Greek Polytheism

Topics I tend to stay away from in arguments are politics and religion. The two are controversial subjects in a way that most people get very sensitive and emotionally moved with great enthusiasm. I think this is the first time I ever write about religion. After growing up in strong Roman Catholic family and five years of theology education at Catholic school, I have fair amount of knowledge in Christianity, which rather resulted my disengagement from it. And apparently, my first topic is on paganism which cease to exist any more. 

After spending considerable amount time with classic works of Greeks and Romans, I was profoundly inspired by their logical views and creations in many different  fields such as social structure, warfare, politics, science, and religion is also among them. Although in today's Christianity dominated world, most people refer to it as paganism, I recently came to a realization that Greeks' views on religion were rather highly logical and reasonable.

Some of the characteristics of divine beings in Greek mythology are that:

• specific role granted to each god. While controversial issues between science and religion still remain unresolved, powers of Greek gods are merely tied with those cannot be explained logically by science, including power of nature and interpersonal affections. This limits interference of religion with other matters, and likely this is the reason neither Greeks nor Romans were obsessed with their religions belief until Christianity spread across the Roman empire.


• acceptance of other cultures. Distribution of powers to each god figures allows room for new roles and also gods of other cultures. Namely, Isis from Ancient Egypt and Cybele from Asia minor became important figures in Roman society. In contrast, Christianity which denies any existence of other divine beings, have gone through long years of brutal warfare due to lack of tolerance.


• personified divine figures. Although people want their divine figures to be a perfect beings, there is no reason gods should not bear some of the human weaknesses. Envy, greed, lust, many of those Catholic church refer to as the seven deadly sins, are natural characteristics humans are born with. One does not necessarily have to restrain oneself for spiritual salvation, but rather free oneself for steady adaptation to changing world and opulence in reality.

Especially in today's competitive society, where humans strive for survival, and let themselves fall into lecherous and depraved state in order to become more socially adaptable, maybe Greek polytheism is the religion this society is in need of, for virtuous and coherent vision of the world.