How should we react to greek “gods” like zeus and what significance do them hold to us in todays life?

Transcript

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question from Rishiraj Prabhu how should we react to Greek God like Zeus and what significance do they hold to us in today’s life answer actually Prabhupada explained that the Greek civilization was basically an expatriate Vedic civilization after the war of Kurukshetra Mahabhar and especially after Parikshit Maharaj’s departure before which time the whole world was under the one central empire of the Kurus but after this whole world started getting disintegrated more and more and various countries started asserting their autonomous rule so the central connection got lost and accordingly what existed of the Vedic culture got mixed with many other things so in the Greek history if we see many of the ideas of Socrates are remarkably similar to the teachings of the Upanishads in the Bhagavad Gita in one of Socrates dialogues there is a whole section where he consoles his friend who is lamenting the death of his wife by speaking about the immortality of the soul so basically the whole system of philosophy is quite similar of course there are dissimilarities also because over a period of passage of time and mixing with other ideas some hybrid ideas have come up so there have some people who have done some research which indicates that Zeus the basic conception of the god Zeus is somewhat similar to some of the Vedic gods now it is very difficult to point to a one to one similarity but Duttakarma Prabhu in his book Human Devolution talks about the similarities in cosmologies across diverse cultures this is how all of them share some standard features for example a higher celestial realm and beyond that a spiritual realm so these are features which are similar so it is possible that the conception of the Greek gods was similar to the conception of the Vedic gods however much of the stories that are associated with the Greek gods have become filled with mythologies so in the sense that they are tales which are not necessarily having any root either in historical fact or in scriptural truth so more important than the specific names of the gods is the conceptual framework that underlies and that is similar to the Vedic scriptures so the Greek and Roman conceptions of the higher worlds had many similarities to the Vedic conceptions so generally our source of authority is Shabda so the Vedic scriptures as they are understood to Guru Sahasra and to the extent other schools of thought, cultures theologies are in harmony with the Shabda to the extent we can consider them to be valid otherwise we can understand that there are deviations and contaminations that are coming to different degrees therefore we will have to see individually the features of the various gods and then we can decide further about what is whether a specific god correlates with a specific deity within the Vedic tradition but such exercises are bound to have, bound to be involved in a significant amount of speculation and their results are going to be debatable so that’s why unless it is of a specific interest or purpose for us as devotees we understand the broad principles that there are similarities in thoughts and there is a there is a parampara based historical understanding of the reason for the similarity of those thoughts and rather than looking at the way things have become in the civilizations where there were deviations and why they became like that it is better for us to focus on the roots and utilize those principles and benefit ourselves from that