by Sean Jobst
20 September 2018
I haven't written much about politics lately, because I've been focusing primarily on my spiritual studies. The culmination is that I am a proud and confirmed Germanic Pagan, returning to the polytheistic view and folkways of my ancient ancestors, what was theirs before Christianization. This was a radical change for me but something deeply stirring within my soul and my blood, and it has finally found room to surface. And everyday I study, learn and grow more, the more spiritual benefits I can see in the form of such things as synchronicities, the ease at which my personal writings flow and how level-headed I am in these studies. So I can see more balance and being in sync with my true nature. My best description of this is that this was a paradigm shift.
Before these last two years, I had taken monotheism for granted, holding to a dogma of one god - first within the Catholic Christian tradition I was born into, and then as a Muslim since my conversion to Islam at sixteen (the latter due to my problems with the Trinity and other theological problems with Christianity). This included the dogmas of a series of prophets and "divine" books, and afterlife of "heaven" and "hell". These are all mere memories of an old life, as I have purged them from my worldview and finally returned home to what was within my blood this whole time.
This is unlike any conversion experience, nor is it like being "confirmed" or "initiated" into some religion. I was sincere in Islam and was studious in it just like I'm generally studious and research-oriented, as any Muslim who knew me during those years attests and is now bewildered. After so long I came to the conclusion there is no "divine truth" nor is there a "universal" religion valid for every people across all time. Rather, there was an "ethnic faith" specific to every tribe or people on earth, which reflected their unique traditions, honored their ancestors, spoke to their immediate surroundings, and represented the interplay of their archetypes, history and destiny.
Europa My Catalyst
As with any other shifts and transformations, this has been a process and not a single event. But the catalyst was my trip to my paternal lands of Swabia (Southwest Germany) and Castilla (central and parts of north Spain) in July 2016 (my mother is of Flemish descent, but I have yet to visit Belgium). The very moment I stepped foot in Stuttgart and my late father's nearby hometown of Bad Canstatt, many emotions came rushing to me and I responded accordingly. Only later in subsequent research, did I learn about such deeper realities like metagenetics and archetypes, which had escaped my attention before since I simply did not allow myself to conceive of a reality outside monotheism.
Almost like a purification, Germany transformed me as I slowly began to shed the old conscious self and sought to discover the latent true subconscious self. The first to go was the Islamic salat, which I had been doing five times daily since my conversion. I instinctively stopped praying, not even a conscious decision but almost like it was just something that snapped within me and prevented me from praying. This was highly symbolic, as one famous hadith (recorded saying of Muhammad) defines the salat as that which distinguishes between Islam and "kufr" (disbelief). Neither did I have any interest in visiting a mosque there even while planning to do so before arriving, as it hit my psyche that Muslims were innately a foreign element in my ancestral lands, so that my people were not Muslims and nor were any of my ancestors.
I understood this impulse later to be the mystical connection one can form with their ancestral land, as so many who have visited the lands of their ancestors can attest. There was something deep that arose within me as I walked the streets of Bad Canstatt and along the Neckar that my immediate line of ancestors had walked; as I saw the history of Schwaben unfold before me in the Landesmuseum and in the historical buildings where ancestral memories were associated; hiking up the Birkenkopf, reflecting on the surrounding valley including the mystical forests and mountains to the east which were our original home, and the sacrifices of so many of our people during the war, etc.. All these experiences contributed to form a singular stirring of my spirit, and I soon followed it with travels to Madrid, which gave me a strong sense of Castilian heritage and history.
Political Conclusions
Meanwhile, my political awakening was continuing to balance the positive stirring with a negative realization of current events. I had known some about the mass-migrations of mostly Muslims into Germany before that, but seeing it with my own eyes punched me to the stomach and awoke my soul, stirring a fire within me that I am a white American man of European descent, whose direct ancestors and cultural background belong to Europe and not to some abstract concept called the "Umma". I had pride in and an inkling of my heritage before and celebrated it on so many levels, but now it was becoming a holistic reality that should also be graced with a spiritual transformation.
