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They see me rollin', they hatin'
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Rome is uniquely evil because they invented the practice of using syncretism to commit cultural genocide without requiring a mortal genocide. This practice paved the way for the global dominance of monotheism, and it directly caused the extinction of the European pagan religions.
Europeans used to have so many different religions, so much different culture. Rome took the first steps towards inventing ethnic whiteness by depriving Europeans of their ancestral religions. Without their religions, Europeans had less cultural distinctiveness from one another. Which made it easier for slaver traders to invent the concept of whiteness during the colonial age.
My ancestors came from England. If it hadn't been for Rome, I could have grown up as a practicing Celt. Or maybe My parents would have worshipped Odin. Or I could have trained to be a druid. England has cultural ties to a lot of different pagan groups. But instead, the English are bland cultureless christian colonisers, because of Rome.
Roman syncretism in no way included the extermination of traditional religions, and native religious practices all across the Empire are recorded as maintaining great independence and uniqueness all the way up to the arrival of Christianity, which was not a phenomenon limited to Rome, which largely rejected syncretism, and which exterminated native Roman religions as well.
The Roman Empire was not what killed traditional paganism. Roman syncretism was not a means of exterminating native religions, but of creating an environment for pluralism; worship of Wodan on the Germanic border was considered just and proper, especially since Romans respected the continuation of native traditions as 'traditional' and thus respectful to one's ancestors, a trait the Romans highly valued. Even the Emperor Septimius Severus worshipped traditional Punic gods of his home province, and was considered largely unexceptional for it, despite said Punic gods not being widespread in the Empire and the ancient enmity between Carthage and Rome,
I think the Romans are responsible for Christianity's problems. Judaism was and still is a very tolerant religion, and there are plenty of other gods in the Torah/Bible. Jesus sure wasn't the cause of the exclusionism; he was a very kind and accepting person. No, I blame Paul and the rest of the Romans, for the evolution of Christianity into a culturally genocidal religion.
You take the Romans, who are used to converting barbarians into their religion, and you give them a henotheistic religion? They're gonna change it into monotheism and demand that everyone convert or die. Syncretism created the slippery slope that lead to mass monotheism. Monotheism existed before the Romans, but it was the Romans who prosecuted it with such hate as to destroy European paganism.
... this the same Judaism whose main commandment is "Thou shalt not have any other gods before Me?" This the same Judaism whose holy book is full of ethnoreligious genocide? This the same Judaism which openly regarded the worship of any other god as worth murdering their fellow Hebrews over? This the same Judaism who regarded a minor heresy (Samaritanism) as worth a religious war over? This the same Judaism who massacred 'pagans' during the reign of the Maccabees before the arrival of the Romans? This the same Judaism who massacred pagans during the First Jewish-Roman War? This the same Judaism who massacred each other during the First Jewish Roman War, for following the wrong sect of Judaism?
Judaism only became a 'tolerant' religion because it lost all worldly power.
... Romans weren't used to 'converting' anyone into their religion. That's not in any way a serious or realistic idea of traditional Roman religio.
The trouble with that is that the Romans practiced numerous henotheistic religions before Christianity, and never did anything of the like that Christianity did with those henotheistic religions. Or, for that matter, that Christianity's violence largely started outside of the Roman cultural heartland and before its adoption by the Roman state.
No^2.
In Exodus, the Egyptian priests summon snakes by praying to their gods. Then Moses summons a bigger snake by praying to Elohim. The implication is that Elohim and the Egyptian gods both exist, but Elohim is more powerful. That's henotheism.
The first commandment isn't "thou shalt have no other gods", because that would be monotheism. The first commandment is "Thou shalt have no other gods before Me", which is explicitly henotheistic.
At the end of the day, any monotheistic Abrahamist is a fool who doesn't read their own scripture, or even their own commandments.
That doesn't at all change the fact that that very same text forbade worship of any other gods. Does it matter if they believe other gods exist, if they regard worshipping other gods as grounds for murder?
That doesn't at all change the facts that Judaism, before the arrival of the Romans, even, was a deeply intolerant religion in practice, that Romans didn't 'convert' others to their religion, that Romans practiced henotheistic religions before Christianity and didn't spiral into fuckwit intolerant insanity with them, that Christianity largely rejected syncretism, and that Christian violence against non-Christians predates Roman acceptance of the religion and was largely centered in a Hellenized and Middle-Eastern context, rather than the Romanized areas of the Western Empire.
Yeah, maybe you're right.
