All religions are cults. Some are just more accepted than others.
:tup:
I really like religions. I just wish people with hidden motives didn’t become so powerful as a preacher or leader. There are a lot of cultural and sociality beliefs that fuck it up to…
You think the preachers who love religions and the study of it. Want to become someone who can help people, but they dont want to molest kids so they exorcism duty?
Since I’m bored at work, let me regale you with another tale of my people. Well, sort of. This one’s from Iceland but we were basically the same people back then, and while it’s not technically mythology, it’s a fictional story with cultural significance. Now, this one is more or less the Icelandic Oddyssey, so I’ll try to cut it down really short. Anyway, this is Njal’s Saga.
See, the vikings believed very strongly in an eye for an eye when it came to fucking with a man’s kin. A famous saying supposedly uttered by Odin would roughly translate as “creatures die, friends die, you too shall pass on, but I know one thing that remains eternal, judgment on a dead man’s name”. So basically, the only thing that will outlast you is how people remember you, so you better uphold your good name. Which meant avenging any wrongs really hardcore. No more was this the case than on Iceland, where eventually blood feuds had to be outlawed because families would gank each other for generations over a slight half a century ago. Which brings us to Njal’s Saga proper, a tale of families getting murdered over the course of 65 years.
The story of Njal is about how fucked up this system was. See, Njal was a viking lawyer. Yes, those existed, and were just as awesome as they sound. Anyway, Njal ends up murdering a rival, and adopts his son as his own as a way to prevent the kid from seeking revenge when he grows up, as would be expected of him. He treats the kid super well, and eventually manages to make him a chieftain through some legal shenanigans. All is good and well. Except Njal has two legitimate sons, both of which are proper vikings in that they feel the need to defend their honor at the slightest perceived insult. A rival chieftain who is pissed Njal’s foster son is such an awesome leader convinces Njal’s sons that a foster son being made chieftain is insulting them as Njal’s flesh and blood, and the two chucklefucks gank the foster son, unarmed in the middle of sowing his fields.
So now Njal has to try to defend his two dumbass sons from murder charges against his foster son, whom he genuinely loved like his own. Except the murdered man’s wife demands three times the usual amount, which is a ridiculous sum that’s virtually impossible to pay considering he was a chieftain and the price of his life would’ve been high to begin with. But Njal being a smart man manages to borrow money from his allies to pay the sum and save his kids. As an added bonus, he throws on a fancy cloak from a distant country. Which turns out to have been a mistake. See, the prosecutor claims this is calling him a woman since cloaks are unisex garments. Now, in Norse culture, not only was being called a woman a grave insult, but it could also be considered being accused of being a sorcerer (it’s a long complicated story that basically boils down to “fags are criminals and criminals are magic”) and negotiations break down to blood vengeance as the only option. See, in Norse law, if you didn’t defend yourself against an insult it would be considered to be the truth.
So Njal prepares to defend from his ancestral home, and assembles his men. But his enemies are so pissed at this point that they employ the strategy of torching his home with innocent and guilty inside, a tactic that was earlier decried as cowardly and disgraceful. So they have the option of burning alive inside the house or stepping out and getting ganked by the men surrounding the house. Only one man, Njal’s grandson Flosi, manages to escape alive. Now, Flosi goes on an epic spree of revenge. First, he uses his lawyer powers learned from his grandfather to have the arsonists banished from Iceland and taking all their gold. Then he ambushes them as they’re leaving Iceland and kills some of them. He then hunts the remaining ones to Orkney, where he breaks into the earl’s hall by force and stabs a motherfucker who was talking mad shit about the people who were burned. As a matter of fact, Flosi has such a goddamn boner for revenge that he hunts the remaining members of the families that wronged him all the way to Rome, where he finally kills them.
So yeah, it’s a tale of how giving a man a cloak could lead to your entire family getting burned to death, and how the only sensible reaction to that is to travel across all of Europe by ship and murdering an entire bloodline. Because viking vengeance was hardcore. Incidentally, while this is a fictional story, the ridiculousness of blood feuds is generally considered one of the main reasons why the kingdom of Iceland basically disintegrated by the 13th century and they became Norwegian subjects.
There should be a gods’ strip or something like in Dragonlance where all of the worshipping buildings and shrines of all religions and mythology are on one strip; like the casinos on Las Vegas strip.
Wonder how long that would last…
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Atheist Experience 21.05 with Matt Dillahunty and John Iacoletti.
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Atheist Experience 21.06 with Russell Glasser and Phil Session.
Heads up. This episode was boring, which is a rarity.
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Atheist Experience 21.07 with Matt Dillahunty and Don Baker.
Hilarious episode. A few great callers. Highly recommend this episode.
They’re sort of like off-brand Conan the Barbarian with D&D product placement all over the place. It’s very much in the same vein as the Drizzt books. Writing that appeals to nerdy teens. You have the tortured evil guy who isn’t such a bad guy after all, who also gets a love interest who doesn’t care he’s weak and frail. You have the muscular badass who gets tons of relatively graphic sex scenes for a book aimed at teenagers. You have the goofy comedy sidekick, who in hindsight you realize was just being a complete and utter dickhead.
As literature, they probably have less merit than Conan, because as pulpy as the Conan books are, they’re generally pretty well-written and they have inspired an entire genre. And as much as I’m shitting on Dragonlance right now, they were everything 14 year old me wanted out of a book. If I ever have a nerdy kid, I’ll give him those books and try not to think about the awkward boner he’ll get from the rather graphic sex scenes for a youth novel. Or maybe they weren’t even graphic. I just remember going “holy shit, they’re fucking in this book!” some 14 years ago.
