Well, that’s great and all, but you people are trying to compare apples and oranges;

On the one hand, we have Norse paganism, built around a society that revered battle, whose gods promoted said battle, and dying in battle was the only guarenteed way to earn a spot in Valhalla/Elysium/etc…where you fought and died in battle some more. If you didn’t make it, well that sucked a lot, but you weren’t punished beyond not getting into paradise. Saxons, Celts, Picts, Gauls, Mongols, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Aztecs, and a whole boatload of other “pagan” tribes and countries had the same sort of deal with their religion. These warrior cultures fought, fought, then fought some more; they had no time or desire (probably) for peace.

On the other hand, you have modern New Testament Christianity, a religion of peace, where not hurting your neighbor and trying to turn the other cheek will get you into Heaven. But if you failed, you end up roasting on a spit for eternity, or at least chilling out with Socrates in purgatory. Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and all the variants of Christianity have this formula to a greater or lesser extent, created for societies that no longer wished to butcher everyone they met and where dying peacefully and piously is the goal.

Divergent cultural ideals prevent these thematically different religions from ever seeing eye to eye, though Old Testament Christianity and extremist Islam have a better chance than most. I know faith is pretty bull-headed, so it serves no real purpose to argue for one or the other. Choosing or not choosing a religion should be a personal choice, not one based solely on blind obedience or a need to be a rebel.

And besides, for all anyone knows there’s a clubhouse for deities where Zues, Jesus, Buddha, Akhenaten, and Odin could all be shooting pool right now. You never know.