My growing distance from Muslims was already coinciding with the U.S. presidential campaign. I was no supporter of Donald Trump for my own principled reasons, but neither was I any supporter of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I wrote and called out all of them, as any perusal of my writings from that time attest. But seeing the vitriol and hypocrisy of the authoritarian Cultural Marxist Left made it clear that the latter was by far the most dangerous. My own broadly libertarian principles coupled with traditional ideas, were now converging with my awakened sense of ethnic identity as a reaction to the insanity of Cultural Marxism.
The consensus of the Muslim community in America was to support the Democratic Party along with the alliances with the Cultural Marxist Left - their dogmas of mass immigration, multiculturalism and Political Correctness. The hypocrisy of those who demand that our countries must be "open" to even our own demographic replacement, to those who say nothing against the wars of the Clintons or Obama, even while shedding crocodile tears about "refugees" while ignoring the reality of economic migration. I was seeing the broader agenda here, with various Zionist/Globalist bankers supporting both wars in the Middle East and open borders in the West, so that all the political obsessions I had about the Middle East (as indeed was common with any of us in the "Truth" movement) were now being transferred to my own environment.
Every fiber of my being was repulsed by these hypocrites, growing more and more as I became more conscious of things I overlooked before. I was seeing Muslims converge behind these dogmas not for truly altruistic reasons but purely for the same reasons that so many Jews have been the driving force behind mass immigration in our European or North American societies - the resulting multicultural, leveling process benefits their own identity politics. And so it was with Muslims who obviously support more mass immigration of Muslims, resulting in Islamization (not through "creeping sharia" but through PC thought-crime laws masked as "hate laws", just as had been done with "anti-Semitism") and hence the growth of the religion they obviously regard as the "Haqq" that everyone should be "convinced" about as is the nature of these universalist religions.
Separating the Cultural from the Spiritual
My approach to Islam had always been more spiritual than legalistic, which is why I gravitated for most of my time as a Muslim towards Sufism - a balance between the spiritual and legal, but still with a more mystical perspective. Nevertheless, I remained open-minded, critically thinking about things such as the hadith - downplaying or rejecting some as opposed to others that seemed more logical. I was able to see that some were direct reflections of 7th-century Arabia, so had a specific cultural context and were far from "infallible". So it was that I possessed a more "nuanced" view of what constituted "Sunna", or recorded actions and behavior of Muhammad.
No matter what religion they possess, the typical person will always bring their own nature and their own unique experiences to that religion, making it work for them whether by focusing on some aspects or downplaying others. This is especially the case with Islam, which as received to us in the West is certainly not the Islam as practiced in Muslim countries. And this is indeed true of all the universalist religions, which ultimately take on local cultural flavors and expressions.
After a certain point, this process crystallizes where the local culture becomes identified with the religion. Yet there is a hypocrisy where the convert is expected to take on those cultural traits while rejecting their own cultural background. I came to know others who resisted this tendency, but they were always a small minority constantly at odds with the majority trends and even they tried hard to reconcile their true nature with what is essentially a foreign religion. No matter how much we try to reconcile it, all the Abrahamic religions arose from and within the Middle East, so how does it apply to all people in all places and at all times?
Looking back at it, I always had these inclinations that were stirrings of my true self putting up its resistance. I was never circumcised, even after my conversion, always viewing it as a strange custom that belonged to a different culture and foreign to me who actually embraces his intactness. Although I memorized several chapters of the Qur'an and learned the prayers and other acts of worship, neither did I ever focus much attention on learning to read and write Arabic. This is especially significant, because I was always very studious in learning so much about Islam; it just was never an inclination towards the Arabic language. And for the last few years of being Muslim, I eschewed the traditional clothing that symbolized being "Muslim", never obligatory but still viewed as "pious" and "spiritual".
Other stirrings were felt in my behavior and outlook. I was always put off by those who proselytize or apologize for a religion, being sanctimonious like their outer act is a crutch to convince themselves or make themselves feel better. Nor did I give in to a fear/guilt/shame mentality, focusing more on the loving and forgiving qualities of the divine, not beating myself up over "sins" - this should not be confused with being a libertine. I never felt the need to "convince" myself about my own spirituality, a security that ironically brought me to rejecting it because ultimately everything is a life journey - the unfolding of a holistic process towards spiritual growth, always being in a "state of change" and discerning a broader story we continuously write.
Why Monotheism?
