Though initiated in the United States, World Religion Day has come to be celebrated internationally by followers of the Baháʼí Faith. We all know the show’s reggae theme song (“Bad boys, bad boys, what’cha gonna do, what’cha gonna do when they come for you?”). Those judged to be bad people were sentenced to eternity in Tartarus, a version of Hell. Those judged to be good people drank of the River Lethe so that they would forget all bad things, and spend eternity in the wonderful Elysian Fields. Cuz well, its good to check right? We’re not letting go of accountability and good sense only because God will make sense of everything. Just as He chose to accomplish the Redemption through His Mother, the Virgin Mary, this time He chose another virgin, Luisa Piccarreta, to whom God gave this supreme gift of the Divine Will while she was only 24 years old, in 1889. Through Luisa, God wants to give this gift of the Divine Will to all who wish to receive it. Begin your interview with open questions that will encourage your interviewee to talk (these questions will begin with who, what, when, where, why, how).

Zeus sent Hermes to talk to Hades, who agreed to let Persephone go, but he secretly fed her pomegranate seeds before she left, ensuring that she would remain bound to his realm forever. Important in trying to spell out principles for dealing with the material was Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), who argued that history has to be written in accordance with the following principles: first, the principle of criticism-i.e., the sifting of the evidences and testing of conclusions (thus historical certainty about much in the ancient witnesses to Jesus is impossible); second, the principle of analogy-i.e., in the absence of firsthand experience, scholars must treat reports of miraculous events with skepticism since people do not encounter such events in their own experiences (here Troeltsch adopted the position of David Hume); and, third, the principle of correlation-i.e., events in history are continuous with one another in a causal nexus, which rules out irruptions into the causal order by God: if he works in history, he is immanently in all of it.

Of all the gods on Olympus, he is arguably the most human, having suffered abuse by the other gods, who by contrast are aloof, perfect, and remote from the frailties of men. More important, no small number of those men and women who converted during the First Great Awakening had defied traditional authorities to uphold their new religious convictions. The first was when Zeus and Hera were in the midst of one of their endless quarrels. The legends say that Hera could not bear the sight of him and his deformed legs, and she wanted this reminder of a failed quarrel with Zeus to disappear, so she threw him off Mount Olympus once more. Hephaestus suffered two falls from Mount Olympus, both humiliating and painful-gods aren’t supposed to feel pain. Hades tricked the two mortals into taking seats of forgetfulness from which they could not get up until Heracles came to rescue them. Elsewhere Hades was portrayed as injured or threatened by a club and bow-wielding Heracles. Demeter received her daughter and, forced to compromise with Hades, agreed that Persephone would remain one-third of the year as the consort of Hades and two-thirds with her mother and the Olympian gods (latter accounts say the year was split evenly-the references are to the seasons of the year).

While the underworld was the land of the dead, there are several stories including The Odyssey in which living men go to Hades and return safely. The fall took an entire day and when it ended in Lemnos, Hephaestus was nearly dead, his face and body permanently deformed. The second fall from Olympus occurred when Hephaestus was still scarred by the first fall, and perhaps more humiliating, this one was caused by his mother. One myth reports that he only returned to Olympus by crafting a beautiful throne for his mother with a secret mechanism trapping her in it. Another from a late source reports that Hades abducted an ocean-nymph called Leuke to make her his mistress, but she died and he was so distressed that he caused the white poplar (Leuke) to grow in her memory in the Elysian Fields. Some of the legends around Hephaestus suggest he was parthenogenic, the son of only Hera unaided by Zeus, an event caused by Hera in anger after Zeus produced Athena without the benefit of a female partner.