If you look at modern people and how they relate to modern religions, there’s a spectrum. There are secular people who don’t believe or practice at all, people who don’t really think about it much, but like the community and cultural aspects of practicing religion, people who are spiritual but don’t view the mainstream religions as getting things quite right, people who pretty much believe and follow some mainstream religion, and people who literally believe HARD the teachings of some offshoot cult.
I assume that ancient peoples had a similar mix, with some people we would consider secular, lots of people who practiced (some with a lot of belief, and some without giving it much thought) and some who devoted their life to a deity and organized everything they did around their beliefs.
I presume the same about a range of belief in Ancient Greece. There’s a good book, Belief & Unbelief in Medieval Europe, that takes pains to show this range for the very authoritarian Christian medieval period. What it looks like for Ancient Greece is that public participation in religion was more or less mandatory, and blasphemy strongly disallowed. So there is a lot of evidence for believe, and less evidence for unbelief. It also helps that there isn’t much in the way of doctrine, and none of the texts on myth are 100% consistent with each other, so there was clearly a wide tolerance for varying belief.
That is absolutely not a valid assumption. I think the problem comes from transferring the values of a hierarchical, text-based, doctrine-heavy monotheistic religion onto one that is also hierarchical but polytheistic, where oral tradition and in particular ritual weigh more heavily than any specific text, where doctrine is patchy and shifting.
Ovid’s writing literature based on mythology, not documenting mythology. And this is a culture where the gods can be foolish or inept and have various other foibles and failing unthinkable in monotheistic Western religion, no lack of devotion required.
I think there’s an unconscious assumption that, because the pagan religions mostly didn’t go around butchering people for believing in different gods, they weren’t very serious about them.
Yeah, Christianity tends to be, “Think of the best person you know, the kindest, bravest, most generous you can think of. Yeah, God is a thousand, million, billion times better than that.” And Greeks tended to be, “Think of people you know, how they can be kind or cruel, brave or cowardly, generous or petty. Yeah, that’s our gods.”
To give a little perspective: As a Jew, all of Christianity is heresy. And if you go back to the origins of Christianity, when Jews and Christians interacted on approximately equal terms, there was a LOT of concern among Jews that this heresy was being taught and was spreading. Now we mostly shut up and are polite about it, of course.
I am secular enough that it doesn’t really bother me. But Christianity is deeply offensive to a significant fraction of believing Jews, in ways that Islam (which is actually quite compatible with Judaism) or Hinduism (which is just worshipping false gods, but not actual heresy) is not.
So, on the one hand, I get that you don’t really like seeing heretical works. On the other hand, it’s hard to really feel bad for you for having to put up with that.
Re: Ovid, see Kaczor, Idaliana, “The Sacred and the Poetic: The Use of Religious Terminology in Ovid’s Words,” Symbolae philologorum Posnaniensium Graecae et Latinae 29:2 (Dec. 2019), 17–35,
DOI 10.14746/sppgl.2020.XXIX.2.2 .
(The point of the article is that Ovid is extremely well-versed in Roman religion, but in the Metamorphoses uses that knowledge toward literary aims, and in the Fasti uses it for more pious purposes, though whether his own or (more likely) his patron’s is more of an open question.)
Despite having started in the pit, this thread is in Cafe society. It’s fine to disagree with the OP. But this is a place to treat each other with respect.
Not really. A handful, maybe. But generally not. Atheism just wasn’t a thing in classical antiquity. Even some of the people held up as precursor atheists, like Socrates, weren’t. They were more like impious than non-theist. And even if you were “secular” in you innermost thoughts, you practiced the rituals, or you risked your life. So the mix is way more skewed to the believers than today.
Although “belief” is perhaps not the best word to use here. This article (first in a series) says it way better than I could.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Most religions aren’t about belief, they are about rituals and practices and rules of behavior. And the ancients were careful to practice their rituals.
Ovid didn’t simply make change for literary purposes. As far as I know, he’s the first one to asert that the Graeae had not only one eye, but also one tooth that they shared among themsewlves. He’s also the first writer I know of to tell the story that Medusa started out as a beautiful maiden who was seduced by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and got turned into a monster. Prior to this, she was held to be one of three monstrous sistyers (with Stheno and Euryale), the daughters of Ketos the Sea Monster and Phorkys, the Ols Man of the Sea, and had always been a monster. Ovid’s story of Medusa changing into a monster is similar to another of the stories he (and only he) tells, about how the maiden Scylla spurned the sea-god Glaucus, who got Circe to make a potion to make Scylla fall in love with him, but the jealous Circe gave her a potion that turned her into a monster. That’;s in the Metamorphoses, too. In Home, Scylla was always a monster
I’m not familiar with this particular case, but by any chance are you folks referring to the New Zealand aboriginals that we normally call Maori? I’m not aware that a particular Hawaiian island has culturally unique apparel.
On the more general topic, the existence of this thread, and any controversy therein, mystifies me.
No, they’re talking about the character Maui from the animated Polynesian-themed movie, Moana. Maui’s a big, shirtless guy with a lot of tattoos, and Disney licensed a Halloween Maui costume that was a brown body suit, colored to match Maui’s skin tone in the movie, with the tattoos drawn on it. They pulled it from stores after the backlash about it being adjacent to Black-face.
I’m a Christian, and have long been interested in Greek mythology, and enjoyed Hercules despite the many, many liberties it took with the aforementioned Greek mythology. I wasn’t bothered in the least by the use of the phrase “gospel truth.” C’mon, it’s the Muses reimagined as a gospel choir, for Zeus’s sake!
Judaism does consider Islam to not be idolatry, but the notion that Muhammad is the ultimate prophet and the Quran the only truth absolutely renders Islam as a whole incompatible with Judaism.
And the belief in multiple deities as in Hinduism is absolutely heresy in Judaic belief.