I unfortunately spent a lot of time reading the Old Testament in my youth, so I remember a lot of the... gruesome details.
... it contributed significantly to me leaving religion behind as I became old enough to reconcile my values and what I had been taught.
While Romans did sometimes clash with other religious faiths, mostly over practices they regarded as 'odious' (human sacrifice was usually the big one), largely, the opinion of Romans was that following the ways of one's ancestors was a good thing. Romans respected 'piety' even if it wasn't Roman piety - even the Jews, for example, were regarded positively in that they followed the ancient faith of their ancestors.
To the Romans, diversity was a good thing, precisely because the Romans regarded all peoples as having unique cultural practices which made them good at different things. The Romans regarded themselves as especially skilled at ruling and organizing (very conveniently for their imperial ambitions), but that also meant that they needed other people, who were better at things like artisanship, philosophy, academic law, even war, to both cooperate with Rome and preserve their own traditional ways.
Romans even largely allowed peoples in the Empire to follow their own traditional laws and power structures, so far as it applied to their fellow provincials. We often marvel in the modern day at the long-lasting assimilation of peoples in the Empire, but this was largely neither an active process, nor even necessarily intended. It occurred largely by passive means of coexistence and convenience, and included significant cultural influence on the Romans themselves from the provincials, even in the Italian heartland of Rome.
But the syncretism still makes the religious world so much smaller, by turning many different pantheons into one pantheon with many interpretations. That destroys a lot of diversity. And in some cases it's comically incorrect, such as when the Romans tried to fit Odin into the Roman pantheon and decided he was Mercury.
Roman syncretism aided in the retaining of conquered territories by making the locals consider themselves to be religiously Roman. That destroys part of their individual identity and makes them less likely to rebel. Racism is unfortunately one of the best motivators for an oppressed people to rise up - see what Hamas has been up to - and the Romans exploited that by convincing people to see themselves as Roman.
The Romans turned all of the religious diversity across Europe into just one religion and one pantheon, with many (many) different cults. Then they turned that one pantheon into one god. I'll never forgive them for all of that genocide.
Interpretatio Romana was not meant as, nor imposed on, the conquered, but was a means by which the Romans themselves envisioned foreign faiths. The point was not to make the provincials 'realize' Wodan was actually Mercury, but to allow Romans to see why foreigners were actually righteous and pious, and not just worshipping scary, dangerous gods, as many pre-modern peoples believed. As I pointed out, even, Romans did not want to destroy or even modify native religious traditions.
Furthermore, isn't Your hostility towards this syncretic, universalist view itself hostile to diversity? Your assertion here is effectively that Romans, by having their own beliefs about the divine, were innately destructive simply by believing in a faith which regarded others as equal and worthy of respect. Is Your view that diversity is only valid if the faiths in question refuse to acknowledge other faiths as having a place in the worldview, regarding all others as intrinsically alien and incomprehensible, apart from the divine order of their own view?
But as I pointed out, provincials weren't assimilated into being 'religiously Roman'. Roman religio was extremely different from native practices, not just superficially, but in terms of themes, mythology, pantheons, values, and actual ritual behaviors.
But that's not even close to true. Nor, for that matter, is having a belief genocide. If someone starts believing what I believe, without me even so much as trying to proselytize, much less impose my beliefs by force, have I committed genocide??
I believe in a world in which all of us will one day believe wholeheartedly in the gods of all religions, regardless of our own preferences regarding worship or deference. I've personally had experiences involving Dionysus, Quetzalcoatl, and the Rainbow Serpent. Not to mention a variety of lesser-known gods. I wish that all people were as open minded.
The majority of pre-Roman europeans were not so open-minded as I am, but they did believe in the gods of other religions in a distant sense. This is the reason why it did not occur to the author(s) of Exodus to deny the existence of the Egyptian gods. That kind of thing simply did not cross many people's minds until much later.
In the bronze age and the pre-Roman classical period, it was perfectly common to slaughter an entire people, without denying the existence of their gods. Religious denial was not an established means of warfare until the Romans pioneered it. The Romans invented a new kind of genocide. The Romans figured out how to exterminate a culture without shedding blood.
But that necessarily presupposes that only Your interpretation of the equally true nature of all gods is the only valid form of religion. How is that, itself, not the call for the imposition of a single religious system upon all others? Why is Your form of religious denial superior to other forms of religious denial?
... but as I've already pointed out numerous times, religious denial wasn't something the Romans pioneered.
Well that's the paradox of tolerance. You're an anarchist, you know what I'm talking about. I'm happy for anyone to worship or not worship as they please. To believe in whichever gods they want to believe in.