Upon my return from Europe and following the election here in America, I dug deeper into spiritual studies as it became clear there was something more than just politics in why I was becoming more conscious of my psychological distance from the Muslim community and a deeper awareness of my ethnicity. Neither was I returning to Christianity, despite some visits to historical cathedrals in Spain and seeking transcendence there and in the religious procession in Madrid. Why I never conceived of anything outside the two religions before? Why this dogmatic belief in One God, Bible and Qur'an, judging one religion by the standards of the other (a reason for my conversion to Islam) - but why not step out of the paradigm itself? After all, I valued myself on my open-mindedness, but simply took monotheism for granted.
They may extol one god, but in practice the monotheistic religions have some being with control over specific natural phenomenon, calling them prophets, angels, or saints. Why would an omnipresent, all-powerful, all-knowing god delegate his powers to these admittedly lesser beings? If he allegedly knows all that we do and has control over all the natural phenomenon, what need for the angels to intervene or record our deeds? If everything is according to his divine will, the natural laws he put in place when "creating" the world, how can this "perfect" god fail so much where he later found the need to send out "prophets" or "messiahs" to correct his earlier mistakes?
Apologists of the Abrahamic religions pride themselves on their "logic", which they use against each other and even within their own sect-ridden religions; its the same with how they will use "science" whenever it seems to "prove" their books, yet disregard it as a false idol otherwise (and I have my own serious problems with scientism). But when we strip the matter down from all the convoluted theological reasonings, we come up with these simple, logical problems left unresolved beyond the circular answer that refers it all back to the book and "belief".
The reality is that Monotheism is very simplistic, reducing the complexities of the world down to one single being. At least that's the theory, because in practice they believe it still "monotheistic" to delegate some of that one being's powers to lesser beings. As one who studied theology, I know the monotheist proposes that for there to be more than one deity means there would be conflict, that their powers would inevitably overstep the other's powers. One central problem is that it ignores the complexities inherent within nature, how every phenomenon shows a myriad of different forces that interact with each other. This principle of one divine being creating a "harmony" in the world by controlling all in his own will or power, is contradicted by the chaos and complexities within nature that nevertheless culminates in balance.
I saw that Polytheism, the nature-based faiths tied to a specific tribe and ethnos, has all the answers for the complexities and chaos we can observe within nature, as opposed to the revelation-based monotheistic religions with their linear view of time and history (ignoring the cycles within nature and history), their separation of the human being from the natural world (rather than seeing them as interconnected, the interplay of all living forms), and viewing our existence as only one temporary life here followed by a permanent existence somewhere else; due to the latter simply not being its focus, how can it satisfactorily explain or reconcile itself to forces within nature?
Problems of Historiography
Neither can the Abrahamic religions reconcile themselves to historiography. For example, the Jewish fables of Moses and the Exodus are completely contradicted by any archaeological evidence and all recorded timelines outside the Bible/Qur'an paradigm. There are no unbiased historical evidences the various Hebrew prophets even existed, much less the various stories repeated about them in both books. One passage of the Qur'an alleges a prophet was sent to "every nation" in antiquity, clarified by a hadith as 124,000, yet the Islamic scriptures only mentions those in the Middle East. Why does it state an alleged universality but then reduces itself to only Semitic stories? The timeline of the Bible is likewise reduced to stories about the Hebrews, so what relevance do either of these books and their stories have for others?
Abrahamics tend to just take their religions for granted, without delving deeper into the historical development of their religions in a holistic rather than a biased piecemeal fashion. Christians would realize how much paganism was absorbed into their faith to spread it, even the holidays and the doctrines about Jesus had their direct parallels in other previous traditions. The Christian of European heritage specifically would realize how this religion was forced upon their ancestors, while the modern secular Abrahamic would shed their apologetic "white guilt" once they realize their ancestors were victims of the very same system of which their ideology is merely a modern outgrowth.
Similarly, Muslims would realize there is a confused historiography about the collection of the Qur'an and the recording of the various ahadith, that would cause any reasonable observer to have serious doubts about their authenticity. The oft-repeated apologist's argument that "Islam was not spread by the sword", by only citing a few select examples where Islam was mostly spread due to the result of traders and mystics, ignores there are indeed innumerable places where Islam was forced upon the people either directly by the sword or indirectly through socio-economic pressures that made their lives miserable. I would simply ask the Muslim of whatever ethnicity, to research from unbiased sources how Islam was spread to your people and what was their native religion before they received Islam - just as I would advise all my fellow Whites to look back into our native traditions.
