No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
You have to understand that in the pre-classical era, Roman people had minor god cults throughout their small villages, and the Greeks did the same thing. The cults beliefs did some traveling over time, and reasonable people slowly began piecing together a shared mythos.
Over time, as the Greeks pulled together their culture into a power structure of loosely associated city-states, their religious cults from dozens and dozens of villages all were glued together into a more cohesive pantheon.
Romans then adopted and 'latinized' the Greek pantheon, mixing in several of their own superstitions and cults.
This means you will have a God of creation and a God of that pond over there, which might have later been rationalized into a nymph.
EDIT:
It's much the same in the Abrahamic religions. Yahweh was the god of storms/thunder, sort of second or third in command to El, had a wife etc. Later he was given domain over war and then later promoted to the one true God.
You can see small remnants of this in the Bible, in the conflicts with Baal (another diety of the pantheon) especially (theorized to be some of the oldest stories in the Bible). Yahweh often uses thunder and lightning in his signs, and in older records mention is made of his wife/children etc.
Before things were commonly written down and literacy was common Religious beliefs were messy, constantly adapting and re-adapting to changing times, rulers, and encounters with other systems of belief.
OP, this is the most correct answer. Then the gods from the goat herders and gods of the sailors and gods of the farmers ended up sort of getting glued together into responsibility groups, and then get names, so sure, there was a god of vines and grapes and wine, which was likely just the general "please god bless my vines" god for the area where lots of people grew vines and made wine.
There are similar practices among animist peoples in Sun-Saharan Africa, where local cults are just how people still do things, with their local gods for the village or the cluster of villages.
Also worth knowing is that when Greeks and Romans traveled, they didn't say "we have a god of war, and it's Aries, and your gods are false and that's the end of the conversation." They would show up and say "What do you call the god of war? We call him Aries."