But if someone doesn't believe in a god, and acts accordingly, then they're blinding themselves to important cultural information which could be crucial to understanding how to justly treat religious people. Here in Australia, we get a LOT of that. We get lots of people, nice people, who don't believe in the Indigenous metaphysical perspective. And it leads them to commit violence. We have white people putting up fences over Aboriginal land, stopping people from living the way their ancestors lived, from fulfilling their sacred responsibilities to Country.
Yesterday I was at a Greens political meeting, and we were talking about fossil fuel levies, and I made some offhand account of how the government claims to own the land. Another guy, he said the people do own the land. But I don't believe that. I don't think people can own land. Land is a living thing, you can't dominate it like it's a commodity, not even for The People. The Rainbow Serpent made the land and it's the people's responsibility to care for it, not to take it for themselves. It can be a great home if you treat it as an equal and establish a reciprocal relationship with it. But if you try to use it for your own gain and give nothing back, it'll get sick and you'll get sick. The land needs to be cared for by people strong in Culture, strong in spirituality. There are ancient systems tested by time, which keep the land healthy through practices and cultural constructs that the West would call spiritual.
Your freedoms end where someone else's freedoms begin. Other people have the right to believe in their gods, their spirits, their magic. I don't think you or I have the right to deny that from them.
I'm friendly with anarchists, but I'm not an anarchist myself.
That's not what the paradox of tolerance is.
But why is that religious view more valid than others? You claim to believe in the existence of all gods equally, but then why is the behavior of other people according to their religious norms considered unprivileged, while that of aboriginal folks is considered privileged in your worldview? Is the ancestral belief that YHWH wishes the land to be divided up and put under the care of individual wardens invalid in comparison to the ancestral beliefs of aboriginal folk that it should not? Why is YHWH's wish less valid than that of Aboriginal gods? What is the criteria you use to make the distinction between one being valid and one not without engaging in rank hypocrisy?
But many religions disagree with that. Even your statement here asserts that it was the Rainbow Serpent who made the land, yet there are many other religions with many other creation myths, and many other views on how land is to be treated. You aren't acknowledging all gods equally, you're picking and choosing just like the 'religious denialists' you claim to oppose.
But the entire issue that this debate started over was precisely that the traditional Roman religio didn't deny anyone the right to believe in their gods; but you asserted that, all the same, the fact that their worldview had a definite view of the gods of others rendered it genocidal and evil, and a form of 'religious denialism'.
The Rainbow Serpent made Australia. Elohim made the middle east. Sky Woman made Turtle Island. Prometheus made the Greeks. etc.
But that's not the belief of (at least two of) those religions. You're not acknowledging the validity of those faiths, you're creating a new cult and asserting that it's the only valid one.
Well of course I don't believe in the exclusionary parts. I'm considered a heretic by many Christian cults, but I think Elohim only made the Hebrews, not all the people. After all, who did Cain and Abel marry? I think it was some of the people who had already been around since before Adam and Eve left Eden. I said I believe in all the gods, I didn't say I believe in every part of every story. I believe in the parts that aren't exclusionary. Thus, Elohim made the middle east.
You'd also do well to remember, I don't just believe in one universe. Different gods made the world in different universes. The universe inhabited by the ancient Greeks, I call Greece.
But then what You believe exists isn't YHWH, or any conception of it that is actually believed by the peoples' whose faith you are appropriating, but an entirely new theology of Your own creation which primarily shares nomenclature and not much else with said faith. If anything, that's at least as disrespectful and dismissive as other notions of divine universality that You say are religiously dismissive. You are asserting your right to rewrite the cultural and theological notions of these faiths and claim it as the one valid way simply because it suits Your culture and theology.
Why then is the Roman conception of the universe invalid in Rome? Did they not inhabit a different universe?
Actually, I once heard from a Deacon that Genesis 1 is a letter addition to the Testament than the rest of Genesis. In the original version of the story, Elohim did not create the Earth. That makes sense, because Elohim was originally just the storm god in a pantheon of other deities, some of whom were more important than Him.
I think My interpretation of Abrahamism is closer to the older versions, from before it developed monotheism.
Cause they marched off to other places and forced those places to be Rome. The Romans did a lot of the early work in destroying the precolonial multiverse. A lot of the later work was done by the British Empire. We used to have a multiverse. Different people in different lands were able to have entirely different cultures and metaphysics. They constructed consensus reality in very different ways. Then the Christians said no.