Paganism
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Is Hinduism Pagan ?
The author asks whether Hinduism is Pagan. He argues that it is not under the historical, pejorative meaning, but that the Atman doctrine fits the broader neo-pagan sense, viewing Brahman…
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Open Thread – 4/1/2022 – Brown Pundits
Open thread, 1 April 2022. Razib Khan opens by previewing a podcast with Francis Young on Baltic paganism, noting how closely living Lithuanian pagan practice resembles Vedic religion and what…
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Sharing a continent
The author notes the subcontinent and China hold over 40 per cent of humanity yet know little of each other, and argues that Indian claims of a continuous ‘pagan’ civilisation…
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Why Hinduism is not inchoate paganism
Razib Khan rejects the view that Hindu identity is merely a reaction to Islam and the British, arguing from cross-cultural cases such as Rome, Iran and Japan that it is…
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Resilience in the face of religious change
Razib Khan extends Gibbon’s argument that paganism could not reverse the rise of Christianity: religions with a class of devoted ideological professionals, like Christianity, Confucianism and Brahmin-led Hinduism, can recover…
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The myth of Arabian paganism, and the Jewish-Christian origins of the Umayyads
Citing a Twitter thread, the author notes that religious inscriptions from sixth-century Arabia appear invariably Christian rather than pagan, which sits uneasily with Islamic tradition and the Book of Idols’…
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The gods of place
Drawing on The Final Pagan Generation and The Souls of China, the author notes that local gods and shrines dominated pre-modern religion in Rome and China, and asks what this…
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What The All-Father Means
The author explains his joke about being a scion of the All-Father: the R1a1a Y-chromosome lineage spread across Eurasia and South Asia, and star phylogenies from whole-genome data suggest a…
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Review: The Forge of Christendom by Tom Holland
A review of Tom Holland’s book on Western Europe’s recovery between 900 and 1100. The reviewer finds it entertaining but one-sided, presenting Christianity as a force for good and the…
