Why are abrahamic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam so hateful against polytheism?

[HoldAll]

yea no both of them have semitic DNA and you cant ethnically cleanse your own race without killing yourself + this is off topic or something

A lot of the posts in this thread are off-topic. It's monotheists vs. polytheists, remember, not monotheists against each other. Which just goes to show what a non-problem this really is.

 

[PolishTruthSeeker]

Let us continue this discussion.

 

[MorganBlack]

Hellz yeah! I'm a pantheist, but just for you, today going TradCath.

The Crusades were peak medieval bro-code. Catholic Church flexing against the infidels, reclaiming Jerusalem like a boss. Manly AFK - knights, armor, epic battles, zero soy. Built Western unity, spurred trade, tech boom. Holy wars? More like holy gains. Deus vult, chads!

Post automatically merged: Nov 11, 2025

Dammit folks. I'm having a really hard time finding current IRL examples of evil dastardly TradCaths persecuting IRL pagans.
Post away, But until then I'm using a made up one.

You had me a 'pray - kill'. No need to convince me.

 

[Ananda]

Polytheists are have no moral high-ground to stand on. Indian polytheists killed up to a million "Abrahamists," by some estimates, in the Partition of 1947. I see no evidence Polytheism make you any less violent, and they killed tens of thousands of people in recent history . For instance, in the 1983 Nellie Massacre, around 1,600 to 2,000 Muslims were killed by their Hindu village neighbors. I am also not making a truth claim Indians are any more or less violent than anyone else.

We can go on , but my real point is that religion is not a very good metric to measure the human potential for violence. All it takes is for any number of triggers for a civilization to enter Mass Psychosis and become violent.

Indian polytheists did not kill a million muslims during partition. Most of the bloodshed during the partition of India & Pakistan was between the adherents of the monotheist religion of Sikhism and Islam in the province of Punjab. The muslims began the massacres and rapes and forced the Sikhs out of their ancestral lands in the muslim dominant parts of the Punjab, and the Sikhs retaliated. The numbers killed were less than a million and likely equally divided.

The 1983 Nellie massacre was in the indian state of Assam, which is being encroached upon by muslim bengalis from Bangladesh even now. This was an ethnic conflict driven by fears of their language and culture being subsumed. Go to any Assamese forum and you'll find that most of them still want the muslim Bengalis to GTFO because reportedly they don't integrate, despise the polytheist religion, are responsible for a large amount of crime, their predatory behaviour toward women, child marriage and breeding hordes of children. Even now the polytheists are being persecuted in Bangladesh by the innocent muslim angels. There is no surprise why the neighboring ethnic groups would fear them.

Usually the pattern is, the Muslims fuck around, then find out (where the polytheists have the numbers to fight back), and then cry victim. Note the recent issues in Gaza. You don't know anything about India.

Polytheists in general do not brand people who have different ideas as devil worshippers and evil. Islam and Christianity most likely worship egregores, given their strong motivation to increase numbers by conversion or breeding hordes of children and taking over the world.

 

[MorganBlack]

Ananada, thank you for mentioning the Sikhs!

I thought the game we're playing here is to take cultural tribal conflicts that are often religiously encoded, including resource or territorial warfare , assign maximum blame to the other guy, de-contextualize and generalize all of them into an even more abstract category we made.

Since we are NOW doing nuance, sure, other estimates range from 500,000 to 800,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus and Sikhs in India during the 1947 Partition.

Post automatically merged: Nov 12, 2025

Look, I'm temporarily playing as a TradCath in this game.

You really don't have to convince me to go on a crusade, jihad, or dharma yuddha. All good.

 

[Ananda]

I'm not even going to address how deeply fuuuuucked UP and tragic we now have unironic legit neo-Nazi pagans are (if you don't know, check Telegram for their knumbskull racist, anti-Jew, anti-Black, anti-Latino, and anti-Catholic vile idiocy. ) - but to make the claim that violence is exclusively on "the Abrahamic side" is, to put it mildly, counter-evidential.

You're right, not all 'pagan' religions are equal. Christianity was an improvement over the older Nordic religion. There is nothing in the Nordic religion which compares to the ideas found in Vedanta or Mahayana Buddhism.

 

[MorganBlack]

Thank you, Ananda!!

TradCath game off.

I should have qualified that I have Norse pagan friends whom I love and respect, and they are not represented by those evil dickweeds.

