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This is a discussion of the Greek Mythos, namely the gods. I was reading about them today, and the conclusion I came to was that they had some serious character flaws. While some might say that this is to humanize them, they seem almost exaggerated extremely in that direction. Most of them were involved in scandalous relationships, all but one of the males had at least one Eremenos, and they were extremely petty and tempermental.

A perfect example was the story of Prometheus. Prometheus(means "forethought") the Titan gave man fire because his brother, Epimethus(means "afterthought"), gave all the gifts to the other creatures before making man. Zeus responded by chaining him to the top of the Caucausus and having an eagle eat his liver every day, since, being immortal, he healed from the previous day's torture. This hardly seems wise, and it sounds a great deal like the Gods were a bunch of children playing with people's lives like toys.

Now, why would anyone believe in Gods such as these? If people make their mythology, why would people create Gods that torment them and make their lives difficult? Zeus loosed all the evils on the world, via Pandora, just so he might torment Prometheus all the more.

This is a recent study for me, and a new one, so I'm not sure on much of what I've read, but here's the place to be enlightened.

Discuss
-The Greek Mythos
-The behavior and lack of responsibility of the Greek Pantheon
-The idea behind the Greek Mythos

The character flaws always humanized them to reality for me, they make the stories stay with you no matter when you heard them.
They were almost a demonstration of what humans would get up to if they had the power.
The tales also reflected back the age in which they were told and some of the harsh realities.
What I ask is in that situation could you believe in the Christian god as he’s perceived now? Benevolent, kind, forgiving or the ancient Greeks version .Seems like a way of dealing with things beyond your control, it was those gods sat up on that mountain.

I find it interesting that they had a thing for great and terrible female/ part female monsters. Women were suppose to be 'subservient' but were portrayed as fearsome in some myths and legends I think they showed some of what was considered to be valued wisdom, like
'Don’t mock the gods or those in power; they tend to get nasty about it: you may wind up with 8 legs and a web'.

They found explanations (supernatural/religious) to explain everything that happened to them. They didn't want to blame themselves (humans are still like this) and they wanted answers. Perfect answer: The Gods.

You forget that storytelling was a large part of Greek entertainment (as tv is today).

To tell stories of the gods was to gain the gods' favor. But who wants to listen to boring stories? So, of course the gods had to have amazing back stories so that people wouldn't get bored. Also, if storytellers added new scandals with every telling, they could lengthen the lifetime of a single story and not have to memorize new ones (as a storyteller couldn't very well read aloud for an audience!). After hundreds of years of adding small touches with every telling, the stories, of course, got pretty convoluted. There are probably actually many more stories and scandals that the gods went through over the years that never got written down for us to read today. I'm sure that specific storytellers also had their own collection of myths to tell about each god, as well. Having more stories (or being able to make up more interesting stories on the fly) as well as having more interesting stories would translate directly into money, as people would be willing to pay more for better stories.

I just can't believe some of the things they supposedly did. Artemis put a man to sleep for all eternity, never aging, just so she could stare at him without losing her virginity to him. Come on!

You have the ultimate disloyal husband, the most jealous of all wives, married divinities constantly trying to show the other up. That's taking it a little far, I think.

It's got a great deal to do with the storyteller's point of view. Back in those days, things like that probably weren't quite as petty as today... they had relationships with their families that are gross today, and I'm pretty sure there are other things that they tolerated that we, as a society, do not.

they were really no better than man in that they constantly killed eachother

Your exactly right, actually. The Greeks used their myths to show life to them... so they showed the gods at their worst. Often they were exaggerations of certain characteristics. For example, Aphrodite and Hephaestus were married and Aphrodite was anything but faithful. There were many stories showing human nature concerning fedility, love and marriage, beauty, etc, at their worst and best...because that's what life was and greeks wanted to know of it.

That's part of the reason Plato had such a cow over the gods in his The Republic. He didn't want the gods to be such poor examples (since his thing was the "ideal form" he didn't go in for showing people how life really was )