but they're just as sacred and righteous. That's why Christianity has satan.

 

[DemiGodBenson]

I can't speak for all of the 30,000 + denominations of Christianity, nor the multiple versions of Islam and Judaism, but I'll try to briefly summarize the Abrahamic perspective.

There is only one God. Not one God bigger or better than the others, but only one. All the rest, including all the millions of different versions of Jehovah, are fiction. Not real. Nonexistent. Symptoms of human consciousness.

It is tempting to think of those things as real beings with real power, who respond and interact in a godlike manner. It is tempting, but it's wrong. When we choose to follow wrong things under false assumptions, we end up in bad situations. If we think God loves killing people, we end up killing people. If we think God likes strippers, we get a religion of strippers like they had in Babylon. If we think God is about being the biggest best and baddest, we get patriarchal cults with infant sacrifice and slave labor. Every time we try to pin down God to a set of human-like identities, the culture founded on those beliefs becomes an evil monster that sometimes doesn't go away until natural disaster wipes it out. Whenever you find people engaged in mass atrocity, you can be sure it is rooted in their beliefs about how the universe is governed.

You can believe in any deity you want, and you will find a mountain of reasons to think that it's real. The real God is always going to be a step beyond comprehension, hence the term "ineffable" applied to it in the lore of magic. Something so grand has no problem relating to you as a father, as a brother, as a friend, or as some squid monster or period-costume character if that's how you approach it.

Post automatically merged: Today at 8:13 AM

This makes sense. There's a thread about reading the book of Psalms every day as a kind of ritual practice, and I thought the idea was interesting enough to get out my Bibles and see which ones were most readable. I used to read the Bible quite a lot in my younger days before I became an atheist. I'm not quite an atheist nowadays, though I would probably refuse to give the Ineffable a name. One of the Bibles I have uses Jehovah throughout the OT. I was reading another book recently which referenced the Jerusalem Bible. The quotes in it appeared quite readable, so I began reading JB translation of Psalms online. JB uses Yahweh where the tetragrammaton appears in the original text.

What struck me more profoundly now than it ever did in my past was how often the Psalm writer invoked Yahweh/Jehovah by name and attributed human-like qualities to his deity. Now I do realize that the Middle East was quite a violent place 2-3000 years ago, so it makes some sense from a historical perspective that violence is a common theme in these ancient writings. I also realized that the Psalmists were usually underdogs of some kind since they often wrote about being surrounded by enemies. And these enemies weren't just foreign kingdoms but people within their own tribe(s). Yahweh was being constantly invoked in poetic form to protect the victim of injustice. It comes across as a bit over-the-top at times, but I recognize a bit of hyperbole too.

What is clear from an objective reading of the OT is that polytheism was recognized. The creation account says, "Let US make man in our image." Much of the posturing in the books of the Bible sounds like kids boasting about who has the strongest daddy (god). It would not surprise me if tellers of tales told some whoppers of lies just to improve the morale of the tribe(s) preparing for battle. "Did you hear about the time our god made the walls of Jericho fall down?" And yet, how many times in the book of Psalms does the writer complain that Yahweh isn't helping? "Wake up, Yahweh!" Ps 44:23.

Well, we get down to the topic at last. The way I see it is that Abrahamic religions tend to literal interpretations of their holy scriptures. I cannot speak for Judaism and Islam, but among more fundamentalist Christians, the belief in Biblical inerrancy makes them jump through many fallacies to reach illogical conclusions, and then they demand you accept them! The games they will play with words can astound you. You may think that Christians hate Pagans for their polytheism, but in fact many Christian sects hate each other for their different interpretations of the same scriptures. Joel Baden's concept of the "inclusion of differences" eludes them. What this means is that the Bible is a compilation of contradictory writings, and this was apparently okay at the time they were assembled because the stories didn't have to make logical sense in a time when most people were illiterate. The writings contained allegorical information that mattered more than concrete facts to their way of thinking.

The Christians that don't hate other sects are quite likely to be more accepting of varying belief systems and participate in interfaith movements. I somehow doubt you'd have problems with more liberal Christian denominations since the members are less inclined to worry about doctrinal dilemmas, focusing instead on social programs in the community.