I tend to side with Kashmiri Shaivism, if I understand it, that "God" - the ultimate ground of being "is" Shiva (I call "Him" The Nous, and the Demiurge) and is so caught up with Shakti so He's not minding reality much, so we get all sort of crazy shit going on - torndoes, swarms of murder hornets, and people running around being pretty terrible. Men have nipples.. and come on, the platypus!

Nobody is minding the store. So we all sort of have to figure stuff out, and what our values are together. It's just taking us all a few millennia to do it. Until then we are all pretty shitty pretty often.

 

[lumineth Realm Lord]

As an aspiring occultist, I want to know the political implications of it.

Control. Monotheism fits everything into boxes of absolute good and evil. Good is based around submission to power and affirmation of orthodoxy. Evil is when you think for yourself and of yourself. It's either risk being isolated, and then going to hell, or get back in line.

It's much harder to have that much power over people when you have multiple gods around, some espousing different values to yours, or even making direct opposition to your authority. And they are not only considered just as powerful as yours, but they're just as sacred and righteous. That's why Christianity has satan.

 

[DemiGodBenson]

I can't speak for all of the 30,000 + denominations of Christianity, nor the multiple versions of Islam and Judaism, but I'll try to briefly summarize the Abrahamic perspective.

There is only one God. Not one God bigger or better than the others, but only one. All the rest, including all the millions of different versions of Jehovah, are fiction. Not real. Nonexistent. Symptoms of human consciousness.

It is tempting to think of those things as real beings with real power, who respond and interact in a godlike manner. It is tempting, but it's wrong. When we choose to follow wrong things under false assumptions, we end up in bad situations. If we think God loves killing people, we end up killing people. If we think God likes strippers, we get a religion of strippers like they had in Babylon. If we think God is about being the biggest best and baddest, we get patriarchal cults with infant sacrifice and slave labor. Every time we try to pin down God to a set of human-like identities, the culture founded on those beliefs becomes an evil monster that sometimes doesn't go away until natural disaster wipes it out. Whenever you find people engaged in mass atrocity, you can be sure it is rooted in their beliefs about how the universe is governed.

You can believe in any deity you want, and you will find a mountain of reasons to think that it's real. The real God is always going to be a step beyond comprehension, hence the term "ineffable" applied to it in the lore of magic. Something so grand has no problem relating to you as a father, as a brother, as a friend, or as some squid monster or period-costume character if that's how you approach it.

Post automatically merged: Dec 1, 2025

This makes sense. There's a thread about reading the book of Psalms every day as a kind of ritual practice, and I thought the idea was interesting enough to get out my Bibles and see which ones were most readable. I used to read the Bible quite a lot in my younger days before I became an atheist. I'm not quite an atheist nowadays, though I would probably refuse to give the Ineffable a name. One of the Bibles I have uses Jehovah throughout the OT. I was reading another book recently which referenced the Jerusalem Bible. The quotes in it appeared quite readable, so I began reading JB translation of Psalms online. JB uses Yahweh where the tetragrammaton appears in the original text.

What struck me more profoundly now than it ever did in my past was how often the Psalm writer invoked Yahweh/Jehovah by name and attributed human-like qualities to his deity. Now I do realize that the Middle East was quite a violent place 2-3000 years ago, so it makes some sense from a historical perspective that violence is a common theme in these ancient writings. I also realized that the Psalmists were usually underdogs of some kind since they often wrote about being surrounded by enemies. And these enemies weren't just foreign kingdoms but people within their own tribe(s). Yahweh was being constantly invoked in poetic form to protect the victim of injustice. It comes across as a bit over-the-top at times, but I recognize a bit of hyperbole too.

What is clear from an objective reading of the OT is that polytheism was recognized. The creation account says, "Let US make man in our image." Much of the posturing in the books of the Bible sounds like kids boasting about who has the strongest daddy (god). It would not surprise me if tellers of tales told some whoppers of lies just to improve the morale of the tribe(s) preparing for battle. "Did you hear about the time our god made the walls of Jericho fall down?" And yet, how many times in the book of Psalms does the writer complain that Yahweh isn't helping? "Wake up, Yahweh!" Ps 44:23.

Well, we get down to the topic at last. The way I see it is that Abrahamic religions tend to literal interpretations of their holy scriptures. I cannot speak for Judaism and Islam, but among more fundamentalist Christians, the belief in Biblical inerrancy makes them jump through many fallacies to reach illogical conclusions, and then they demand you accept them! The games they will play with words can astound you. You may think that Christians hate Pagans for their polytheism, but in fact many Christian sects hate each other for their different interpretations of the same scriptures. Joel Baden's concept of the "inclusion of differences" eludes them. What this means is that the Bible is a compilation of contradictory writings, and this was apparently okay at the time they were assembled because the stories didn't have to make logical sense in a time when most people were illiterate. The writings contained allegorical information that mattered more than concrete facts to their way of thinking.

