maybe Zeus (supposed to be the Master of the Universe) is above Him but where has he been for thousands of years?
In my view, the gods never stopped interacting with us. We just lost sight of who they were, and either mistakenly attributed their work to Yahweh or Jesus, or simply to natural phenomena unmoored to the divine. And I mean, attempted revivals of Hellenistic paganism have been a periodic phenomenon in Europe pretty much ever since the traditional religious establishment was dismantled. It never really stopped, the gods never went away.
That seems to be the his beginning. Apparently he could of been a desert god.
I highly recommend Dr. Justin Sledge's video about Yahweh's history, over on his youtube channel
Esoterica. It's not too long, and is a great primer on the subject.
Do you think Zeus has the same power now as he did when he was declared master of the universe?
I think they all do. I don't think their power has any direct relation to human worship. The "gods need prayer badly" is mostly just a trope of modern fiction. It's a fun storytelling gimmick, but it has no basis in theology or reality.
I don't know if you think Jesus Christ is God or was even a real person...
I think that whatever form Jesus was given in the Bible is a mishmash of oral legends, borrowings from Hellenistic myth, and projecting expectations of Jewish messianism (including his purported genealogy), to the point that the historical Jesus might just as well be treated as a completely different person.
one of them are right or all of them are wrong.
That kind of exclusivism is pretty much only present in Christianity and Islam. Even Judaism is wibbly on it. There can be many creator gods, as they can all be projections or emanations of the ineffable creative, ordering
principle. What the Neoplatonists called
Nous, or the Stoics called
Logos, is less of a being with a mind and more of an abstract principle of thought and rational order. Zeus, and many other gods, are their faces-- perhaps like facets on a gemstone.
So why call them gods at all? Why worship them?
A god doesn't have to be a creator to be worthy of honor, love, respect, or worship, or simple recognition of their divine power. That's a bizarre leap to make. A person doesn't have to be a king to be worthy of respect, yeah? Why would a god have to be the "highest god" to be valued?
most are blatantly lying...
I think it's a bit weird to take a deity's follower lying, or simply being wrong, as an indication that the deity itself is lying.
This is the confusion I have with my experience, if it was not the Holy Spirit then why say the bible is mostly true, including Jesus is God
Depends on what exactly they communicated to you. It might have been the broad strokes of the Bible, as a message of love and redemption, or it might have been specific books or text within it, since the New Testament canon was compiled over about a century.
Is this the Bible as a literal text, or the Bible as a vibe? And if the former, necessarily begs the question of
which texts?
For what it's worth, I think it highly depends on which Gospel we're looking at. The three synoptic Gospels emphasize Jesus' humanity, ethical messages, and miracles as a holy man or prophet. It's only really with John that you get mystical, and a lot of it is strikingly similar to Orphic ideas and philosophical views of Dionysus. Compare Zagreus as the pre-existent god, an extension of the Logos or universal mind; Jesus reads a lot like being Bacchus' avatar to the Jews.
Things get blurry when it comes to where Jewish eschatology fits in, but I'd consider that a cultural feature of the time and place, a product of the rather alarming material conditions in Judea.
I've read much of Greek mythology, and all the gods can't be trusted when it comes to human affairs.
Most pagans do not take myths literally, and there's indication that myth-literalism was also uncommon in the Ancient world. Myth is allegorical, mostly.
This entity I experienced wanted nothing from me, it just wanted to let me know that it would always love me no matter what. Nothing required from me, just to live. Doesn't sound like a Greek or any other pagan god, unless you can think of any?
Most of the Theoi sound like that.
I think humans true form is spirit. This is because of personal experiences.
I suppose it depends on what you see as "True". I think our spirit is a core part of us, yeah. But I don't think our bodies are evil, bad, or lowly. Matter is suffused with divine presence, too. We are a microcosm of the universe. But, I'm a Humanist in a lot of ways, and I see humanity as a miraculous culmination of creation.
I think it's pretty plain to see in Greek mythology, and Sumerian that the gods had physical bodies for some time.
As I indicated earlier, myth literalism is generally rejected.
All that being said...I do agree with you, in a way. This gets more into my mystic experiences, and I haven't fully sussed out the philosophical rationalization of it. But I do think the gods, at some point in the past,
could more readily incarnate and walk among us. I think that time has passed, but it may come again, perhaps in cycles. Though I still see these bodies are projections of a sort. They can exist perfectly fine without them.
Now, an alternative perspective, which my wife has described, is that the gods exist across every potential spatial dimension. Therefore, they
do have bodies, which
they would perceive as physical. But because we can only comprehend 3 spatial dimensions (plus time),
we cannot perceive or understand them fully, and their bodies aren't ordinarily comprehensible to us. Thus, the fullness of their existence is still unintelligible to humans.
but I do hope you find this dialog fruitful
It has been so far![/QUOTE]