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@Alfher I'm sure drawing connections between dieties in different cultures does not instantly categorize someone as a "racist colonizer". Someone is just sharing their thoughts on similarities. They're not forcing others to think that all these pairs are in fact the same diety. IMO drawing connections and mentioning similarities is fine as long as someone is not using that to justify forced cultural absorption/takeover or some kind of information-apartheid.
I did not say that anyone present was being intentionally, consciously racist or colonial. I said specifically that the methodology exhibited in this thread has historically been used for racist oppression and colonial genocide and that this is the basis for this type of forced synchretism.
Which is a normal starting place, because our entire western history and academia is built on that foundation of racism and colonialism, and that perspective is built into our subconscious paradigms in the western world. From the genocide the Ancient Israelites did to the people of Canaan, to what Greece and Rome did to everybody from Egypt to the Celts, to what Britain did to basically everyone up to what the US and its cohorts are still doing today.
This is precisely why scholars have developed extra steps and processes of Deconolizing and properly Deconstructing history, religion, and other paradigms as well as our own subconscious paradigms. Which I mentioned in my first post, because Deconstruction and Decolonization techniques are important to this work.
There is natural synchretism that comes from natural cultural interaction, and there is made up cultural synchretism like in this thread, or like how Rome took Celtic gods out of context to equate them with their own gods. This second type is a tool of cultural genocide and historic erasure, and still has that effect even if not intentionally used with that goal in mind. Indigenous people the world over still suffer from this genocidal effect today, because uneducated people keep taking lore and practices from closed traditions out of context and create fake stories that bury the real stories.
There is an appropriate, correct, objective way to analyze these histories. That’s why it’s important that Canaanite religion is the direct influence on the Bible, not Sumerian. The Ancient Israelites of the Torah were not interacting with Sumerians who lived 2,000 years before they did anymore than we are interacting with Greece colonized Egypt where they wrote the PGM scrolls, they were interacting with Canaanites.
This is also why it’s important for me to understand the Christian influence on the Norse literature I study for my personal praxis, and how even magic symbols like the Ægishalmur come directly from the tradition of the Key of Solomon influencing Nordic Christian grimoire magicians rather than being ancient runic symbols like a lot of people today think.
There is no truth without context.
The archeological and literary record, in proper geographic and temporal context, provides tons of incredible answers to questions like where the Elohim came from and who Lucifer actually is or where Jesus learned the phrase Gehenna from. We have lost a lot to the sands of time, but we haven’t lost everything.
Most people would just rather feel like they’re right than do the hard work to learn the objective truth and challenge their own UPG.