Now, you probably share the widespread Western belief that the Lord Buddha is the most compassionate of the gods, much more so than Jehovah and Allah and the rest.

When they tried to depict the most abiding qualities of men, it was because men had common roots with the unchanging gods.

Israelites of course abstained from pork, but Ahab was married to a Phoenician / Tyrian princess Jezebel, who was one of the most " powerful and notorious women of monarchic times " yet who died of a similarly seemingly random death like her husband, and his capital of Samaria was said to follow Canaanite gods.

Then looking at him darkly Zeus who gathers the clouds spoke to him :' Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar. To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos. Forever quarrelling is dear to your heart, wars and battles .… And yet I will not long endure to see you in pain, sinceyou are my child, and it was to me that your mother bore you. But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinouslong since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.

This describes how the gods revealed to him in a dream the constellations that would be most favorable for the planned construction of a temple.

Joshua's two final addresses challenge the Israel of the future ( the readers of the story ) to obey the most important command of all, to worship Yahweh and no other gods.

Agni is one of the most important of the Vedic gods.

" The tension between reason and passion is symbolized by his character's relationship with the gods, as in Hecuba's prayer, answered not by Zeus, nor by the Law of Reason, but by brutal Menelaus as if speaking on behalf of the old gods, and most famously in Bacchae, where the god Dionysus savages his own converts.

Many gods were associated with particular regions in Egypt where their cults were most important.

Freyr ( sometimes anglicized Frey, from * frawjaz " lord ") is one of the most important gods of Norse paganism.

In Saxo's Gesta Danorum, however, the gods and goddesses are heavily euhemerized, and Saxo's view on pagan deities is extremely biased, therefore most stories related to pagan gods written in it might not exist in ancient lore.

In addition to seeing it as the most fundamental of the four elements and the one that is quantified and determines the quantity ( logos ) of the other three, he presents fire as the cosmos, which was not made by any of the gods or men, but " was and is and ever shall be ever-living fire.

The anarchist Emma Goldman expressed this view when she wrote, " Consciously or unconsciously, most atheists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell ; reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment.

Several Biblical stories allude to the belief that the Canaanite gods all existed and possessed the most power in the lands that worshiped them or in their sacred objects ; their power was real and could be invoked by the people who patronised them.

Hubal () is regarded as the most notable and chief of the gods.

In most cases gods and goddesses are often depicted in stone reliefs, pottery decoration, wall paintings and in the various Maya, Aztec and Mixtec codices.

Other parties have also propagated the idea that the Native Americans believed the conquistadors to be gods: most notably the historians of the Franciscan order such as Fray Gerónimo de Mendieta.

The gods were forced to stop meddling with humanity ( at least openly ) a thousand years ago by the Celestials, and most people today believe them to be fictional.

Nymphs are personifications of the creative and fostering activities of nature, most often identified with the life-giving outflow of springs: as Walter Burkert ( Burkert 1985: III. 3. 3 ) remarks, " The idea that rivers are gods and springs divine nymphs is deeply rooted not only in poetry but in belief and ritual ; the worship of these deities is limited only by the fact that they are inseparably identified with a specific locality.

Inti, the sun god, was to be worshipped as one of the most important gods of the empire.

Among recent authors, John Ray has stated that " the hieroglyphs were the most important of the scripts on the stone: they were there for the gods to read, and the more learned of their priesthood ".

Pantheistic and polytheistic faiths make no such distinction ; gods and other beings of transcendent power often have complex, ignoble, or even irrational motivations for their acts.

* The multiple gods of pan-and polytheistic faiths ( as in the ancient Greek and Roman )

By accommodating the conquered people's gods, religion became more polytheistic and government became somewhat more secular ; the title of lugal, big man, appears alongside the earlier religious titles, although his primary duty is still the worship of the state gods.

Hosea's family life reflected the " adulterous " relationship which Israel had built with polytheistic gods.

Prior to Islam the Kaaba of Mecca was covered in symbols representing the myriad demons, djinn, demigods, or simply tribal gods and other assorted deities which represented the polytheistic culture of pre-Islamic Arabia.

Panentheism ( from Greek ( pân ) " all "; ( en ) " in "; and ( theós ) " God "; " all-in-God ") is a belief system which posits that the divine ( be it a monotheistic God, polytheistic gods, or an eternal cosmic animating force ), interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it.

In this type of polytheistic context, the chaotic nature of the world implies multiple gods battling for control.

In the first stage, represented by the oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible, it was polytheistic and creation involved a battle between the leader of the gods ( probably El ) and the forces of Chaos represented by chaos-monsters such as Leviathan.

Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic, thereby accepting the existence of many different deities, both male and female, though it was also henotheistic, with certain gods being viewed as superior to others by their specific devotees.

Although the panentheistic tendency in Hinduism allowed only a subordinate rank to the old polytheistic gods, they continued to occupy an important place in the affections of individual Hindus and were still represented as exercising considerable influence on the destinies of man.

Trickster gods found in polytheistic belief systems often have a dystheistic nature.

* the worship of polytheistic gods by use of idols ( or images )

He aimed his critique at the polytheistic religious views of earlier Greek poets and of his own contemporaries: " Homer and Hesiod " one fragment states, " have attributed to the gods all sorts of things that are matters of reproach and censure among men: theft, adultery, and mutual deception.

Heimir Geirsson and Margaret Holmgren argue against the view that different religions can lead to the same God because some regions are incompatible with each other ( monotheistic and polytheistic religions have contrasting views of divinity, for example, and some Greek or Nordic gods magnified human weaknesses ).

Many polytheistic traditions portray their gods as feeling a wide range of emotions.

In other cases, Elohim acts as an ordinary plural of the word Eloah, and refers to the polytheistic notion of multiple gods ( for example, Exodus 20: 3, " Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

In Gen 20: 13 Abraham, before the polytheistic Philistine king Abimelech, says that " the gods ( elohim ) caused ( plural verb ) me to wander ".

There are no reasons to believe that the Indo-Europeans practiced a religion that was more male-dominated, patriarchal, or wont to promote male gods at the expense of goddesses, than any other polytheistic religion.

In polytheistic religions, gods are typically ascribed human or human / animal bodies ( including gender and race ), family relationships, and human failings ( including intra-familial struggles, jealousy, revenge, and a whole host of negative human traits ).

Candomblé is a polytheistic religion and worships a number of gods, derived from African deities:

It can also be asserted that this whole legal system was ideologically founded on the indigenous postulate which adhered to the shamanistic religio-political belief in polytheistic gods and which was called kami and later developed into Shintoism. Masaji Chiba, " Japan " Poh-Ling Tan, ( ed ), Asian Legal Systems, Butterworths, London, 1997 at 91.

The Serbs were a polytheistic Slavic tribe that believed in several gods, such as Svetovid ( God of war, fertility and abundance ) and Dažbog ( Sun god, a culture hero and a source of wealth and power ).