Every ancient civilization produced its own mythology. Partly to come up with some sort of explanation for the things they didn't understand (which back then was pretty much everything), and partly because human beings really like to tell and hear stories.
All of these mythologies are fascinating in their own right, of course, and they all have something to say about human nature, but in the west many people seem to be really fond of Greek mythology rather than, say, Celtic, Slav or Norse mythology. (Roman mythology doesn't really count, given that the Romans simply took the Greek myths and changed the names of the gods. Nice try.)
Quick digression. Of the many, many things that the Romans stole from the Greeks, a small but rather beautiful and poetic one is the epitaph they used to put on gravestones: sit tibi terra levis, may the ground rest lightly upon you. (Of course the Greeks wrote that in Greek, not Latin.)
Some of the stories in Greek mythology are really clever, but individual stories aside, there's an interesting aspect about the relationship the ancient Greeks had with their gods (something that perhaps was not unique to the ancient Greeks) that is quite different from monotheism. (I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim gods as one and only, given that Christianity is quite simply a Jewish heresy, and Islam is nothing more than a Jewish and Christian spin-off.)
While the Greeks did venerate their gods (those gods were just as vain and egotistical as the god of monotheism), they did not grovel before them. They didn't kneel, they didn't prostrate themselves abjectly and submissively, as millions of religious people still do to this day. And why didn't they? Well, the answer is quite simple. Their gods didn't love them, and so they didn't love them back. That sort of attitude may seem odd at first.
If you believed in a supernatural being or beings, wouldn't you want them to love you? Who doesn't love love? Were the ancient Greeks just wicked and immoral? They were not. They simply looked at the world around them and they found it baffling. They saw it full of beauty and wonder but also, all too often, random and unjust. The only possible explanation for them was that the gods were capricious: sometimes benevolent and sometimes spiteful, sometimes forgiving and sometimes vengeful, sometimes compassionate and sometimes callous. (The Greek gods and goddesses also happened to be quite a horny bunch, but that's beside the point.)
The ancient Greeks just couldn't reconcile their view of the world with the idea of loving, caring gods who looked after us and intervened in our lives to make things better, something an atheist can understand. In a way you could say that they had the courage to see the world as it is, rather than as they wished it to be, and in that respect their position was not that dissimilar from atheism either.
Quick digression: the very last of the pagan Roman Emperors was not Constantine but his grandson Julian. Raised as a Christian, Julian later abandoned Christianity in favour of paganism (hence the nickname Julian the Apostate). In his essay Against the Galileans (Galileans meaning Christians), reflecting on the story of the snake and the apple of good and evil in the book of Genesis, Julian rightly points out that a loving God would not have withheld the gift of knowledge from men, and would not have been jealous of men eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal.
According to him, that story shows God to be evil, and the snake, wanting to give humanity the enormously valuable gift of differentiating good from evil, to be good. I think the man had a point. (Julian also ridiculed the idea of a talking snake, but to be fair there are plenty of weird creatures in Greek-Roman mythology too.)
Anyway, with the arrival of Christianity, paganism quickly evaporated, and with it a perhaps cynical but also honest way of thinking went as well. With Christianity's emphasis on divine love, salvation and eternal life, a more wishful way of thinking took over, and it's still going strong now. Are we better off or worse off? It depends. A religion like monotheism can do many things, and one of them is to give people strength and hope in times of hardship.
A while ago I was talking with a Malaysian woman, and she told me a very touching story. She told me that, when she was in high-school, back in Malaysia, her best friend was a girl who came from a very poor family. She said that this girl was the nicest person she ever met. One of those people that never said anything bad about anyone. Not a single bad bone in her body.
One morning, on her way to school, this girl was run over by a truck and killed. And then she said something that I thought was really poignant: "I have to believe that she died for a reason, and that she's in a better place now, otherwise I just can't bear it."
I get that. I really do. Can we blame people if they choose to believe in something that makes them feel better when things are tough? Religion is often used as a crutch, and you wouldn't want to take a crutch away from someone, would you? That would be mean.
On such occasions like the one with that Malaysian woman I'm more than happy to keep my opinion to myself (although she knew I don't believe). If that was all that monotheism was, just a crutch, then I'd have no problem with it. (It's when they start telling me how I should live my life that I get a little annoyed.)
But of course, even as a crutch, it's still just a fairy tale, however helpful it may be. I realize that the idea that there's no one up there looking out for us, and that things don't always happen for a reason, and that there's nothing waiting for us after we die can seem rather bleak and nihilistic. But before you go get a razor to cut your wrists, allow me to make one more observation.
It's precisely because the world can be random and unjust that we have to try our best to make it as fair and just as possible, right here right now. No point waiting for an afterlife. And it's precisely because there's no one up there looking out for us that we have to look out for each other. If the gods don't love us, well, then I guess we'll just have to love each other, won't we?
