TGIF

Ahh, the end of the week at last. Just knowing that in a few hours I'll be free is enough to overcome the aggravation of yesterday's post. I feel more like a human being today, and not some sort of crazy, snarling animal who has somehow learned to use a telephone. And other than that I haven't much to say, but it seems silly to have a whole post just to say that I feel less insane than yesterday, so I'll think of something.
I know! How about the Wonder Woman novel I just finished reading? It was as dramatic as any comic book, and had some flaws, but you can't really pick up a novel based on a comic book and expect it to be more than junk food. But it was good junk food, I must say. More about religion than I thought it was going to be, which was... well, it made me realize that either my religious and cosmic ideas have been shaped by comic books, or I just have comic-book mind... ;)
Anyway, the main conflict of the novel was between WW and this televangelist named Rebecca. Rebecca's conviction is that WW is blasphemous and that her existence is an affront to Christian society. *laughs* which isn't actually a far cry from the insanity of real televangelists, but let's move on with the story here. Rebecca believes this because WW says she was brought to life from clay by a bunch of Greek gods, and attests that she has visited Olympus many times and seen them, spoken to them. Rebecca can't handle any old gods being proven real, so she wages this campaign to bring WW down.
You don't really need a plot layout or anything here--the point is that the book spends some time trying to reconcile Christianity and Olympian mythology, and in a broader sense, reconcile polytheistic ideas with monotheistic ideas. The author seems to suggest, by the end, that all these ideas can coexist. Which is my thought about it, precisely.
Maybe it's a the bias of being raised with a monotheistic background, but I like to think that maybe there's a difference between God and gods. Maybe gods are like saints... they're powerful in some non-human way, they're divine in some way. Or maybe they're more like angels and demons, some good, some bad, all more than human. Maybe God, anybody's one God, is a power higher than that. Overseeing it all. Maybe, by worshipping many gods, polytheistic societies are actually worshipping seperate parts of a greater whole, or... steps, on the way to the highest divinity.
And now that I've said my strange and confusing piece, I'll leave you to chew on it or spit it out as you will. One last thought, though. If Wonder Woman is Greek Amazon, brought to life from clay by a host of Greek gods, why the heck did her mother name her Diana?