Much can also be said about the alleged "Golden Age" of Islam, which has some elements of truth but are greatly exaggerated and taken out of context - the latter being that most of these greatest minds were mostly conquered peoples and were notorious freethinkers or "heretics" in one way or another, so how can an orthodox Islam be credited with their impulses? It always annoyed me as one with part-Spanish heritage, how Muslims present the Moorish occupation of Hispania - what they call "al-Andalus" - as a "paradise", ignoring that our ancestors were far from "barbarians", that the Moors (whose invasion was mostly enabled by the vengeful Jews, who hated our Iberian ancestors) were in awe of our ancestors' achievements, and there were many atrocities committed against the occupied across many periods of the Moorish occupation.
Monotheism Is Stolen Paganism
Related to the historiography is an even more serious factor in leading me away from monotheism - the fact that the various stories, motifs and figures of the Abrahamic religions were simply stolen from pre-existing Pagan mythologies; the word "mythology" meant as a profound, deeper spiritual reality conveyed in allegories or archetypes and not synonymous with "superstition" as the various Abrahamic outgrowths assume. Nor is recognizing their Pagan origins negative, unlike the Muslims who point it out against Christianity, the Protestants who point it out against Catholics, etc.. Rather, these Monotheistic religions rest on such shaky ground they needed to absorb the native Pagan motifs and mythologies of the people to even spread their desert religions.
Even the one god figure of the Abrahamics was stolen from Paganism. The Old Testament speaks throughout of the "Elohim", a Semitic plural form for multiple deities. The initial name for the god of the Hebrews was El, which was simply adopted from the surrounding peoples. Initially, "Yahweh" was merely their tribal god which they elevated over all others, without disputing their existence. When we look at "Jesus", we see all elements - a crucified god-man, legend about his birth and its symbols, how his birth was retroactively dated to the Winter Solstice, even the term "son of God" - were already present in various world mythologies. Even Islamic sources admit "Allah" was the name for the Pagan Arabs' chief god, ascribing two daughters and over three hundred lesser gods.
Monotheism itself wasn't new, as there were always tendencies within even the Tribal/Pagan faiths towards reducing all deities to one source. Some of these were rivals to the Abrahamic religions, such as the rise of Mithraism coinciding with Christianity, just like even Islamic sources attest to several prophet claimants throughout Arabia at the time of Muhammad. Yet, these Abrahamic religions (with the exception of Judaism, since they consider themselves "superior' while proposing "Noahide" laws for us "goyim") of Christianity and Islam have stories of their god doing horrible things such as destroying entire peoples for offending him, demanding obedience to him, testing innocent mortals with "sacrifices" to appease him, etc.. This tendency coincided with the centralization of political systems away from the tribal and local to the imperial and even universal, so its easy to see the link.
Conclusion
The more I researched, the more I found there is nothing of wisdom and enlightenment within Islam and Christianity, that wasn't already contained - often with the very same or similar words - within the pre-existing Pagan/Tribal/Ethnic faiths. Yet, these faiths didn't have the negative elements or the fear/guilt and master/slave obedience mentality of the Abrahamic religions, or the rituals trying to govern every single aspect of life. I realized the Pagan/Tribal/Ethnic faiths have a much healthier and holistic ethos, more attuned to nature and accepting human instincts as they are. Quite simply, they have the positive aspects of Christianity or Islam, without all the worst and most destructive aspects.
This is already lengthy, as I don't take any such decision on an impulse and as a complex thinker, have to lay out my reasons for a decision. Yet even with this I am skirting the surface, with many evidences and more specific thoughts to back up each of the statements above. Some of these will be contained in future articles, but as one cannot live only with the negative (of what one is not) my primary focus now is a positive celebration of my heritage, our native spirituality, our traditions, our rich mythos, and both our past and our destiny. I welcome any healthy questions and discussions.
