Ojuice5001

I'm sure we've all heard the story of how the people of Athens used to have an altar to an unknown god, and Paul decided that this altar was, in fact dedicated to the Jewish god. It's a story Christians point to if they want to emphasize that the pagan world had plenty of sincere seekers of the truth about God(s). Why don't we do that now? Have an altar dedicated to the unknown god, I mean.

I believe it would be a help to America's relations with the gods. The gods of Greco-Roman mythology aren't really known gods, because you can't have knowledge of what you believe to be nonexistent. So they could claim this altar for themselves with just as much justice as Paul claimed the Greeks' altar for Yahweh. Christians and Muslims would be quite good at rationalizing the monument as honoring their god. And it shouldn't offend anyone else either; anyone should admit that there may be some unknown gods in existence, and it couldn't hurt to make a public, physical acknowledgement of them.

Marduk

First of all, do Pagan religions have a creator god, one that created the whole universe? Zeus had a dad, Kronos, so Zeus couldn't have been a creator god. Is this unknown god the creator God of the Chriatian religions? The Egyptians had a creator God sometimes, Ptah, but other times it was 'the allgod'
I can see why the Hebrews wanted to consolidate it all into one, much less confusing. The Pagan gods always seem more like a family of immortals or supermen or aliens violating the Prime Directive, than religious type gods.

Ojuice5001

That's probably what the maker of the "unknown god" altar had in mind. We know we've had contact with Jupiter and crew, and that they shaped the universe, but we know very little about the ultimate reason the universe exists. There is a kind of reverence that is really best directed toward some kind of ultimate being.

But I'm as skeptical as an agnostic when it comes to this kind of ultimate being. Sometimes I think the real threat to traditional polytheism isn't the exclusivist Christians or the unsatisfiable skeptics, it's a theistic pagan who cares about the Absolute Being more than anything else in existence.

Eudaimonist

I think the modern equivalent is the UU church. They seem eclectic enough that their church is, in some sense, an altar to the "unknown god".