Word: pagans
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...Death of Classical Paganism, by John Holland Smith (Scribner's; 280 pages; $12.95). A British novelist and historian, Smith declares himself a "pagan" and expresses his regret that the Christian God ever overwhelmed Jupiter and his court of divinities. Most historians believe that the classical gods were already moribund when Christianity arose; Smith argues that they were alive and well until they were "assassinated" by the new faith. The early Christians' Jupiter-is-dead movement, he concludes, was the worst of "all the crimes committed in Christ's name" because it impoverished Western culture...
...argument depends upon linking megalithic structures in both Europe and America with the ancient Celts. But Fell notes that Celtic Ogam writing is found only on stone buildings in America, and not in Europe. The reason, he says, is that the early Christian missionaries obliterated all traces of the pagan writing from hundreds of similar megalithic structures in Europe...
...drank to the brink of alcoholism and took 150 drops a day of laudanum-twice the dose fatal to a nonaddict. Yet the drug Baudelaire was most addicted to was hope: luxe, calme et volupté-the elegance of Islamic paradise, a Christian's heavenly peace and a pagan bliss of the senses. Baudelaire chanted of this blessed trinity while he suffered the diseases of the age: poverty, rage and soul-withering ennui...
...other liberal scholars who say that condemnations of homosexuality were limited by the cultural context. Thus when the Law of Moses states, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination," McNeill treats this as a protest against use of homosexuality in pagan rites. When St. Paul fulminates against "men committing shameless acts with men," McNeill reads it as opposition only to homosexual activity by people who are naturally heterosexual. The ambiguous story in Genesis 19, he says, means that Sodom was destroyed not for practicing sodomy but for its "inhospitality" to strangers...
...historical stage center during this period was held by the Christian Byzantine Empire and the followers of Mohammed, who burst out of the Arabian peninsula after the prophet's death in 632, overran Persia and eventually extended their empire from northern Spain to the frontiers of China. The pagan Khazars successfully resisted Christian and Moslem arms. The power of the two monotheisms seems to have driven the Khazars to seek a god of their own. The problem was, which...