Hampton Roads gets a fair share of titters because certain devout locals with access to a cable audience claim to get weather reports from God himself - and inaccurate ones at that. Fair enough. But for all Pat Robertson’s eccentricities, he cannot compare to the loonies in Greece who are attempting to revive the worship of Zeus.

To hear the pagans of Athens explain it at a recent ceremony outside a 1,800-year-old temple, Zeus-worship would fit right in on an average American college campus. While celebrating the nuptials of Zeus and Hera, high priest Kostas Stathopoulos intoned, “Our message is world peace and an ecological way of life in which everyone has the right to an education.” The only things they didn’t include were universal health care and a commitment to fight homelessness.

In short, the Christian right may have turned Jesus into a card-carrying Republican, but Zeus is a member of MoveOn.org.

Maybe the English translations of Homer we get here are a bit off, but it doesn’t seem likely that a guy who took power by hurling his dad into the fiery pit of Tartaros after a 10-year war that savaged the landscape of ancient Greece would be very sympathetic to modern pacifism and environmental regulation.

Pretty much none of the stories about Zeus make him seem like a guy you’d want to be running the universe. While married to his sister Hera, the king of gods fought yet another war with a bunch of giants. In the heat of battle with one of the toughest, Porphyrion, Zeus used his divine power to fill the giant with lust and then killed him while he was distracted by trying to rape poor Hera.

In Zeus’ defense, he does have a couple of modern features. His dad, Kronos, ate all of the poor kid’s siblings, leaving him to grow up hidden in a cave. That kind of abuse and neglect could at least land him a spot on Oprah.

His view of marriage would fit in pretty well today too. He worked his way through three wives while fathering so many kids with so many other women that most of them didn’t even know one another. That’s something to worship for sure.

Maybe he’s a better meteorologist.

Source: The Virginian-Pilot

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.