Gods (Mythology) vs Cosmic Beings (Marvel)

[Jonathan]

Was Zeus suppose to be omnipotent in the mythology? What about Odin?

[Hazard]

Let's be honest, when Typhon came the Greek gods fled to Egypt and turned into animals to hide.

Athena had to get Zeus to man up before he fought.

Not an endorsement of Omnipotence there.

[The Drunkard Kid]

I know we're just pointlessly arguing this point back and forth with mainly the Hesiodic/Homeric Zeus.

But I'm not making it up when I say that the greeks did believe in an endless/infinite universe (at bare minimum).

All this time, I haven't even brought up what Pelasgian Zeus or Orphic Zeus could do.

Bring up actual *myths* where that is referenced, if that is the case. There are Jewish/Christian/Hindu/Pagan/Shinto/etc... Scientists who believe in things that were never mentioned in the myths of their respective religions. They are welcome to interpret the teachings of their religion through the lens of modern knowledge, but, if those topics weren't forbidden by Rumbles', they would have to actually show references if they want to argue that Bheema is stronger than the Incredible Hulk, and the like.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Was Zeus suppose to be omnipotent in the mythology? What about Odin?

My understanding was that, generally speaking, the Olympians were portrayed as beings with mortal minds and personalities that had the power to dictate what is Right, but no obligation to follow those rules themselves, which explained why reality seemed to be so fickle and capricious even if one does all the correct actions.

[Bullet Sniper]

Was Zeus suppose to be omnipotent in the mythology? What about Odin?

In orphism, Neoplatonism, and stoicism at least, then yeah.

Odin can see the nine worlds and carved the universe out of Ymir with ville and ve.

[Bullet Sniper]

Let's be honest, when Typhon came the Greek gods fled to Egypt and turned into animals to hide.

Athena had to get Zeus to man up before he fought.

Not an endorsement of Omnipotence there.

That was the Homeric version of Zeus. One of the most well-known yet weaker zeus's. Definitely no omnipotence there I agree, but still pretty damn powerful.

[GozertheGozarian]

It's been ruled on, let's move on.

[big_adventure]

I know we're just pointlessly arguing this point back and forth with mainly the Hesiodic/Homeric Zeus.

But I'm not making it up when I say that the greeks did believe in an endless/infinite universe (at bare minimum).

All this time, I haven't even brought up what Pelasgian Zeus or Orphic Zeus could do.

Wait, Orphic Zeus? The dude who was abdicating his throne because Hera was pissed at him or sleeping around? That Zeus? Orphic Zeus really doesn't have feats beyond Homer/Hesiod Zeus. He's not really even a different guy.

Stoic Zeus few real feats. All power in stoicsm comes from the pneuma. Which is the holy fire that forms the bond between everything in the universe. Again, not really showing an impressive understanding of what "universe" is. And again, they absolutely did not believe in in anything like a truly infinite universe with massive gas-filled stars and planets and black holes and dark matter and anything. They might have called it infinite (in some translations), but they really didn't know what that could mean, plus, the stoic writers were not scientists. They were philosophers.

Basically, it's time to come to grips with something here: this is Rumbles. You need feats if you want stuff to work out in your favor. Ancient gods are light on high-end feats. And this is because the people talking about them might have said things like "cosmos" and "infinity" but what they really understood was the area they knew about on the surface of the Earth. In the case of the Argiles, Acheans, pre-Roman Greeks, etc., that's the rectangle of land from Italy to North Africa to India to the Black Sea. Infinity was the shit past that. The Romans expanded that on up to England and Germany. Zeus lacks galaxy-busting feats because the people writing about him didn't have the faintest understanding what a galaxy was. To them, it was blobs of light in the sky. They didn't even have a theory for things like "trillions" and such, to say nothing of interstellar or, god forbid, intergalactic, distances.

[Slade1]

Wait, Orphic Zeus? The dude who was abdicating his throne because Hera was pissed at him or sleeping around? That Zeus? Orphic Zeus really doesn't have feats beyond Homer/Hesiod Zeus. He's not really even a different guy.

Stoic Zeus few real feats. All power in stoicsm comes from the pneuma. Which is the holy fire that forms the bond between everything in the universe. Again, not really showing an impressive understanding of what "universe" is. And again, they absolutely did not believe in in anything like a truly infinite universe with massive gas-filled stars and planets and black holes and dark matter and anything. They might have called it infinite (in some translations), but they really didn't know what that could mean, plus, the stoic writers were not scientists. They were philosophers.