20 September 2018
I haven't written much about politics lately, because I've been focusing primarily on my spiritual studies. The culmination is that I am a proud and confirmed Germanic Pagan, returning to the polytheistic view and folkways of my ancient ancestors, what was theirs before Christianization. This was a radical change for me but something deeply stirring within my soul and my blood, and it has finally found room to surface. And everyday I study, learn and grow more, the more spiritual benefits I can see in the form of such things as synchronicities, the ease at which my personal writings flow and how level-headed I am in these studies. So I can see more balance and being in sync with my true nature. My best description of this is that this was a paradigm shift.
Before these last two years, I had taken monotheism for granted, holding to a dogma of one god - first within the Catholic Christian tradition I was born into, and then as a Muslim since my conversion to Islam at sixteen (the latter due to my problems with the Trinity and other theological problems with Christianity). This included the dogmas of a series of prophets and "divine" books, and afterlife of "heaven" and "hell". These are all mere memories of an old life, as I have purged them from my worldview and finally returned home to what was within my blood this whole time.
This is unlike any conversion experience, nor is it like being "confirmed" or "initiated" into some religion. I was sincere in Islam and was studious in it just like I'm generally studious and research-oriented, as any Muslim who knew me during those years attests and is now bewildered. After so long I came to the conclusion there is no "divine truth" nor is there a "universal" religion valid for every people across all time. Rather, there was an "ethnic faith" specific to every tribe or people on earth, which reflected their unique traditions, honored their ancestors, spoke to their immediate surroundings, and represented the interplay of their archetypes, history and destiny.
Europa My Catalyst
As with any other shifts and transformations, this has been a process and not a single event. But the catalyst was my trip to my paternal lands of Swabia (Southwest Germany) and Castilla (central and parts of north Spain) in July 2016 (my mother is of Flemish descent, but I have yet to visit Belgium). The very moment I stepped foot in Stuttgart and my late father's nearby hometown of Bad Canstatt, many emotions came rushing to me and I responded accordingly. Only later in subsequent research, did I learn about such deeper realities like metagenetics and archetypes, which had escaped my attention before since I simply did not allow myself to conceive of a reality outside monotheism.
Almost like a purification, Germany transformed me as I slowly began to shed the old conscious self and sought to discover the latent true subconscious self. The first to go was the Islamic salat, which I had been doing five times daily since my conversion. I instinctively stopped praying, not even a conscious decision but almost like it was just something that snapped within me and prevented me from praying. This was highly symbolic, as one famous hadith (recorded saying of Muhammad) defines the salat as that which distinguishes between Islam and "kufr" (disbelief). Neither did I have any interest in visiting a mosque there even while planning to do so before arriving, as it hit my psyche that Muslims were innately a foreign element in my ancestral lands, so that my people were not Muslims and nor were any of my ancestors.
I understood this impulse later to be the mystical connection one can form with their ancestral land, as so many who have visited the lands of their ancestors can attest. There was something deep that arose within me as I walked the streets of Bad Canstatt and along the Neckar that my immediate line of ancestors had walked; as I saw the history of Schwaben unfold before me in the Landesmuseum and in the historical buildings where ancestral memories were associated; hiking up the Birkenkopf, reflecting on the surrounding valley including the mystical forests and mountains to the east which were our original home, and the sacrifices of so many of our people during the war, etc.. All these experiences contributed to form a singular stirring of my spirit, and I soon followed it with travels to Madrid, which gave me a strong sense of Castilian heritage and history.
Political Conclusions
Meanwhile, my political awakening was continuing to balance the positive stirring with a negative realization of current events. I had known some about the mass-migrations of mostly Muslims into Germany before that, but seeing it with my own eyes punched me to the stomach and awoke my soul, stirring a fire within me that I am a white American man of European descent, whose direct ancestors and cultural background belong to Europe and not to some abstract concept called the "Umma". I had pride in and an inkling of my heritage before and celebrated it on so many levels, but now it was becoming a holistic reality that should also be graced with a spiritual transformation.
My growing distance from Muslims was already coinciding with the U.S. presidential campaign. I was no supporter of Donald Trump for my own principled reasons, but neither was I any supporter of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I wrote and called out all of them, as any perusal of my writings from that time attest. But seeing the vitriol and hypocrisy of the authoritarian Cultural Marxist Left made it clear that the latter was by far the most dangerous. My own broadly libertarian principles coupled with traditional ideas, were now converging with my awakened sense of ethnic identity as a reaction to the insanity of Cultural Marxism.
