Ernst Bergmann Thesis 2

 

Thesis 2

Asatru is the contemporary form of faith that we Germans would have today if we had been granted the opportunity to continue to develop our ancestral religion undisturbed.

What is a contemporary form of faith?

It is a form of faith that corresponds to the level of knowledge and world experience of modern man. A religion that is not contemporary or alien to the times is to be rejected just as much as a religion that is alien to the species. For the Germans of today the cult of Wotan, with whose allegedly threatening reintroduction the scorners of the German religious movement frighten children and teens, is out of time, even if it is not alien to the species. It is true that the noble and heroic Odin religion is the highest among the old Indo-Germanic religions and, moreover, the closest to our hearts, because it contains mythical elements which have the only symbolic value for the thinking German of today. Whoever wanted to reintroduce the cult of Wotan in today's Germany would make himself almost as impossible as those who tolerate the even much older and, moreover, alien Babylonian-Semitic cult of Yahweh still today in German churches.

We Asatru are often called "heathens". We reject this designation if it is understood to mean the followers of a form of religion alien to our time. We do not reject it if it is understood to mean only a form of religion free of Christianity. In this case we raise the swear word "Deutschheide" to a name of honor. And this all the more, as there is a Germanic persecution in Germany again today. 

Every creative people and every living time create their own religion, in which the eternal values are reflected in a time and species appropriate form. The original Christians and the Lutherans were granted this right, why not us German believers of today? Reformation is the sign of freshness in the heart of a nation. Only undeveloped peoples maintain and preserve in the long run in their existing customary and ossified religions worn-out and used-up forms of cult and dogma of peoples and times long since lost. The creative greatness of an age can be judged by whether its will to change and advance breaks through the last layers and penetrates down to the very basis of the living religious soul. This is what the German-Nordic faith movement of today accomplishes. It is the expression of the awakening of the nation in the religious field and will necessarily replace the faith movement of the "German Christians" who are content with a surface reform. The elementary will to live of the German people is breaking through in the tremendously growing völkisch-religious movement of today. And when this will to live breaks up outmoded forms of religion which stand in the way of its creative essence, it proves by this very fact its hunger for a genuine and living contemporary religion.

Editors Note: One might be surprised to find me shilling for Ernst Bergmann, who here calls Odinism outdated and out of time, but this is easily channeled into the proper stream. First, the Thesis itself is incredibly important: German-Faith is the religion European people would have if we had not been forcibly converted to Christianity along the way. I believe that Asatru IS this religion. Other candidates of our time include Techno-Atheism (progressing technology as divinity), and Multiculturalism (that anything non-European is divine). There is no option to be irreligious; even choosing a state of no religion/secular humanism becomes a religion, as human beings operating in nature will always seek security and self-advantage, OR they die off, leaving the people who do have a religion as the sole survivors. We see all of these beliefs operating in society today, as Christianity loses adherents rapidly, as predicted, because of its supernatural basis in a benevolent, omnipotent deity which is so easily shattered by innumerable "new atheist" attacks. The supernatural will however triumph, as the Western technology will fail in the long run. Whites are currently choosing techno-futurism over Christianity, but the non-White world is choosing their old forms, and reproducing far more rapidly. It seems there are hard limits to space colonization, to personal mobility devices like cars, trains, boats and planes, and these limits will force us to the supernatural when this complex technological society fails, and it will, we just don't know when. Fossil fuel will fail in one of two ways: 1.) it will all be drained (Peak Oil, Malthusian theory), or 2.) the people will be unable to drain it due to stupidity. (Demographic bomb of lower IQ birth rates). Either way, the supernatural reasserts itself, and the old economy of wood and bone, Schmalhans as the forest chef, will rise supreme. 

Modern Germanic Faith has to use 1000 A.D. as a belief base, but also incorporate what has been learned by science in the intervening millennia, as well as incorporating guesses about what the future holds. Birth rates are important, ecology is important, economy is important, science is important - none of these concerns are insurmountable to Native European Faith, and what Bergmann states here, that Odinism is dead and gone, is the result of timidity. He didn't have 75 million Germanic atheists unmoored and drifting as we do here in America. He had a 90% or more Christian population that he was charged with finding a new religion for. Rather than a nationwide, state sponsored Odinist conversion, the official National Socialist policy tried to create "Positive Christianity" by cherry-picking things they liked out of the Bible, and easing the German people into a Lutheran-Christian variant. This failed miserably. I will do a full critique of National Socialism at some point, but suffice to say that Völkisch and NS do NOT have a 1 to 1 correspondence, contrary to both Anti-fascist and Neo-NS popular thinking.