Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 6. The Sky 163
message of peace on earth. His doctrine of the value of human life has been
propagated by force. Apostles of the Prince of Peace advance over corpses.
This was not how his first twelve disciples did their missionary work. The
statues of St. Paul which I have seen in the Mediterranean lands, with the
Old Testament under one arm and a long sword in the other, date from a
later age and a time when the zeal to convert others had grown so strong and
the faith so fanatical that Christians had completely forgotten Jesus’ own
doctrine of love and respect for the lives of others. It was their intolerance
that caused the sanguinary wars of religion. How many lives have not been
sacrificed to fanaticism!” 29
So, while offering mankind a way to feel wonderful about itself, the new religion also
did much to destroy the sense of belonging to this world, the sense of belonging to
a community in Midgard. A bonded man after the conversion no longer belonged to
a farm or a community; he was connected solely and with a direct line (through the
church) to an omnipotent God. Individualism in its modern sense, then, naturally
brings with it the feelings of isolation and alienation which brings the entire point
of all the preceding chapters back to the idea that people have lost their sense of
connectedness.
The ancient Germanic spiritual philosophy has much to offer modern folk, but the
social and political forces being utilized circa 950 CE are still present, even today, in
the form of social, religious, and political propaganda against any worldview which
is believed to stand in direct opposition to the status quo. People continue to be
harassed, tortured, and sometimes even killed because they see the world in a way
which differs from the so-called norm.
However, it should also be noted that most of these martyrs have also been
very vocal in their opposition to the current worldview, and their vocal opposition
was interpreted as a threat to the prevailing Christian masses or to specific individuals.
Acceptance of the Northern Germanic spiritual philosophy as practiced
by the northern European forebears does not require any overt acts of opposition;
in fact, direct confrontation based on philosophical or religious differences would
actually run counter to the Heathen concept that the “community” is more important
that the individual. The earliest settlers of Heathen Iceland accepted and
tolerated Christians as viable members of the community. Intolerance was and still
is a part of the Christian world view regardless of how politically correct the Bible
is interpreted, and this intolerance has spread to other, non-Christian, groups either
through association or simply by the fact that it is commonplace. The western
hemisphere is, after all, 50-80% Christian even in this age of atheists and agnostics.
29 Moberg, Vilhelm A History of the Swedish People (Dorset Press; New York, NY) 1970, vol.
1, p. 84.