When You Break, by Bear's Den (explicit)
For all it's melancholia, it's a gorgeous song. Bear's Den may become my next band obsession.
---
By far, at this point in the semester, my favorite class has to be Paganism to Christianity.
For the first three weeks we covered Greek mythology, one of my stronger suits in the world of mythology and religion. I've learned a lot of things that the Percy Jackson series didn't cover, like the Dodona oracle, the exegetai, Eleusinian Mysteries - basically, the nitty-gritty stuff that HoO didn't need to cover in order to make sense. Not to mention I read the entire Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, which covered five pages, top to bottom in tiny print, of notes about who fathered who and who offended who, plus little tidbits like the actual names of the three Fates/Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), the fact that Athena also goes by Tritogenia (Third-Born), and Aphrodite comes from Cyprus, hence her alternate name Cytherea.
Another interesting thing I kind of always assumed but never really outright learned was the complete and utter lack of secularism. Religion was the law, and kings or governments made decisions based on the gods' will - good omens and the like. In fact, Plato was the first to outright suggest that matters of belief could be criminal offenses. But then again, Plato wanted to ban jokes, so what does he know?
Perhaps my favorite thing I've learned so far is a quote by Xenophanes, and the TL;DR version goes, "If horses could paint, their gods would be horses."A.k.a., anthropomorphism is stupid. Quite interesting how skepticism on religion in Greece was tolerated unless it messed with the practice of rites*. Don't believe in the gods the same way as everyone else? Cool, unless you don't carry out the proper rites. You don't need to believe to practice.
*With the famous exception of Socrates, but to be fair, he was not only disbelieving of the gods, but also taught his pupils the same, and introduced foreign deities. Polytheism doesn't mean it's more liberal in tolerance than Christianity.
This week we started on Roman religion. Up until now, I had assumed that Romans took Greek mythology and just changed a few names around, but it actually worked out a little more like convergent evolution - the Romans already had their gods - Jupiter, Juno, Minerva*, etc. (Ceres was the first to become more Grecian, followed closely by the adoption of Asclepius - not surprising, health and fertility were pretty important things). It's more like the Romans noticed the similarities between the two sets of deities and adopted the cults of Greece into their religion. It was Greece's antiquity - that which the Romans very, VERY much admired - that garnered so much interest and respect from Roman citizens.
*In Percy Jackson, it seems as though Minerva was much less powerful than her Greek version, and Bellona took over her job position. As Reyna told Annabeth, Minerva was more the goddess of arts and crafts in Roman society. But I just learned that on Capitoline Hill is a temple dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as well as Juno and - surprise - Minerva. Riordan, what's up with that?
I learned the Romans have no equivalent to the Greek Theogony - no myths about the squabbles of the gods, or who did what to which poor human. There were few stories at all, with or without a moral. Instead, they had rites to celebrate Rome's growth, like a certain victorious day here or a birthday of an emperor there (totally looking at you here, Augustus, you self-centered, conceited master leader you). This isn't to say they didn't sacrifice to the gods at all, but to them the gods were more like benevolent patrons of the state - you could say to worship the gods would be the same as worshipping Rome itself (though that statement is false, citizens didn't sacrifice to their city or anything).
Another interesting (in a different way) part of this class is the number of Christians/Catholics taking it (I also know of one Jewish girl). Not that the interesting part is that they're taking a class that talks about paganism (described by my teacher as "everything other than Christianity"), but how astute and quick they are to draw similarities between their religion and that of the Greeks and Romans.
For instance, I have heard comparisons made between the production of Gaia from Chaos/the Chasm, and the beginning of the universe in the Genesis. I've heard how the Golden Age of Man is similar to the Garden of Eden, and how Pandora is similar to Eve in that they are the cause of all man's misery (My personal observation, might I add, is how they were set up to fail from the beginning by God/the gods, and yet it is still their fault. Pandora with the tantalizing box and a curious heart created by the gods, and Eve with the tantalizing apple of knowledge and free will given by God). Most recently is the comparison of Romulus and Remus to Cain and Abel - brothers killing each other, yeah, I see it.
I don't know, but for some reason it bothers me how much these people are trying to find their God in everything, even in an era when the concept of their God didn't even exist yet. They're kind of like that friend that somehow always manages to make the conversation about them - "Oh, yesterday I went biking with my family." "Really? That's so cool, I once had a bike my brother gave to me, we went riding together all the time, I have to tell you about this one time where we blah blah blah I've changed the subject to me now, hope you didn't have anything else you wanted to say."
That doesn't bother me so much as what went down today though. A boy (the same who connected the Golden Age with Eden and Romulus with Cain) had a lot to say when we learned the Romans weren't as concerned with ethics.
Some backstory: So basically, the Romans had no dogma, and no moral code. To have the favor of the gods in their society meant one was successful, wealthy, and healthy. As Cicero said, "The supreme law is the well being of the people." They had social customs - they had piety, or respectfulness to the gods and the people around them - but their religion itself did not have a code of ethics.
A lot of religious classmates took extreme issue with this news. The boy previously mentioned asked if the religion didn't provide morals, did the government do it instead? Since technically the gods and government are the same thing. I thought this was a fair question, but it slightly unsettled me because it meant in the boy's mind there absolutely needed to be a guideline for daily life from a higher power. If it didn't come from a god, then it had to come from a god-like source. The possibility a code, in any form, didn't even exist in the first place couldn't seem to occur to him. That thought is scary, that he thinks humans are such weak creatures that we cannot independently and rationally determine for ourselves what is right and wrong, and that we'd screw it up if we ever did.
Another dude asked since the Roman society offered no moral code, did the citizens go elsewhere to seek guidance? This one pissed me off much more than the first question, because it implied citizens could not be moral without someone, probably supernatural, telling then what was right and wrong. In my mind, the boy's tone was condescending - how could these people possibly know what to do unless someone else explicitly told them? They must have gone to a different cult for guidance, they wouldn't've implicitly known to be honorable. This last analysis also pissed me off because it implied conversion - a practice many Christians love to promote despite the obvious discomfort of the recipient - not because they "fear God's wrath" and would rather prefer to "sin," but because it's an unwarranted and unwanted imposition of one point of view over another (Can you tell this experience is personal?).
I've never witnessed so many hands raised to ask questions yet - six in succession, quite a lot in a class where no one really has a hard time understanding the material. This phenomenon ties in with I've witnessed with other religious people, namely Christian and Catholics, who all seem fixated on a God telling them what is right and wrong. I've heard extremists - the ones who won't outright say that they think Christianity has a monopoly on morals - claim that without the Bible and/or the Ten Commandments, many people would genuinely not know what to do, and we'd have many more murderers and criminals in general without religion. An interesting claim, since recent stats have revealed .07% of self-reported prisoners are atheist. (What Percentage of Prisoners are Atheists? It’s a Lot Smaller Than We Ever Imagined)
I'm clearly revealing my own bias now, so I'll stop. An interesting note on myself is how I automatically link sources to facts after writing essays that need multiple in-text citations as compared to high school. It happened in my last post too.
Results and Conclusion (Is this a scientific report format I detect?): I am enjoying my class on religion the most out of my four total classes, probably because I'm such a Greek mythology buff to begin with. However, I'm not appreciating the constant comparison of one religion to another, supposedly and traditionally better one. But since I understand that they cannot help their upbringing any more than I can help mine, I won't condemn a person simply because their one view (on a subject that matters very little to me) differs from mine.
