Pagan

Paganism is on the rise. By Pagan, I don’t mean ancient religion like Hinduism whose followers have been practicing their faith for thousands of years without conflict, severe repression or interference from other organized religions like Islam or Christianity.

I’m more interested in extinct religion like the belief system of the pagan of Arabia before the pre-Islamic era and also old western religions like Druidism, Wiccan and Asatru (before the emergence of Christianity).

While we can hardly find people claiming to worship or practice the ancient pagan religion of Arabia (maybe because we don’t exactly know what that is?), we can most certainly find some people (living mostly in western countries) who unashamedly and without even a slight hesitation confessing to have abandon their parents’ Christian faith and adopted the pagan religion of their ancestors.

Paganism is defined as

a broad group of indigenous and historical polytheistic religious traditions—primarily those of cultures known to the classical world. In a wider sense, paganism has also been understood to include any non-Abrahamic, folk, or ethnic religion.

You can find plenty of Youtube videos of folks who have embraced new version of old pagan religion like the Asatru (contemporary paganism )

Among reasons cited by them for abandoning the faith they were born into are:

• They no longer view Christianity as a divine religion. Christianity too has been deeply influenced by paganism
• They perceived Christianity as a ‘foreign faith’ because it originates from the Middle-East while the pagan religion of their ancestor has a very strong ‘local’ (western) root
• They reject organized religions (all of the main ones) because these religions don’t offer much benefit to mankind
• Paganism has allowed them to have a deeper and closer relationship to the nature

These are some of the reasons given by them.

Moving on.

We don’t know much about the pagan religion of Arabia. Did Islam ‘wiped’ out the old faith completely? I don’t think so because I’ve heard some people claiming that while the pagan concept of God of Arabia no longer exist but Islam has heavily borrowed many of the traditions/practices before Islam and incorporated in the new faith.

I’m not exactly sure if the Muslim community back then actively prosecuted people for following something unconventional or if the concept of conventional even existed back then. Based on the historical development of various sects and school of thoughts, people were not shy from expressing their ideas and we have written record of that. Unfortunately, it’s no longer the case now because if you have any opinions that seem unorthodox..you may get yourself kill..simply for even thinking about it. The society has really retrogressed much.

In the next few posts, we will hopefully look into the pagan religion of Arabia.