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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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A good chunk of those can be found in pagan religions, though.

Uhhh, I'd need to see serious evidence for that kind of assertion.

The Confession, Repentance, The emphasis of the sanctity of the meek, it's universalism

These are possible to find individually in pagan religions but not really all together in this package. Nolan just got asked this question by a Chinese Classics Professor, because Homeric Greeks don't really have the Christian concept of Atonement that pervaded, and was even a core theme, of his new movie. The Greeks saw the gods as beings, you offended them and you made amends much like you would if you offended your king. It's not repentance. Germanic/Norse Paganism, is almost the opposite in that vengeance for slights/wrongs was the moral basis. I feel like I could dig more and more, hence why I think you need evidence for this assertion, because nothing I can uncover even suggests this is close to the truth.

The concept of Original Sin

This is uniquely Christian, not even Judaism or Islam really hold to the conception of original sin. Adam sinned yes, but the whole of humanity does not bear the burden of his sin in either of those two religions. To define Original Sin, it is something like Primordial Transgression + Inherited Human condition = Inherent Moral Fault

Going down the list:

  • Zoroastrianism: No original Sin, has the concept a dualistic conception of evil invading the world, but human's aren't default evil or corrupted because of it
  • German Paganism: No OG Sin
  • Norse Paganism: No OG Sin
  • Celtic Paganism (that we know of): No OG Sin
  • Slavic Paganism (that we know of): No OG Sin
  • Greek Paganism: Prometheus is the Primordial Transgression but Human's aren't inherently guilty because of it
  • Roman Paganism: No OG Sin
  • Egyptian Paganism: Humans are judge individually, no collective guilt/sin
  • Mesopotamian Paganism: Humans suffer because of the Gods per the Epic of Gilg, no primordial transgression
  • Aztec Religion: Some googling shows that Human have a cosmic debt, which they repay via sacrifices (not very OG sin at all)

The concept of Original Sin is about as OG Christian as it can get. I'd go so far as to say that any ideology that borrows the concept, that developed in the west IS borrowing Christian Theology. So yes Communism and Wokeism, tightly match to Christianity. But if the genealogy of Wokeism is Christianity + Marxism, and 1848 Germany was still deeply religious, when Marx wrote Das Capital, then it stands to reason that Marxism and its descendants are also descendants of Western Christianity minus the Christian Metaphysics. After all Marx was culturally Christian. It's essentially Western Christian Theology all the way down.

There are numerous pre-Christian religions/theologies, that developed outside if Christianity (e.g. in Americas) that share the Original/Ancestral sin framework. For that, the main two attributes of the original sin is as follows:

  • The world was created as good but it has fallen.
  • The human is born broken, he is prone to sin and evil and his duty is to navigate this fact.

Here, Buddhism is a direct comparison. The universe is orderly and good, while human is born broken often ridden with karmic debt. The Pythagoreans had similar concepts as do Hindus with doctrine of Ṛṇa or Popol Vuh of Mayans. Of course there are quite an important details that completely subvert the Christian story, but so does Progressive religion.

Progressives believe in subverted story of original sin - individuals are born as perfect innocent tabula rasa individuals, it is the world that is evil and poisons them through systems of oppression into various sins such as racism etc. You have to become woke to these sinful poisonous systems out there, and do the work to perfect yourself and the world in order to build eschatological progressive heaven on Earth in form of ultimate Social Justice, thus liberating future perfect newborn beings from these negative influences. Progressive hamartiology has more overlap with let's say Gnostic view of Original Sin as opposed to mainstream Christianity - and it is not a coincidence.