Back then they were not referred to as myths… Myth is more accurately defined as a story of importance. Its a myth-tory as to the origin of the word as far as I have read, but these stories were not beliefs or canonical… they were stories of past “gods” and serve as a guiding principal in culture. If you take a look at Greek history and the mythology almost ALL the tales are about divine or wicked-like beings (except for one… Oedipus). Like the Bible these satires are parabolic more so than they are systems of belief.
To answer the last one… NO to all of that. THERE WERE GODS and humans. The enlightened would be those aware of the importance of these Stories. Religious people are not necessarily uneducated, just conditioned under a certain set of beliefs powered by fear. You can be afraid of a poisonous snake and still know what kind of snake it is…
Truth is there are those that “translate” or alter stories to better portray the vision of the story they have in their head so that (also) those who may not literally follow the story intellectual purpose may better understand. Then, there are those that follow the stories down to the origin and take it TOO literally and wish the stories bitter ends (because to them they mean nothing or relate to them in no way). Really the only change I consider disappointing would be that Aphrodite is now famously known as the goddess of LOVE where as then LOVE was not a translated word of endearment rather than passion (as she was the Goddess of LUST and War)…
Is the Odyssey a religious text? Or was it a historical adventure story that also included how the gods were involved? (Sort of like Ben Hur or The Robe would apply to Christianity?) The role of bards was of course to entertain, as opposed to the priests or attendants at the assorted temples and shrines. I assume the same applies to the Greek dramatists, they involved the gods in their plays when convenient, but it wasn’t dogma.
So the real thing we’re arguing about is dogma. Was there an established canon, or simply everyone (or each temple) had their own version, and generally these coincided because no temple wanted to confuse the donors by making them think there might be a problem? (Sort of a consensus rather than a pontificate) Were the books more a collection of what was generally said about the Gods - “everyone knows Mars is the God of War, everyone knows Jupiter is the big daddy… Let us worship Aphrodite 'cuz she wears that tightie nightie, and that’s good enough for me…”
Were there any controversies about aspects of the dogma - whether Zeus has one thunderbolt or three, whether Mars could occasionally toss thunderbolts too, for example? I assume the Manichean heresy and similar lethal schisms did not suddenly appear with Christianity. After all, the Samaritans pissed off the orthodox way back when.
Not being dogmatic is not the same thing as not religious. many Greek plays were performed as a central part of religious festivals (chiefly the Dyonisia), and cultic activity surrounded the performances. Overall, there wasn’t as sharp a division between the religious and the secular as there is today.
I do not know much about Greek Mythology, but know a lot about Indian (Hindu) mythology and a little bit about mythology in Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism.
I think a key point of discussion missing in the above discussion is the Logic system developed by the Greek : Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Their logic is interwoven in the Abrahamic Religions and western thinking as such. So Western logic / Belief systems is illustrated by :
Good and Evil : Something can be either good or evil. If you have proved that something is not good, then logically it follows that it is evil !!
God and Satan (Devil) / Allah and Shaitan → One is all good and the other is all bad.
One God (Monotheism) and all other false
Heaven and Hell
etc etc. So if you judge any mythology by this system, it will come out to be false and irrelevant.
In the Indian logic system, there is something called Catuṣkoṭi - Wikipedia . Per this logic, the statement : “Good is good” can be
True
Not True
True and Not True
Neither not True and nor True
That’s the philosophical aspect of it. In real life terms, there’s the concept of Maya (the Matrix) woven into lives. Thus even the most ardent believer of one set of mythology knows that it may not be true for someone else and someone else may have their own “mythology”. Also belief is one path to life, there are other paths to living like a butcher or a shoemaker or a plumber doing her/his job well doesn’t need to have any beliefs (sort of like the concept of flow Flow and Happiness | Psychology Today
So, it’s key to Christianity that there are two gods, one good and one evil, who both exist, and it’s also key that there is one god, and all others do not exist?
In a way, it is. I’ve never understood why Christianity calls itself monotheistic (and we’re not even speaking trinity here) if there’s an obviously also powerful adversary who is able to confuse the minds of the faithful by dirty tricks. Doesn’t compute.
In Christianity God is all good and have no shortcomings. In Eastern thoughts God is good but can have shortcomings and evil can have good too. It’s like a spectrum
It’s the Ying and the Yang, good and evil blend into each other.
So the mythological characters are fake and real at the same time. It’s observer created reality.
Think of it like the picture of the atom, with electrons spinning around and protons and neutrons sitting in the middle. We know that it is a wrong model, but someone may decide that this description is good enough for them. Someone else may Say the quantum models are true etc etc
Essentially the logic is that there is no objective truth - just observer created reality. And everyone’s reality feels “real” to themselves
From my read, the OT pretty explicitly accepts the existence of other gods, it just says that none of them created the universe, none of them are worthy of worship, and - intrinsically for the Jewish - only He promises to protect the circumcised among the tribes of Israel and lead them to victory in all their wars.
There is a James Blish science fiction book where the protagonist, a Jesuit, is convinced of the heresy that the devil can also create life.
Ruiz-Sanchez has to go to Rome to face judgment. His conviction about Lithia is viewed as heresy, since he believes Satan has the power to create a planet. This is close to Manichaeism.
But the whole Greek mythology is not unlike Hindu (but probably more prurient) a never-ending soap opera where the multiple gods clashed, killed, raped, etc. just like the humans below them. Very little to do with monotheism, or good and evil, more defending the capriciousness of life as being caused by a pantheon of gods who were equally capricious and venally motivated - so like humans, sometimes good and sometimes evil. it has little to do with good and evil, other than the odd parable to show the occasionally “you will get your just deserts in the end.” Nor was Greek/Roman mythology monotheistically exclusionary - more along the lines of “Oh, those are some of the same gods, but you just know them by different names.”
I’m not sure any of the Greeks tried to contradict this, except as a mental exercise, “what if we started a society from scratch…?”
