Edith Hamilton has much to answer for.

She's not the only one, of course. Merely one of the most prominent of those scholars who pre-digest their findings on religion/folklore/etc. into neat, clean categories and tables of responsibility with all the corners squared off. She was the one who got picked up as a textbook and thereby popularized, for whole generations, the concept of "X is the god of Y".

Aphrodite is the goddess of love; Isis is the goddess of fertility; Susanou is a thunder god. Each of these statements is, if not an outright lie, deeply inaccurate. Aphrodite, according to her stories, liked to have sex and make trouble. She also liked beautiful things for themselves, herself primary among these. One story says she liked to bathe in a particular spring, another says she was born in Cyprus, and if you ask Plato you get told that there are two sides to her, the heavenly one interested in homosexuality and the common one interested in heterosexuality. Some stories say she was born of Zeus, others say she's Poseidon's daughter, and still others bring in Thalassa. Isis may be who a lot of Heliopolitans asked to help out with fertility but by those standards you could just as easily call her the goddess of magicians, and that entirely leaves out her primary occupation of being the power behind her son's throne. And that's only in one version of her stories, over a rather short period of time. To call Susanou a thunder god misses every single one of the most significant actions attributed to him, some of which, such as causing the sun to hide in a cave or being the source of staple food crops for humanity, are pretty darn significant.

The tendency of scholars writing "basic" texts or "overviews" is to attempt to make coherent a huge and fragmented body of information. I consider this terribly dishonest. It ignores the constant contradictions between sources and glosses over the fact that many sources come from different geographical regions and different time periods, and have nothing but the names in common.

Worse, by focusing on what commonalities can be found and ignoring the complications, Hamilton et al spread the misconception that there is one, coherent story about gods and other legendary creatures--that one can, for not-a-random example, find a single, authoritative answer to questions like "What are the mating habits of vampires?" or "Who is the consort of Cernnunos?".

And sooner or later that misconception leads straight into thinking that there is a single, authoritative answer to questions like "Is America the good guy?".

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E-life would be better if everyone refrained from replying until they have actually read the post/comment/thread in question.

Read it. Not skimmed it, not glanced at it in the middle of reading one of the fifteen other windows they have open, not blipped over from some convo for five seconds to dash off a reply just for the joy of hearing their own voices. Read it.

Possibly even, and I know this is a pipedream, here, read it with a small amount of care and attention. Maybe even pausing to dismount from personal hobbyhorses and consider for a brief moment that the poster might mean something different from what they would mean if they wrote the post in question.

Is it really so vital to have your existence noticed that you'll consent to be noticed for being a blithering hot-air bag who totally missed the point?

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