@DannyStayzHome I am not familiar enough with your scriptures to “cherry pick” them, however I believe
@tanstaafl72555 is correct when he says they need to be taken as a whole in their entirety, which is both difficult and something few do.
I think we may also have a bit of misunderstanding each other, which makes sense as we’re coming at various texts and treatises from wildly different perspectives and positions. However, as I read the passage I linked to a few times an interesting thought did occur to me regarding the concept of “authority”. I am going to make an assumption, based upon the many comments I’ve read in multiple venues by Christians about submitting to your lord as believing that your god is the ultimate authority and by extension your scriptures which you believe to be the word of god. More on this in a second.
Before I connect the dots that are in my head, in recent years there has been a revival of sorts of people looking to relearn and go back to the old ways of their ancestors, which varies according to geographic regions, but is largely what I will call greater Germanic and Scandinavian areas. This can be seen in the subjects like Odinism and Asatru. These are very different than the new age paganism with a sprinkle of this and a dash of that, but instead go back to the concept of the origin of authority being the gods. In this case, however, the gods are not the same as the Abrahamic one.
Back to the point of authority, in the case of the Odinist, the “authority” is that of our ancestors and our ancestral gods, much like the Christian believes the ultimate authority is the Christian god.
To make a comment on paganism, including Odinism, you are correct in that, “paganism is absolutely against everything about God“, but not in the way I frequently see Christians refer to it. It is NOT Satanism or satanic; it isn’t even defined in terms of the Abrahamic view, though the Jews do refer to the pagan gods as demons and in doing so at least recognize their existence. Also, the existence of one does not preclude the existence of the other. As I have said in this thread or another, I am not Jewish, my ancestry is mostly Germanic, and I choose to follow my ancestral gods rather than that of a sect of Judaism and pointing to the NT (a rewrite hundreds (?) of years later in a different language Greek rather than Hebrew) saying that yours is now the one true god of everyone doesn’t make the sale for me.
What the Odinist doesn’t have, that you do, is both the volumes of written history and a large social connection, though the latter is changing. While there are a few poetic edas, e.g. Beowulf, and other documents like the Codex Oera Linda that delve into the concepts of law in those early societies prior to the invasion by Rome it still remains a very folkish system; very opposite that of Christianity. It leaves the people who choose to follow it having to interpret and intuit it for themselves, much like our ancestors originally did.
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