The consensus of the Muslim community in America was to support the Democratic Party along with the alliances with the Cultural Marxist Left - their dogmas of mass immigration, multiculturalism and Political Correctness. The hypocrisy of those who demand that our countries must be "open" to even our own demographic replacement, to those who say nothing against the wars of the Clintons or Obama, even while shedding crocodile tears about "refugees" while ignoring the reality of economic migration. I was seeing the broader agenda here, with various Zionist/Globalist bankers supporting both wars in the Middle East and open borders in the West, so that all the political obsessions I had about the Middle East (as indeed was common with any of us in the "Truth" movement) were now being transferred to my own environment.
Every fiber of my being was repulsed by these hypocrites, growing more and more as I became more conscious of things I overlooked before. I was seeing Muslims converge behind these dogmas not for truly altruistic reasons but purely for the same reasons that so many Jews have been the driving force behind mass immigration in our European or North American societies - the resulting multicultural, leveling process benefits their own identity politics. And so it was with Muslims who obviously support more mass immigration of Muslims, resulting in Islamization (not through "creeping sharia" but through PC thought-crime laws masked as "hate laws", just as had been done with "anti-Semitism") and hence the growth of the religion they obviously regard as the "Haqq" that everyone should be "convinced" about as is the nature of these universalist religions.
Separating the Cultural from the Spiritual
My approach to Islam had always been more spiritual than legalistic, which is why I gravitated for most of my time as a Muslim towards Sufism - a balance between the spiritual and legal, but still with a more mystical perspective. Nevertheless, I remained open-minded, critically thinking about things such as the hadith - downplaying or rejecting some as opposed to others that seemed more logical. I was able to see that some were direct reflections of 7th-century Arabia, so had a specific cultural context and were far from "infallible". So it was that I possessed a more "nuanced" view of what constituted "Sunna", or recorded actions and behavior of Muhammad.
No matter what religion they possess, the typical person will always bring their own nature and their own unique experiences to that religion, making it work for them whether by focusing on some aspects or downplaying others. This is especially the case with Islam, which as received to us in the West is certainly not the Islam as practiced in Muslim countries. And this is indeed true of all the universalist religions, which ultimately take on local cultural flavors and expressions.
After a certain point, this process crystallizes where the local culture becomes identified with the religion. Yet there is a hypocrisy where the convert is expected to take on those cultural traits while rejecting their own cultural background. I came to know others who resisted this tendency, but they were always a small minority constantly at odds with the majority trends and even they tried hard to reconcile their true nature with what is essentially a foreign religion. No matter how much we try to reconcile it, all the Abrahamic religions arose from and within the Middle East, so how does it apply to all people in all places and at all times?
Looking back at it, I always had these inclinations that were stirrings of my true self putting up its resistance. I was never circumcised, even after my conversion, always viewing it as a strange custom that belonged to a different culture and foreign to me who actually embraces his intactness. Although I memorized several chapters of the Qur'an and learned the prayers and other acts of worship, neither did I ever focus much attention on learning to read and write Arabic. This is especially significant, because I was always very studious in learning so much about Islam; it just was never an inclination towards the Arabic language. And for the last few years of being Muslim, I eschewed the traditional clothing that symbolized being "Muslim", never obligatory but still viewed as "pious" and "spiritual".
Other stirrings were felt in my behavior and outlook. I was always put off by those who proselytize or apologize for a religion, being sanctimonious like their outer act is a crutch to convince themselves or make themselves feel better. Nor did I give in to a fear/guilt/shame mentality, focusing more on the loving and forgiving qualities of the divine, not beating myself up over "sins" - this should not be confused with being a libertine. I never felt the need to "convince" myself about my own spirituality, a security that ironically brought me to rejecting it because ultimately everything is a life journey - the unfolding of a holistic process towards spiritual growth, always being in a "state of change" and discerning a broader story we continuously write.
Why Monotheism?
Upon my return from Europe and following the election here in America, I dug deeper into spiritual studies as it became clear there was something more than just politics in why I was becoming more conscious of my psychological distance from the Muslim community and a deeper awareness of my ethnicity. Neither was I returning to Christianity, despite some visits to historical cathedrals in Spain and seeking transcendence there and in the religious procession in Madrid. Why I never conceived of anything outside the two religions before? Why this dogmatic belief in One God, Bible and Qur'an, judging one religion by the standards of the other (a reason for my conversion to Islam) - but why not step out of the paradigm itself? After all, I valued myself on my open-mindedness, but simply took monotheism for granted.