Basically, it's time to come to grips with something here: this is Rumbles. You need feats if you want stuff to work out in your favor. Ancient gods are light on high-end feats. And this is because the people talking about them might have said things like "cosmos" and "infinity" but what they really understood was the area they knew about on the surface of the Earth. In the case of the Argiles, Acheans, pre-Roman Greeks, etc., that's the rectangle of land from Italy to North Africa to India to the Black Sea. Infinity was the shit past that. The Romans expanded that on up to England and Germany. Zeus lacks galaxy-busting feats because the people writing about him didn't have the faintest understanding what a galaxy was. To them, it was blobs of light in the sky. They didn't even have a theory for things like "trillions" and such, to say nothing of interstellar or, god forbid, intergalactic, distances.

While I agree with everything said, you can't classify infinity. Infinite is infinite. Doesn't matter if the Greeks didn't fully understand it or if there are no stars, planets etc.

[The Drunkard Kid]

While I agree with everything said, you can't classify infinity. Infinite is infinite. Doesn't matter if the Greeks didn't fully understand it or if there are no stars, planets etc.

Technically speaking, there are different degrees of Infinity, such as the set of All Positive Even Numbers being smaller than All Positive Whole Numbers being smaller than All Positive Numbers being smaller than All Numbers, even though all of those sets are technically infinite. Similarly, an infinite universe containing one world floating in an infinite void with sparkly lights painted on it would be less infinite than an endless universe filled with hundreds of millions of galaxies and the like.

OTOH, barring parallel universes, our current understanding of the universe is generally of a finite universe, albeit one that has a lot more grandiose filling than the Greeks even had concepts for, so there is that.

[Powerboy]

Technically speaking, there are different degrees of Infinity, such as the set of All Positive Even Numbers being smaller than All Positive Whole Numbers being smaller than All Positive Numbers being smaller than All Numbers, even though all of those sets are technically infinite. Similarly, an infinite universe containing one world floating in an infinite void with sparkly lights painted on it would be less infinite than an endless universe filled with hundreds of millions of galaxies and the like.

OTOH, barring parallel universes, our current understanding of the universe is generally of a finite universe, albeit one that has a lot more grandiose filling than the Greeks even had concepts for, so there is that.

I always thought that Greek mythology probably meant infinite in the sense that Earth connected to Olympus which connected to Tartarus and the Fields of Elysium, all of which may have been infinite, etc. I realize that an endless stretch of lights isn't as "filled up" an infinity as our modern understanding of galaxies but it's still an infinite distance and space.

Regarding the debate over Orphic/ Stoic/ Neo-platonic Zeus, my question is: were these versions simply interpreted to be at a power level beyond the more familiar Homeric Zeus or were there actual feats that were well beyond Homeric Zeus?

Someone pointed out that, looking at modern religions that claim an omnipotent deity, they still have feats and those feats can be categorized as highest feats on down, not as "no limits". Of course, we are not allowed to talk about those religions. The point is that theological interpretations are not what matters. The actual stories/ myths are what matter and what the feats were in those actual stories.

[big_adventure]

Thing is, the best and biggest feat that most creator-gods have in ancient religions is creating Earth, and sometimes the shiny painted lights around Earth. I'm totally fine calling those cats planet-busters or somewhat higher based on making an equivalent of planet-and-shiny-light-creating. Poor Zeus doesn't even have THAT - dude was born in Crete, for Odin's sake, the planet and the universe happily existed before he started sleeping with everything on it.

[Powerboy]

Thing is, the best and biggest feat that most creator-gods have in ancient religions is creating Earth, and sometimes the shiny painted lights around Earth. I'm totally fine calling those cats planet-busters or somewhat higher based on making an equivalent of planet-and-shiny-light-creating. Poor Zeus doesn't even have THAT - dude was born in Crete, for Odin's sake, the planet and the universe happily existed before he started sleeping with everything on it.

Yeah I know. At least Mythical Odin is a legitimate planet buster (okay with his two brothers but still) as it is not unreasonable to extrapolate destroying a planet from creating one.

I know Zeus's lightning bolts were, in some versions, described as shaking the heavens and the Earth. Ever been out camping when a serious lightning storm hit and a bolt of lightning struck a tree twenty feet away? The heavens and the Earth shaking is an apt description of what it feels like. Plus in Zeus's case, it's the heavens and the Earth that the various myth writers were referring to which is the world they knew. But as it does say his bolts shook the Earth, I'm willing to say that means the whole Earth the writers knew about and that's some definite continent shaking, even multiple continents. "The Heavens" is very vague. But it's far short of planet busting.

And yeah, when people say this or that dude created the sun, moon and stars, pretty clear that the myth writers are talking about those lights in the sky regardless that some philosophers may have suspected they were a bit more than that. Most myths have the Earth resting on a foundation at the base of the universe and surrounded by a dome to keep the waters above from flooding in and mixing with the waters below so they just trickle in from above as rain. No concept of outer space, celestial bodies, etc.