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Atheist Experience 21.08 with Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris.
Time to resurrect this shit because I really like making overly long posts about dope viking shit. Also, you know, Thor Ragnarok makes this seem timely.
So you’ve probably heard of Ragnarök, the Norse end of the world. In and of itself, the concept of an end of the world isn’t anything unique. In fact, most major religions through history seem to have one. But the Norse one is not only just as badass as is expected, it’s also pretty goddamn ridiculous and includes a ton of shit that simply makes no sense and is indicative of Norse storytelling, which is basically making shit up on the spot and/or telling blatantly contradictory stories as long as they serve their purpose.
So Ragnarök starts with Fimbulvinter, a winter lasting three years. The sun stops shining in the sky. There will be endless war and brother will kill brother. This last part is significant because the vikings saw extremely strictly on the murder of kin, and doing it yourself was an unspeakable crime. Wolves will hunt humans. The stars will fall from the sky.
Now this shit is bad, but next is a team-up worthy of any Versus game. The fire giants will sail on Naglfar, a ship made out of the nails of the dead, and their king Surt the Black will swing a sword that burns brighter than the sun and immolate all of existence. Also, this army of fire giants? It’s literally called the World Enders, just to emphasize what ther purpose is in this story. For some reason they will join up with the frost giants, who have no problem whatsoever with getting torched, because fuck the good guys, I guess. One would think beings from a world of ice would have more of an issue with burning everything to ashes. As if this ball-freezing and ass-torching wasn’t enough, the Loki family will join up too, because as we established, nothing has to make sense as long as all the bad guys are all fucking shit up.
Fenrir will break loose from his fetters, and despite previously only being a particularly large wolf who could eat a man’s hand in one bite, he is now large enough to swallow the sun. Because fuck the good guys. His lower jaw will scrape the earth and his upper jaw will scrape the heavens. Again, he’s just this large now, deal with it. His brother, the Midgard Serpent, will rise out of the sea. Now, this is a giant poisonous snake known as the World Serpent because it circles the world. A being this huge rising out of the sea will cause tidal waves, flooding the world. Now, two things here. One, keep in mind the world is already being torched by Surt. Two, since simply drowning the world would be pussy shit, the Midgard Serpent also spews poison, making all the seas and all the air toxic. So now we have burning to ash, ice giants, a wolf eating the sun, and drowning in fucking poison tsunamis.
So now it’s time for the gods to fight. After all, Ragnarök means the Twilight of the Gods. Speaking perhaps to their questionable competence, the Norse gods will not notice the whole burning, poison floods, earthquakes, or sun-eating wolf shenanigans until the Watchman of the Gods, Heimdall blows his horn. I guess they were too busy doing god shit to pay attention to three fucking years of world-shattering disasters, or the sky splitting, or the lack of any light whatsoever because the sun, the moon and the stars are gone. So the gates of Asgard swing open and the armies of the gods march forth. Now, keep in mind, this is what the whole Valhalla deal was. Die in battle and end up in the Great Hall of Odin, where you prepare for the final battle. Kind of a shitty afterlife considering what happens next. Spoiler: the gods get their asses kicked.
Odin starts out by immediately getting eaten by Fenrir. So much for the All-Father, I suppose. His son takes revenge by tearing the wolf’s jaws open and stabbing it through its open maw, piercing its heart with Odin’s spear. Again, keep in mind this wolf was just recently large enough to swallow the sun. Apparently it’s smaller now. Thor faces off with his old nemesis the Midgard Serpent. Luckily, he does slightly better than his dad and actually kills the giant serpent, but takes a page out of a kickass kung-fu movie and only manages to take nine steps before he dies of the serpent’s venom. Heimdall, proving once again he is probably the most competent of the gods, performs a double KO with Loki, both gods running each other through with their spears. Garm, the giant hound guarding the realm of the dead (or possibly a separate evil location, depending on who you ask), will eat Tyr, the quite redundant god of war who still takes third place behind Thor and Odin as a war god despite war being his only deal, while the other two have like a thousand domains on top of war. Tyr stabs the hound from the inside its stomach with his sword before dying, desperately trying to rid himself of his bitch status. Which is of questionable success, since it’s kind of vague who or what Garm actually is, so Tyr ends up being killed by a big dog everyone can agree exists and is a badass, but nobody can quite decide where he comes from or what exactly he guards. Freyr, being a goddamn dumbass, gave away his magic sword before facing Surt, so he’s fucked. Being a viking god, however, he defiantly stabs Surt in the eye with a deer’s antler before getting cut in half by Surt’s flaming sword. Keep in mind that the guy who stabs the fucking dude who burns the entire world to a crisp with a piece of Bambi’s dad is not a war god. He is a fertility god. His main characteristic is a giant erect phallus. So Boner Man stabs the fucking World Ender in the eye despite having lost his only weapon, while the All-Father, an actual war god and the most powerful of all the gods, unceremoniously dies without getting a single hit in despite literally being armed with a spear whose only characteristic is that it cannot miss ever. Go figure.
So with basically all the gods, men and various mythological creatures dead, the world burns to ash and sinks into the sea. One has to wonder what the bad guys’ plan was there. The only survivors are two humans and a bunch of jobber god-kids nobody cares about who get to rebuild the world. Only Nidhogg, the dragon that chews on the roots of the World Tree Yggdrasil, is still chowing down. Dun dun dun! Sequel hook!
Scientifically speaking, there will be an end to Earth and all living things will become burn and the Earth will become uninhabitable