They may extol one god, but in practice the monotheistic religions have some being with control over specific natural phenomenon, calling them prophets, angels, or saints. Why would an omnipresent, all-powerful, all-knowing god delegate his powers to these admittedly lesser beings? If he allegedly knows all that we do and has control over all the natural phenomenon, what need for the angels to intervene or record our deeds? If everything is according to his divine will, the natural laws he put in place when "creating" the world, how can this "perfect" god fail so much where he later found the need to send out "prophets" or "messiahs" to correct his earlier mistakes?
Apologists of the Abrahamic religions pride themselves on their "logic", which they use against each other and even within their own sect-ridden religions; its the same with how they will use "science" whenever it seems to "prove" their books, yet disregard it as a false idol otherwise (and I have my own serious problems with scientism). But when we strip the matter down from all the convoluted theological reasonings, we come up with these simple, logical problems left unresolved beyond the circular answer that refers it all back to the book and "belief".
The reality is that Monotheism is very simplistic, reducing the complexities of the world down to one single being. At least that's the theory, because in practice they believe it still "monotheistic" to delegate some of that one being's powers to lesser beings. As one who studied theology, I know the monotheist proposes that for there to be more than one deity means there would be conflict, that their powers would inevitably overstep the other's powers. One central problem is that it ignores the complexities inherent within nature, how every phenomenon shows a myriad of different forces that interact with each other. This principle of one divine being creating a "harmony" in the world by controlling all in his own will or power, is contradicted by the chaos and complexities within nature that nevertheless culminates in balance.
I saw that Polytheism, the nature-based faiths tied to a specific tribe and ethnos, has all the answers for the complexities and chaos we can observe within nature, as opposed to the revelation-based monotheistic religions with their linear view of time and history (ignoring the cycles within nature and history), their separation of the human being from the natural world (rather than seeing them as interconnected, the interplay of all living forms), and viewing our existence as only one temporary life here followed by a permanent existence somewhere else; due to the latter simply not being its focus, how can it satisfactorily explain or reconcile itself to forces within nature?
Problems of Historiography
Neither can the Abrahamic religions reconcile themselves to historiography. For example, the Jewish fables of Moses and the Exodus are completely contradicted by any archaeological evidence and all recorded timelines outside the Bible/Qur'an paradigm. There are no unbiased historical evidences the various Hebrew prophets even existed, much less the various stories repeated about them in both books. One passage of the Qur'an alleges a prophet was sent to "every nation" in antiquity, clarified by a hadith as 124,000, yet the Islamic scriptures only mentions those in the Middle East. Why does it state an alleged universality but then reduces itself to only Semitic stories? The timeline of the Bible is likewise reduced to stories about the Hebrews, so what relevance do either of these books and their stories have for others?
Abrahamics tend to just take their religions for granted, without delving deeper into the historical development of their religions in a holistic rather than a biased piecemeal fashion. Christians would realize how much paganism was absorbed into their faith to spread it, even the holidays and the doctrines about Jesus had their direct parallels in other previous traditions. The Christian of European heritage specifically would realize how this religion was forced upon their ancestors, while the modern secular Abrahamic would shed their apologetic "white guilt" once they realize their ancestors were victims of the very same system of which their ideology is merely a modern outgrowth.
Similarly, Muslims would realize there is a confused historiography about the collection of the Qur'an and the recording of the various ahadith, that would cause any reasonable observer to have serious doubts about their authenticity. The oft-repeated apologist's argument that "Islam was not spread by the sword", by only citing a few select examples where Islam was mostly spread due to the result of traders and mystics, ignores there are indeed innumerable places where Islam was forced upon the people either directly by the sword or indirectly through socio-economic pressures that made their lives miserable. I would simply ask the Muslim of whatever ethnicity, to research from unbiased sources how Islam was spread to your people and what was their native religion before they received Islam - just as I would advise all my fellow Whites to look back into our native traditions.
