Paul Waggener and Greg Johnson discussed books which had influenced their thinking about religion in a recent podcast. Paul's father was an Anglican clergyman who converted to Orthodox Christianity in order to find a less corrupted faith

• https://counter-currents.com/2021/01/counter-currents-radio-316-paul-waggener/#more-124596

It is somewhat tangential to your question but it was an excellent list. I intend to listen again and write down the titles.

I've come to think religion is not only endemic to the human condition, but necessary for our health and the cohesiveness of civilization. White people are desperately in need of Religion.

The question then becomes, but what religion?

Christianity is our heritage. However, Christianity is problematic in that it espouses a world-rejecting, self-flagellating, often hopeless set of beliefs. It is joyless. Christians offer dirges to a god dying slowly on a torture device. Christianity also almost completely removes the Feminine Divine from its mythos - leaving us only with the pallid, timid, ever suffering Mary. No bountiful mother goddess offering nourishment to her children from her fertile soil, no savage queen of the battlefield gathering the fallen into her arms, no wisdom goddess presiding over the arts, medicine, and commerce. A strong people needs strong women raising children, and strong women need archetypes just as much as men do.

Christianity fails in its universality. It was originally used as a tool to unite the masses, true, but it ultimately crumbles under the weight of its own success.

We now have the scientific paradigm to explain why the sun rises and how gravity works. Christianity was codified and became dogmatic, leaving it with very little flexibility against the new knowledge humankind has gained in our recent past.

Neo-paganism is something people are turning to as an alternative, and I think it has some merit. I've been exploring pre-Christian pagan religions for many years, and while I believe they are invaluable to study, I keep running into the same problems.

One, these are all beliefs with specific cultural contexts for civilizations that have long since died. There is some relevance to modern life, but I drive a car and sit in an office all day, I'm not tilling the fields or fighting off horse raiders (although with the way things are going that might change soon enough). Any lineage to the modern world was utterly destroyed by Christianity. We can look to Hinduism as an example of how things might have developed, but ultimately that ship has long since sailed.

Two, so many pre-Christian religions were extremely localized, to the point where you could have a tribe of 100 people with one god, and a mile away have a different tribe with a whole separate pantheon. This is especially true of Western Europe, who had neither the population nor the literacy to support religion like the Romans did.

Three, we are now White. Forget about long-ago Germanic or Gaulish tribes, if you're American you're likely a mishmash combination of any number of Western and Eastern European nations. White is now our identity. Which of the ancient pagan religions can provide for that over-arching label?

Four, with the exception of Greco-Roman religion, we know so so little about the actual beliefs and practices of ancient paganisms. The majority of it is guesswork and romanticism. How strong of a foundation is that for a new religious movement?

I do wonder if something like Proto-Indo-European paganism would be something to focus on, as it pulls together many of the disparate, scattered threads of European paganism. But again, most of it is theory and we have even less concrete information about it than we do even little known European neo-paganisms.

Asatru seems to be having some success, and I think organizations like the Asatru Folk Assembly are worth looking into - one of the most useful and age-old aspects of religion is something for people to organize around, after all. And what we need is something to organize around, with religion being as good a tool as any. The AFA is well-organized and focuses their energy on creating community and temples, while all I see from the 'universalist' Asatru orgs are people falling over each other to prove how anti-racist and LGBTQ accepting they are.

We can't focus on things like Esoteric Hitlerism or Neo-Nazism, the reality is those things are far too demonized and I don't see them gaining any sort of meaningful following. They will remain on the fringes and the people who wave those flags will be outcast. I also don't consider Atheism a viable option, an absence of faith easily leads to hopelessness and nihilism, things we can ill afford.

I don't know what the answer is here, just some things I've been contemplating for awhile.