The Christians that don't hate other sects are quite likely to be more accepting of varying belief systems and participate in interfaith movements. I somehow doubt you'd have problems with more liberal Christian denominations since the members are less inclined to worry about doctrinal dilemmas, focusing instead on social programs in the community.

 

[MorganBlack]

Modern neopaganism is romantic poetry (art) based on an idealized version of history.

All good, I think history is quite horrible and I understand why people want to distance themselves from it. But to them it only counts if the mean people were from Catholic countries.

Modern pagan reconstructionism comes out of academic speculation , and was shaped by misinformation left over from wars between the British and Dutch empires against their economic rival , the Spanish empire, from the early modern era. Huge topic but the stories of "evil and dastardly" Catholics is mostly imperial propaganda from this clash of empires, roughly 1580–1700.

Academia then was high insular and British-coded, so the Anglo atheists took this propaganda as literally true, only to be picked by the same people when they made early modern neopaganism in the 19th century as community theatre re-eenactments. Maypoles, Morriss dancing, Stonehenge, you know the drill.

To be clear, I do not attack and modern neopagans the same way they attack Christians, and happen to like them... good folks. But their incessant and loud use of WitchTok slurs and insults against their boogie-man the "Abrahamists" is tiresome and boring, and usually just derails the discussions of magic to virtue signal and lecture the rest of us. In the States all that is usually just misdirected anger away from their parents who raised them in horrible big-box evangelical churches.

So one of the characteristics of people with a strong Saturn in their natal chart is an interest in history, so this one of my fave topics. Lets look at what the historical records say, summarized below:

Historical pagans varied widely by culture and era, but primary sources actually do confirm high levels of violence as being normal:

Germanic pagans were rapist head-choppers who practiced ritual human sacrifice and widespread raiding/rape as economic strategy. This is usually hand-waved away becasue the written record here is mostly from Tacticus, But it's still self-serving cherry-picking.

Greek pagans practiced slavery, female infanticide, widespread pederasty, with ever more during wartime rape and enslavement.

Roman pagans had gladiatorial death games, mass crucifixions, infanticide of deformed newborns, and routine public executions/torture.

British pagans had a entire culture based on warbands conducting tribute warfare, ritual human sacrifice, mass headhunting, tribal warfare, slave raiding, exposure of unwanted infants, Violence and sacrifice were routine, not exceptional.. with no evidence of a peaceful matriarchy the fantasists dream of.

Let's be clear, the pagan world was a legit hellscape. Yes , we should call out the Church for killing the Cathars, but I guess people being terrible people only counts if they are Christian.

 

[hûr the other]

Some old pagan sites in England show signs that Jesus and the Christian god where included in their religion, this could be a mistake of archology. Most churches stand on old pagan sites normally on hills/mounds with yew trees on the site. This duel worship would have ended when it was deemed a heathen religion by pope Gregory I.

 

[MorganBlack]

Yep yep. We need a better word than Christo-paganism, just... ugh!, but yeah, it is what it was.

Religion itself as a category is an artifact of an English-speaking education system that loves to place everybody and everything in tight little boxes put on shelves in a library.

See also Sasha Chaitow's Substack for some of the ways "esotericism" has been in need of better taxonomy for some time:

The Neoplatonic Soul of Theurgic Orthodoxy

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Magic, Orthodoxy, and the Limits of the Esoteric Label

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Greek Shamanism: A Comedy of Errors
The Making of a Modern Fiction and How a Platypus Explains What the Evidence Really Says

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Greek Magic Primer #1: What is Esotericism and why does it matter in the Greek context?

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Why Pagan Philosophers became Orthodox Icons

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[Angelkesfarl]

"When we speak of Monotheism (al-Tawḥīd), we are speaking of the One God: He is the Absolute Power, Absolute Strength, Absolute Knowledge, and Absolute Peace. He is a Living, Omnipotent God who listens to all His creations simultaneously without losing focus. He neither sleeps nor wakes, existing outside the boundaries of time and space. He is unique unto Himself; He has no wife, no son, no ministers, and no one to assist Him.

He created the Angels after He created the Heavens and made them His messengers between Himself and His creation. In the Islamic faith, Angels never disobey God's commands because they are instilled with a powerful and deep love for God, coupled with a sacred reverence towards Him.