Much can also be said about the alleged "Golden Age" of Islam, which has some elements of truth but are greatly exaggerated and taken out of context - the latter being that most of these greatest minds were mostly conquered peoples and were notorious freethinkers or "heretics" in one way or another, so how can an orthodox Islam be credited with their impulses? It always annoyed me as one with part-Spanish heritage, how Muslims present the Moorish occupation of Hispania - what they call "al-Andalus" - as a "paradise", ignoring that our ancestors were far from "barbarians", that the Moors (whose invasion was mostly enabled by the vengeful Jews, who hated our Iberian ancestors) were in awe of our ancestors' achievements, and there were many atrocities committed against the occupied across many periods of the Moorish occupation.
Monotheism Is Stolen Paganism
Related to the historiography is an even more serious factor in leading me away from monotheism - the fact that the various stories, motifs and figures of the Abrahamic religions were simply stolen from pre-existing Pagan mythologies; the word "mythology" meant as a profound, deeper spiritual reality conveyed in allegories or archetypes and not synonymous with "superstition" as the various Abrahamic outgrowths assume. Nor is recognizing their Pagan origins negative, unlike the Muslims who point it out against Christianity, the Protestants who point it out against Catholics, etc.. Rather, these Monotheistic religions rest on such shaky ground they needed to absorb the native Pagan motifs and mythologies of the people to even spread their desert religions.
Even the one god figure of the Abrahamics was stolen from Paganism. The Old Testament speaks throughout of the "Elohim", a Semitic plural form for multiple deities. The initial name for the god of the Hebrews was El, which was simply adopted from the surrounding peoples. Initially, "Yahweh" was merely their tribal god which they elevated over all others, without disputing their existence. When we look at "Jesus", we see all elements - a crucified god-man, legend about his birth and its symbols, how his birth was retroactively dated to the Winter Solstice, even the term "son of God" - were already present in various world mythologies. Even Islamic sources admit "Allah" was the name for the Pagan Arabs' chief god, ascribing two daughters and over three hundred lesser gods.
Monotheism itself wasn't new, as there were always tendencies within even the Tribal/Pagan faiths towards reducing all deities to one source. Some of these were rivals to the Abrahamic religions, such as the rise of Mithraism coinciding with Christianity, just like even Islamic sources attest to several prophet claimants throughout Arabia at the time of Muhammad. Yet, these Abrahamic religions (with the exception of Judaism, since they consider themselves "superior' while proposing "Noahide" laws for us "goyim") of Christianity and Islam have stories of their god doing horrible things such as destroying entire peoples for offending him, demanding obedience to him, testing innocent mortals with "sacrifices" to appease him, etc.. This tendency coincided with the centralization of political systems away from the tribal and local to the imperial and even universal, so its easy to see the link.
Conclusion
The more I researched, the more I found there is nothing of wisdom and enlightenment within Islam and Christianity, that wasn't already contained - often with the very same or similar words - within the pre-existing Pagan/Tribal/Ethnic faiths. Yet, these faiths didn't have the negative elements or the fear/guilt and master/slave obedience mentality of the Abrahamic religions, or the rituals trying to govern every single aspect of life. I realized the Pagan/Tribal/Ethnic faiths have a much healthier and holistic ethos, more attuned to nature and accepting human instincts as they are. Quite simply, they have the positive aspects of Christianity or Islam, without all the worst and most destructive aspects.
This is already lengthy, as I don't take any such decision on an impulse and as a complex thinker, have to lay out my reasons for a decision. Yet even with this I am skirting the surface, with many evidences and more specific thoughts to back up each of the statements above. Some of these will be contained in future articles, but as one cannot live only with the negative (of what one is not) my primary focus now is a positive celebration of my heritage, our native spirituality, our traditions, our rich mythos, and both our past and our destiny. I welcome any healthy questions and discussions.
[Update, 2022: Since writing this article, I have learned and grown alot as its all an ongoing process. I am broadly a Heathen and Pagan, relating to all the Germanic, Celtic, and Iberian parts of my heritage. I learn from closely-related cultures but try to reconstruct down to the Southern Germanic, the Belgae, and the Celtiberians as faithfully as possible. Its all about a self-awakening and rejecting the Abrahamic paradigm rather than a "conversion" to some "religion". Rather, this self-awareness or Gnosis is an alternative to religion. I've also awakened to the Animism that is at the root of all native spiritualities. - SJ]
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