How was religion treated in Ancient Greece?

Not disputing or debating other answers, but also don't forget, Christianity made headway in Greece, even if it was still very new and a minority, it was starting to become established there before a lot of other places in Europe. There is more than one book in the new testament even titled after a region of Greece, Thessalonia "Thessalonians", and Collossus, "Collossians", and Philippi "Phillipians"...

pardon my spelling :)

Completely untrue. The ancient Greeks took their gods very seriously. Read Herodotus and notice how often cities and political leaders consult oracles. The Spartans voluntarily sent two of their best men to be killed in Persia because an oracle told them the god of ambassadors was angry with them for killing Persian emissaries who had demanded submission. Many Athenians stayed in the Acropolis and were killed because they interpreted "walls of wood" in a Delphic oracle to mean fortifications on the Acropolis rather than their navy. Read Hesiod and you'll get a very cautious, practical attitude towards all these little rituals you need to do to avoid angering a spirit or god.

Now, the Greek philosophers took a more agnostic attitude; they were generally persuaded that real gods couldn't be the philandering, emotional beings depicted by the myths, so they assumed that these were either lies or allegories. But they were a small minority of intellectuals with limited influence, and Socrates was forced to commit suicide for teaching this stuff in the early stages.

Athens, the city-state got here into being in 800 B.C.E. The Homeric age wherein there have been separate tribes and villages grow to be from 1200-800 B.C.E., till now 1200 there have been what grow to be talked approximately as Aegean people who turned around the Aegean sea as a a thank you to the east as what could grow to be Troy. there grow to be no dark age as there have been no written histories till the Greeks began using an alphabet the borrowed from the Phoenicians. it relatively is perplexing to declare oral historic previous grow to be maximum superb or incorrect and Atlantis isn't area of the Homeric age. Many writings have been lost whilst Christianity destroyed temples and early libraries the temples held because of the fact Greek historic previous secure Greek Gods.That began the dark age of Greece and Rome.

It was a very loose religion where the gods behaved a lot like mortals without any defining guidelines. I think Socrates was put to death mostly because he wouldn't commit suicide as with their strictures. They usually took some sort of poison they would drink and die from it. Their decadent society was ultimately their downfall. It would have ended sooner if it wasn't for the morally stringent Spartans.

really depends on when and where in Greece. but if your talking Athens when Socrates was around then yeah it was a social communion, but gods were more concepts than beings that they would actually worship, yet still very few even among the philosophers would deny belief in deities

Earlier on in Greek history their gods were very human, they had the same faults as humans but had amazing powers. They were more like modern day super heroes than the traditional notion of a god or gods. The way the ancient Greeks dealt with the idea of death was very peculiar. They didn't really believe in heaven or hell so much, they did but it wasn't very important. What was important was gaining immortality through your actions in life, having your name live on through glory in battle was their way of dealing with death. This is seen in the works of Homer, Achilles has the choice of either going to Troy and dying in battle but his name would live on forever and he would become immortal in his death. Or he could not go to Troy, fall in love with a beautiful woman who will also love him dearly as well as his children and grandchildren but his name will fade into obscurity after a few generations. As you know he decided to go to Troy and here I am talking about him prolonging his immortality.

Much later in Greek history they begin to take their gods more seriously and their pantheon becomes a full fledge religion.

philosophers were smart: they made their followers believer they were their own god, basically the way of thinking was gods work. and yes they did do lots of drugs to influence one another and got drunk. politics was seen as a joke because they knew it leads to corruption. they built a strong democratic republic were only adults were allowed to vote.