Are There Any Good Gods?

In many of my previous posts, I explore whether or not certain gods are evil, and in a story I posted earlier, I contrasted the gods invented by a child with better-established gods invented by adults. It seems no matter what mythology you look at, gods are evil. This arguably includes the Abrahamic God as well, since his mythology includes flooding the world, among other things.

The closest thing I have found to a perfectly innocent mythological being are beings who fight for just causes. Hermes, for example, kills the monster guarding Io, because she was being held captive by Hera. The angels of the Abrahamic religions deliver messages of God and deliver people from demons. I therefore saw fit to do the same thing with my own gods, not giving them anything dark until they were themselves attacked. This is a tradition in modern fiction. People want to see strong heroes, but have a low-view on attack without reason, so enjoy watching heroes defend their loved ones against evil antagonists.

However, in religious mythologies, gods are either morally justified by divine command theory (good is a synonym for godly so anything God does is good) or not morally justified at all (gods are more powerful than humans but not more moral). I actually like gods who have a bad side, since it makes the mythology more descriptive of the world as it is, as opposed to the world as it should be. Mythologies that have unambiguously good beings, such as angels, tend to create evil demons to explain evil, and I'd rather have a more realistic situation such as Greek mythology (where, as in real life, there is no all-good or all-evil being).

However, perhaps due to dissonance between ancient and modern values, certain gods have worse reputations than others, due to certain modern biases.

People, women especially, often have a more idealized view of gods who do not commit rape, even if they are not otherwise moral (Ares being an example). This is an inverse of what happened in Ancient times, where Zeus, a serial rapist, was idealized and Ares was demonized.

This might be explained by the fact that ancient views of the gods varied, and the people didn't necessarily believe all of the myths about them. The story of Apollo's rape of Creusa for example, was likely an invention of Euripides (Ion was originally said to be fathered by Xuthus). Some myths are closely associated with a god's religious cult, but others were designed more for entertainment purposes.

Often in modern fiction, villains have "standards" and will not cross certain lines (like Ares). However, the main reason for mythological rape is procreation. The act is "justified" by the fact that it creates a hero.

In both real life and mythology, this is bullshit. Gods have celebrity status among their own peoples. If they wanted children so badly, they could easily find a mistress that would consent to them. An especially glaring example of this is Odin's rape of Rindr to create Vali. He chose Rindr because of a prophecy. This is the worst example of self-fulfilling prophecy I've ever heard, although the murder of Baldr comes close. It seems Norse mythology is filled with misplaced fatalism.

Often I hear about Odin and Zeus still being honored today with the justification, among theists, that "the gods are real but their myths are not". As an atheist, there isn't really anything more to the gods but their mythologies, so the ideas of gods without myths seem like secondary mythological copies whose mythologies have been wiped clean to make them seem more palatable. This begs the question, what have these mythless gods done? Aren't they ever bored?