God is Righteous, Just, Merciful, Generous, and forgives all sins and disobedience. However, He intensely despises one thing: lying (al-Kadhib). Because He despises lying, He hates it when He creates things and then an individual lies by claiming that another god created them. (Illustrative Example: Imagine raising children, dedicating all your time and money to them, only to find them ultimately saying, 'You are not our father; another father gave us everything.') Would you accept that?

Because everything claimed about the existence of any other god is purely worthless nonsense, the Lord therefore hates Shirk (polytheism) and despises idols, but He does not hate the idolaters.

We, as human beings, are given limited lifespans, and He grants all of us the freedom of choice. But blame no one but yourself in the end when you find yourself dead, surrounded by the Angels of Punishment (Malā’ikat al-ʿAdhāb), and descending into Hell.

Incidentally, there are no devils in Hell at all—only torturers who are also like humans. Hell is overseen by 19 principal Angels: 18 Angels (3 for each direction) and a principal Angel named 'Mālik', named for his massive control capabilities. He is an extremely great and immensely powerful Angel; no Angel is stronger than him, and all Angels fear him because he is the servant of God—He who will punish everyone. All devils will submit and weep from the intensity of the eternal torment in Hell.

This is why God hates all idols and holds them in contempt, as they are mere lies fabricated only by humans and devils. Are idols truly just empty stones? Yes, they are just empty stones and worthless figures.

So how did they speak to their worshipers and claim divinity? It is the Fiery Demons (al-Shayāṭīn al-Nāriyyah) who possess the powers of Black Magic that manipulate humans and the rest of the Jinn (hidden spirits) to worship them. The worship of individuals transcends the age of humanity itself, extending into the realms of Jinn and Devils.

Who is the first devil? He is a creature of fire, called Azāzīl in some interpretations, or Lucifer, but his true name is Iblīs ('The Devil' / 'Satan'). He was not a 'fallen angel.' The truth is that, in the Islamic expression, there are never any fallen angels, because Angels never betray or reject God's commands. Iblis was a Jinn of fire who ascended long ago, before humanity, to the highest ranks of divine grace through his worship and intense devotion to God. He learned all the teachings in Heaven and understood everything.

When God created Adam (and later Eve), He commanded Iblis and all the Angels to prostrate to Adam. This prostration was not for worship, but a prostration of obedience—meaning anyone who prostrates to Adam becomes his ally. But Iblis refused and uttered his famous words: 'I am better than Adam, whom You created, O God, from clay. I was created from fire, and I am superior to him.' Iblis, or Satan, was then expelled.

To pass quickly: when Satan descended to Earth, he found his relatives and kin of the Jinn already there. ('Jinn' literally means an invisible creature made of ethereal fire—they are created from every type of combustion in the cosmos; imagine anything that can ignite, they are from it and it is from them).

Thus, when Satan descended to Earth, he pulled Dark Black Magic from his pouch. He started with his own personal worship, calling himself the Morning Star (referencing the Sun). This is why the first worship in the cosmos was the Sun. (Note the solar halo behind every entity claiming divinity—you will understand that only one entity moves behind the curtain.)

Iblis married into the lineage of the Giants (al-ʿAmāliqah)—the strong, primordial Jinn—and transformed his children into the names of gods. He taught humans and Jinn Dark Black Magic. This is the story, in brief.

Do you now understand why the Abrahamic faiths hate magic and Shirk? Or should I explain further?

For your information, there is a huge difference between the Abrahamic faiths' hatred of Shirk (polytheism) and their view of the Polytheists (al-Mushrikīn). In the eyes of individuals within those faiths, the polytheists are victims of their fathers' ignorance and inaccurate upbringing. Yet, it is the will of the Lord that cannot be ignored: He truly hates Shirk and despises all those idols and effigies."

 

[MorganBlack]

Angelkesfarl, not to go off topic, but does Islam have Purgatory, or is the Underworld all Hell / Tartarus to you?

 

[Angelkesfarl]

Angelkesfarl, not to go off topic, but does Islam have Purgatory, or is the Underworld all Hell / Tartarus to you?

"In Islam, there is no purgatory in the Hermetic sense. Instead, there is Hell (Jahannam), which is a place of punishment for sinners, consisting of seven levels (Darajāt), stacked one beneath the other. The first level is for those who are deficient in their good deeds compared to their bad deeds; these individuals will eventually be released to Paradise (Jannah). The rest of the levels are for those suffering eternal punishment.

