The Greeks who worship the ancient gods

[SecularMotion]

The summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it's a special time for people in Greece who worship the country's pre-Christian gods.

Along with a few thousand others he is taking part in the Prometheia festival, which celebrates the ancient Greek hero Prometheus, who helped humans by stealing fire from the gods.

It's the most important annual festival for followers of The Return of the Hellenes - a movement trying to bring back the religion, values, philosophy and way of life of ancient Greece, more than 16 centuries after it was replaced by Christianity.

These people consider Greece to be a country under Christian occupation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22972610

[rug]

1. Do you think they are deluded or irrational?

[uriel1972]

5. Umm, irrational if they think they can challenge the dominant orthodox religion

and replace it with an ersatz conglomeration of wishful thinking and potted history, yes.
Delusional, is a word I use carefully as I am schizo and have had delusions.

On the other hand if it's just a bit of fun then more power to them.

[LostOne4Ever]

8. I think its the latter

I mean judging by this quote:

They don't actually pray to Zeus, Hera and the others. They see them as representations of values such as beauty, health or wisdom.

The followers are an odd mix. There are New Age types who revere ancient traditions, leftists who resent the power of the Orthodox Church, and Greek nationalists who see Christianity as having destroyed everything that was truly Greek.

It does not sound like they actually BELIEVE this.

[LostOne4Ever]

2. Sounds pretty cool

This time of year could really use an extraholiday anyways.

[dimbear]

3. Cronus sighted whetting his sickle. n/t

[rug]

4. Uranus spotted crossing his legs.

[Rod Walker]

6. So they worship Prometheus, but deny being pagans...

"They have understood that we are not dangerous and we are not pagans and Satanists," he says.

Dude, I think you're pretty much a pagan by definition.

They don't actually pray to Zeus, Hera and the others. They see them as representations of values such as beauty, health or wisdom.

Because actually believing in Zeus and Hera would be, well...silly. That's why they run up Mt. Olympus carrying spears and shields, dress like this:



and call each other "Callisto" and "Orpheus". Because that's so much more dignified.

[Promethean]

7. So just to put some things into perspective.

Most of the responses in this thread previous to this post are exactly how Atheists view all religion, Christianity included. The talk of absurdity is precisely how Atheists see concepts like Burning Bushes, Parted Seas, Virgin Births, Heavenly Ascension, Resurrection, Eternal Punishment and many more. As a matter of fact Atheists find a lot of those concepts down right insulting, especially Original Sin.

[WovenGems]

9. Oh so true

[trotsky]

10. Or as the classic Internet quote puts it so well:

"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one less god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -- Stephen Roberts

No Christian, no believer I have ever met has ever been able to wiggle their way out of that without special pleading.

[struggle4progress]

11. It certainly is curious that Christianity, which arose near Roman-occupied Jerusalem,

did not come to us in Hebrew or Latin but in the language of the Greeks, who seem to have developed rational thought further than any other ancient culture

Since the Greeks had been under Roman rule for some time in the days of early Christianity, it is perhaps understandable that many were sympathetic to a religion which taught that Rome had crucified the Son of G-d, a teaching whose subversive content becomes all the more clear when we realize that the Roman emperors were rather in the official habit of styling themselves as sons of G-d

There may be other reasons that the Greeks so quickly adopted Christianity, which lie in the fabric of Greek society: neither Greek democracy nor Greek rationality were products for the masses in that slave-based society; they were instead products for the leisure classes. The deconstruction of mythological explanations seems to have been a distinct and definite thread in Greek rational philosophy, at least from the time of Socrates, part of the charges against him being that he impiously taught that neither the sun nor moon were gods. But Greek rationality alone was no match for pragmatic Roman imperialism: like the theocrats of Jerusalem, the rationalists of Greece fell into Roman hands, Archimedes impotently begging a pillaging soldier not to disturb his dustboard before the soldier killed him. Post-conquest Roman administration followed an established pattern of maintaining the expected traditional outward appearances as far as possible, while subverting the apparatus to Roman goals. Greek knowledge spread through the empire as educated Greeks were resold as Roman slaves

And what effect could this have had on those who, previously under the rule of the Greek upper classes, now found themselves under Roman rule? Ordinary people have had no use for those who regard themselves as "sons of the gods" since long before the authors of Genesis wrote:

... the sons of the gods saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took for themselves all they wanted as wives ...

The old Greek folk religions had been under attack by cognescenti for centuries by them, but the reason which supposed to replace them had not brought success against the Roman invasion. Missionaries appear, preaching that the True G-d is neither a rapist like Zeus nor an ally of conquerers: indeed, they say, your conquerers crucified our god, and they further teach that knowledge and wisdom alone cannot provide all we need. The Greeks listened to the missionaries, and argued with them, and were convinced