[Bullet Sniper]

Wait, Orphic Zeus? The dude who was abdicating his throne because Hera was pissed at him or sleeping around? That Zeus? Orphic Zeus really doesn't have feats beyond Homer/Hesiod Zeus. He's not really even a different guy.

Stoic Zeus few real feats. All power in stoicsm comes from the pneuma. Which is the holy fire that forms the bond between everything in the universe. Again, not really showing an impressive understanding of what "universe" is. And again, they absolutely did not believe in in anything like a truly infinite universe with massive gas-filled stars and planets and black holes and dark matter and anything. They might have called it infinite (in some translations), but they really didn't know what that could mean, plus, the stoic writers were not scientists. They were philosophers.

Basically, it's time to come to grips with something here: this is Rumbles. You need feats if you want stuff to work out in your favor. Ancient gods are light on high-end feats. And this is because the people talking about them might have said things like "cosmos" and "infinity" but what they really understood was the area they knew about on the surface of the Earth. In the case of the Argiles, Acheans, pre-Roman Greeks, etc., that's the rectangle of land from Italy to North Africa to India to the Black Sea. Infinity was the shit past that. The Romans expanded that on up to England and Germany. Zeus lacks galaxy-busting feats because the people writing about him didn't have the faintest understanding what a galaxy was. To them, it was blobs of light in the sky. They didn't even have a theory for things like "trillions" and such, to say nothing of interstellar or, god forbid, intergalactic, distances.

You seem to be missing the part where Zeus in Orphism literally ate Phanes, a supreme god of the orphic religions, and the whole universe (or multiverse, orphism has an infinite multiverse, no joke) and the rest of the gods in it and became every god and everything in it. Not to mention he is not even a regular god by that point, he's more like a transcendent force that encompasses everything and beyond.

I have a quote for Stoic Zeus where it describes how powerful he is and the later Stoics believed in a temporal multiverse too.

[Bullet Sniper]

I always thought that Greek mythology probably meant infinite in the sense that Earth connected to Olympus which connected to Tartarus and the Fields of Elysium, all of which may have been infinite, etc. I realize that an endless stretch of lights isn't as "filled up" an infinity as our modern understanding of galaxies but it's still an infinite distance and space.

Exactly infinite is infinite. An ancient mythic cosmology doesn't need to have galaxies or superclusters to be an endless/infinite universe, if it's already endless/infinite or described as such itself. The universe is basically everything of a single reality or within the space-time continuum.

Regarding the debate over Orphic/ Stoic/ Neo-platonic Zeus, my question is: were these versions simply interpreted to be at a power level beyond the more familiar Homeric Zeus or were there actual feats that were well beyond Homeric Zeus?

Both.

Does eating the supreme being of orphism (and the cosmos, which in orphism, contains infinite universes and other shit in and out of it) along with the rest of the gods and becoming not only the new supreme being, but being one with absolutely everything and transcending all concepts and existence answer your question?

Someone pointed out that, looking at modern religions that claim an omnipotent deity, they still have feats and those feats can be categorized as highest feats on down, not as "no limits". Of course, we are not allowed to talk about those religions. The point is that theological interpretations are not what matters. The actual stories/ myths are what matter and what the feats were in those actual stories.

You'd be amazed to see what you could find in "modern" religion and of its mystical and esoteric branches. Take Kabbalah for example.

Thing is, the best and biggest feat that most creator-gods have in ancient religions is creating Earth, and sometimes the shiny painted lights around Earth. I'm totally fine calling those cats planet-busters or somewhat higher based on making an equivalent of planet-and-shiny-light-creating. Poor Zeus doesn't even have THAT - dude was born in Crete, for Odin's sake, the planet and the universe happily existed before he started sleeping with everything on it.

You do realize like how many frickin' ancient religions and mythologies (and even moreso the gods/beings themselves) there are in the whole world right?

And you say that the biggest and best feat of most creator-gods is creating only the Earth? Lmao. Tell that to Chaos, whom out of all existence, sprang out of, including the gods, even Gaia and Tartarus, or the infinite void of darkness/nothing itself (which I'm sure could fit infinite Earths or Suns). Or Ptah who can frickin' create a universe with only a mere word or thought. or Ohrmazd/Ahura Mazda who can not only create the matieral and spiritual worlds and create finite time from infinite time, but an infinite spanning universe made up of more universes in parallel with his reality of creation and with a finger. And many others.

And norse mythology has nine worlds in a tree possibly laying in an endless void (ginnugagap) and ragnarok involves the destruction of all the worlds (universe/multiverse) and a few of the norse gods survive. and despite what most people think, the norse myths do actually have a creator god too (alfadur), however obscure he may be.