i hope the beloved mutuals don’t think me unintellectual for this but i love romantic subplots i gobble them up delightedly with very few exceptions. ‘oh fuck yes a little bowl of seeds for me’ etc
“how are they finding time to fall in love when the worlds ending” and what are we all doing right now 🤨
You can do something to honor a god and pray to them for something, even if you don’t have a personal relationship with them and don’t plan to either.
For thousands of years, people around the world have simply just, prayed and given offerings to various divine beings, regardless of personal devotions.
You can pray to Zeus for rain. You can pray to Hermes for a safe journey. You can pray to Apollo before a surgery. You can pray to Hestia when you move into a new place for a home blessing. You can pray to Athena before an important exam. You can pray to Artemis when your pet is at the vet’s.
You can ask for a god’s intercession at any time, for any reason, without worshipping them on a regular basis.
It’s what people of all cultures and civilizations have done since religions came into the lives of humans.
Seriously you do not need to defend your faith. These people that act like a god literally did x, because some version of a myth describes them doing it are blatantly ignorant of what mythology is. Let alone of how mythology was viewed specifically in ancient Hellas.
This addiction to literalism is seriously damaging. People trying to cancel gods and worshipers based on a view of mythology that would get you laughed out of a high school Greek/Latin course, let alone a full-on academic or scholarly discussion on the relation between myth and worship.
Pay no heed to them. Honour your gods as you desire. The ignorant and incurious can say what they want, but the world and its history will not lessen its complexity just because they want it.
The mind boggling part to me is that in the same breath these people will argue the Bible is not to be taken literally when in fact, what is the Bible if not yet another set of myths? Like, the Bible is literally Christian mythology, and people seem to have no problem with not interpreting its stories literally because they were written by mortals.
So we’re quick to point out that the God of Abraham wiping out all of humankind in one go and sparing only one family is pure fiction, yet we somehow can’t wrap our minds around Zeus’s sex life being written up as stories and local lores.