Analysis – How is paganism like Raava and Christianity like Vaatu?

Raava and Vaatu. The first represents balance and the second imbalance. They are characters from the world of “Avatar: The Legend of Korra”.

BY: El Cancerbero

They are a “tension between opposites” (and that is already represented in many Asian philosophical and/or theological traditions or from other ancient cultures). It seems to me that this idea is one of the oldest ideas of human culture that sought the character of Kosmos (order) and Kaos (disorder) in the Physis (nature).

When Raava dies, he is reborn as a seed that germinates from Vaatu himself and, in his case, vice versa. The famous Ying Yang has already expressed it. But in what concrete examples can we verify it?

The book “That was not in my History of Philosophy book” by Santiago Navajas analyzes how Christianity, which originated from Judaism, sought to exterminate pagan religions (all the beliefs of the peripheries once Christianity became official and centralized in the Roman Empire). But let us not forget that Christianity was born as a pagan religion when the religion of the Roman Empire was the official one, this being a syncretism of the various religions of the colonies that joined the empire. Thus, when the Christian religion separates from Judaism and forces all other non-Christians to convert,many of them accept it politically (and compulsorily) but not honestly. In the evolution of Christianity we can see the adoption of a diverse “pagan” culture such as non-circumcision, assuming the day of Apollo’s birth as the birth of Jesus (December 25), the worship of images , theurgic thought, etc. Today we can see how behaviors from the pagan tradition are preferred by popular culture and the Christian and Catholic Church has been forced to be more and more tolerant, losing followers year after year. In this way I was able to see a casual but accurate example in the way in which two forces that are contrary germinate from each other in a tension that seems infinite. I want to clarify that here I am not thinking about the concepts of “good” and “bad” but only with the concepts of order-balance and disorder-imbalance, where I assume that there is balance and imbalance both in the paganism as in Christianity. The seeds of balance and imbalance germinate in both religions or cultures, just as they do in ourselves and in nature.