Hephaestus make love to Athena: at the moment of climax she pushes him aside, and his semen falls to the earth where it impregnates Gaia." Hephaestus was associated by Greek colonists in southern Italy with the volcano gods Adranus (of Mount Etna) and Vulcanus of the Lipari islands. The first-century sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have observed, "there are many other mountains all over the earth that are on fire, and yet we should never be done with it if we assigned to them giants and gods like Hephaestus". In the Trojan war, Hephaestus sided with the Greeks, but
The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can't Tell Us What to Do religious responses to the dilemma, and concludes that none of them succeed. Further, Lindsay talks about the epistemological problems in claiming that a doctrine is based on divine revelation, as there is no independent way to verify that such a revelation has occurred. It is from this point that the reason in the eponymous sub-title of the book is given: "God cannot tell us what to do because, among other reasons, we are not able to recognize a command from God. Because God cannot effectively communicate with us, we cannot base morality on his commands." Reviewing the book in Free