In one sense it's actually no more absurd to worship Zeus and Apollo than it is to worship Jesus and Muhammad and Yahweh
I mean they are all absurd
and in a way the lesson we should take from the fact that virtually nobody in our days worships the olympian gods
is that one day the same will be true, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah will go the same way
I have kind of learned that those people who do claim to still worship the Olympian gods
perhaps they don't really worship them as superhuman people
hey might have turned their belief into a kind of tertiary agent who really was in the supernatural he was into a kind of symbolic version
and that's actually true also of many Christians
if you actually tackle some Christians even some bishops
and ask them do you really believe that Jesus walked on water or turned water into wine or was born of a virgin
they would often say "oh no, that's just symbolic we don't believe that anymore, etc."
and I suppose it's possible that somebody who claimed to worship the Olympian gods would say something like:
"Oh well, we just use the word Apollo as a symbol for nature or something like that..."
I find that rather, this whole idea of retaining something that looks like religion by calling it symbolic, is pernicious because it misleads people
into thinking that there really is something in religion when if you dig down deeper you discover that actually it's all symbolic anyway it doesn't mean anything
But isn't it extraordinary that you would leave the mainstream religion and then make all the effort to have these eccentric, obsolete [religions]?
Well, it depends on the motive. I could imagine that one motive of doing that would be to point out the absurdity of the mainstream religion
which is the purpose of the god of the church of the flying spaghetti monster
and the purpose of that is to say "Anybody can make up a religion because religion is made up anyway and so we're going to make up a new religion of the flying spaghetti monster"
and another way to do that would be to just say "Well, we might as well worship Zeus and Apollo", "We might as well worship Thor and Jötunn the Norse gods"
if that was your motive i would think it was rather a good motive because you would be ridiculing the mainstream religion
and maybe some of them are doing that I don't know...
