I have been doing some reading on Jesus

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[–]IridescentAnaconda 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I bet the demons aka archons are identical to the gods of the pagan pantheon.

I think reasonable people can disagree on this last point. The ancients had different conceptualizations of the metaphysical layer of reality. In my opinion, it was more nuanced, but I get that modern Christianity works for a lot of people.

But, yes, in general, reincarnation is supposed to be a curse, not a blessing. If the Christian conceptualization of God is correct -- that He truly loves His creation -- then the only concept of eternal damnation that makes sense to me is reincarnation: it's as eternal as you choose it to be.

[–]Vulptex 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

The pagan gods were all a bunch of psychopaths and exactly what you get when you give a human too much power. The Old Testament mixes them up with God, because the ancient Israelites were pagan Canaanites but later didn't want to admit it, so they took all their pantheon traditions and attributed them to the new monotheist God that had been brought to them. I suspect the slaughter of every single person in Canaan was also a story they invented so they could claim to be the originals with no connection to the pagans before them, because biological descent mattered a lot to ancient cultures.

[–]IridescentAnaconda 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I tend to view the pagans as archetypes and thus aspects of God (or aspects of the human psyche, which is a much lower frequency of God, "created in His image"). Yes, of course they are psychopaths because they represent purified essences, and any behavior taken to an extreme is going to be psychopathic. The point isn't to worship a single deity, it's to understand how they function together to make a unified whole. It's a mirror of own own psyche, and thus a mirror of God.

Christians seem to function without this (well, not Catholics: they reproduced the whole idea with the saints). I don't really understand Protestantism, so I can't comment on it. I grew up Roman Catholic and ported my belief system to Buddhism (which makes more intellectual sense to me) and a form of paganism that makes more emotional sense to me, even as I still use Catholic prayers as part of my spiritual practice.