Seeking forgiveness in Islam from God is conditional upon embracing the final religion, which is Islam. The very word 'Islam' fundamentally comes from the root of 'peace' (salām), meaning one must be good, ethical, respectful of God, and follow the path of righteousness

 

[MorganBlack]

Interesting . We should probably make another thread. We can call it, with tongue firmly planted in cheek 'The 'Scary Abrahamic and Monotheism Mega-thread'

I think I understand the difference now, but what re you doing hanging out here? Seriously.

When it comes to monotheism I only speak Catholicism, and even Catholicism is not the hard line monotheistic faith as many here think. There is only one God , but there are other helper gods in God's Divine Council. This is from the Old Testament, btw, the Elohim. Baptist Protestants and other evangelicals twist their themselves into mental prezels trying to erase and ignore the more, uh, faithful translation.

But without a Purgatory and the idea of limited, temporary return of the soul (the Purgatorial Holy Soul) it removes a whole bunch of flexibility for monotheism to incorporate earlier beliefs, magical practices, and spirits into it's structure. For Islam, is sounds like the afterlife is a sealed courtroom and prison, once you're gone, you're gone, and anything that looks like a ghost is a trickster spirit (a Jinn).

It may make it harder to correctly undrstand the Western Grimoire tradition, whcih was also praticed and shaped in part by Catholic monks, if you are looking at the daimons of the grims as punishinng devils. They are not demons in that sense, but they certainly can act that way if pushed.

 

[Angelkesfarl]

Interesting . We should probably make another thread. We can call it, with tongue firmly planted in cheek 'The 'Scary Abrahamic and Monotheism Mega-thread'

I think I understand the difference now, but what re you doing hanging out here? Seriously.

When it comes to monotheism I only speak Catholicism, and even Catholicism is not the hard line monotheistic faith as many here think. There is only one God , but there are other helper gods in God's Divine Council. This is from the Old Testament, btw, the Elohim. Baptist Protestants and other evangelicals twist their themselves into mental prezels trying to erase and ignore the more, uh, faithful translation.

But without a Purgatory and the idea of limited, temporary return of the soul (the Purgatorial Holy Soul) it removes a whole bunch of flexibility for monotheism to incorporate earlier beliefs, magical practices, and spirits into it's structure. For Islam, is sounds like the afterlife is a sealed courtroom and prison, once you're gone, you're gone, and anything that looks like a ghost is a trickster spirit (a Jinn).

It may make it harder to correctly undrstand the Western Grimoire tradition, whcih was also praticed and shaped in part by Catholic monks, if you are looking at the daimons of the grims as punishinng devils. They are not demons in that sense, but they certainly can act that way if pushed.

And why the sarcasm? I believe that what we mock now might be our future.

Islam predates Abraham. Islam fundamentally means submission to the commands of the Creator out of confidence that He is Wise, Just, Merciful, and All-Knowing. If you strip yourself of your conscious choices and adhere to His commands and guidance—which are entirely about pushing humanity's collective consciousness toward love, harmony, helping the weak, feeding the hungry, and showing mercy to the vulnerable—then this is the path.

As for what I am doing here, it is because I want to engage with Western magical cultures. You must forcefully strike two stones together to produce the spark that will ignite the fire, spreading warmth in some minds, illuminating others, and burning still others."

 

[MorganBlack]

My apologies, Angelkesfarl. That was not sarcasm directed at you, or even sarcasm.

That was my very poor attempt, with my American sense of ironic humor, to make a humorous trans-textual reference to many here who think monotheism is all bad. I forget that sense of humor may not translate well.

And thank you for still taking time to answer me in good faith , even when you thought I was trying to insult you! Respect.

 

[Angelkesfarl]

My apologies, Angelkesfarl. That was not sarcasm directed at you, or even sarcasm.

That was my very poor attempt, with my American sense of ironic humor, to make a humorous trans-textual reference to many here who think monotheism is all bad. I forget that sense of humor may not translate well.

And thank you for still taking time to answer me in good faith , even when you thought I was trying to insult you! Respect.

"I am the one who owes the apology, my friend, and I hope you accept it. I am completely new to American culture, and this is my first interaction with it. I believe that with time, I will master speaking it so that I can achieve better understanding without needing a translator. Until then, I believe that today, as educated human beings, we can overcome any cultural or religious difference so that we may be friends and interact with respect for the human spirit within each of us."

 

[MorganBlack]

No apologies needed, Angelkesfarl, but thank you for accepting mine! All the best to you and yours, my friend.