Noticed a few comments of this nature on one of my articles from earlier this year. [n.b. – wrote this piece circa December 2019, with some slight more recent editing]

Now, I … really don’t understand the sort of person whose basic approach to mythology and religion is “Hmmm, I like the aesthetics, but how about we do it without the ‘Gods’ part …” – and vigorously protests that they ain’t an atheist because “nono, we kept some of the aesthetics of having gods, I mean, how else are we going to talk about our placentas??”

Part of it, I suspect, is just simply that. Some of these guys do rather like the ‘image’ that’s conjured in their minds of being … pulp-fictional ‘barbarians’ or something (yet don’t have quite the gumption to just go out and actually join a biker gang); and so they’re out to make that “image” their “self-image”.

And therein lies the two prongs of the problem. First and foremost, the ‘image’ they want to emulate … is not actually a historical nor otherwise authentic one.

Because make no bones about it [other than skull-cups – which, yes, are actually a thing]. Almost without exception, what we know of ancient Indo-European peoples (especially the ‘Barbarian’ ones), is that they were intensely religious people and societies. [Insistent Atheist interpolations, as a side note, looking at heritage-concepts and going “let’s not so much ‘deconstruct’ as attempt to outright ‘de-legitimate’ and ‘destroy’ the essence of these things” … tends to be something rather more common in ‘developed’, ‘civilized’, and sedentary societies rather than among ‘barbarians’ in the ‘wilderness’ – funny, that]

But second, and more insidiously, as this whole thing is often about “self-image” to them – that means that what’s being expressed is “themselves”, rather than anything authentic. Just dressed up with the aesthetics of something external to – and fundamentally cooler – than them, to make up for the yawn-inducing emptiness of the atheism that replaces a fedora for a horned plastic helmet at parties. With added anti-authority, anti-organized religion, and anti-‘Abrahamism’ characteristics [hence also why “ANYTHING I DON’T LIKE IS LITERALLY ABRAHAMISM” keeps turning up from these sorts – because so much of their image-to-themselves is some kind of emphatically-edgy anti-conformist negative reaction to other things more powerful and/or ‘orthodox’ than they]

What does this lead to? These kinds of flailing attempted push-backs against the genuinely religious.

Why? Because Cognitive Dissonance; and the desperate attempts to make that feeling stop by ‘externalizing’ it in the direction of the actually-religious and the actually-religion.

They know, on a low psychological level, that what they’re doing is fundamentally fake. Their hate for us is driven by the fundamental fact that we show that their preference is inadequate. That it isn’t just possible to intellectually entertain the concepts underpinning proper Indo-European mythoreligion … but that it is a valid and viable ‘mode of being’. And, furthermore, that their ancestors – the ones they’re always going on about in lieu of anything else beyond themselves, it seems – went much further than just thinking about it, and actually lived the beliefs in question.

In other words, we de-legitimate their world-view simply by existing.

Oh, and speaking of authentic Indo-European perspectives upon these matters … there are many instances and examples which I could draw upon to show just how fundamentally fallacious this guy’s remarks really are. (i.e. that yes, yes we do indeed Pray – and have been doing so for quite some thousands of years now)

And the relevant guidance upon an appropriate response thereto. (it involves a Roudran Theological Argument)

But we shall restrict ourselves to a single pair of excerpts from pretty much the oldest Indo-European religious text available to us today [it’s somewhere about three and a half millennia ancient, or even older especially in parts]:

“ahaṃ dadhāmi draviṇaṃ haviṣmate suprāvye yajamānāya sunvate ||”

“I bestow wealth / power / the desired for the oblation-haver, to the zealous, the rite-commissioner, the presser-of-libation”

“ahaṃ rudrāya dhanur ā tanomi brahmadviṣe śarave hantavā u |”

“I, Rudra’s Bow do Tauten – for the Arrow to Smite, Verily, the Hater-of-Prayer / -Devotion”

I do so love that particular RigVedic Hymnal ❤