Reddit reviews Mythology

Mythology by Edith Hamilton. My grandma gave me her copy when I was nine and it's what got me into Mythology. Also has some Norse mythology included too!

Link to its Amazon page

It depends. I actually recommend not getting stuck reading religious arguments and anti-religious arguments. Try instead simply learning about the world. Your life and happiness don't need to be defined by religion, there's a lot more out there.

Read some books on science and history, not religious or atheist ones, just ones that expand knowledge. Things like Cosmos, or a History of the Peloponnesian War. Read about different cultures and their myths, like Edith Hamilton's Mythology. Read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And in the meantime, just be a good person who loves their friends and family, and don't worry about God, or the lack thereof.

When you've learned more and feel comfortable, I suggest learning about the history of your religion, and what people actually believed, not just what the religion claims it was always like. Karen Armstrong's 'The Bible' is a good one. Read an annotated Bible and look at what's actually there. Then feel free to read an apologist and atheist book to hear both sides.

Most importantly, you should be learning for the sake of learning, and enjoy it. Don't feel guilty or torn. That you feel like you deserve eternal torment for simply participating in a ritual with friends and family is a fucking tragedy. Hell, Christmas and Easter are mostly made of pagan traditions, some explicitly outlawed in the Bible, but I'm sure eating chocolate eggs and decorating the tree doesn't make you feel sinful, not should it. We give these things our own meaning, there's no outside force causing you unhappiness or judging you.

I strongly urge you to look at Mythology by Edith Hamilton (you can see it here )

Someplace in my apartment, I have a copy of Nordic Gods and Heroes by P. Colum; that was my first introduction to the subject.
Norse Mythology by John Lindow is also excellent.

I very much second the recommendation of Joseph Campbell -- he's written extensively (and very accessibly - laypeople and scholars alike find his work useful and respectable) on myths.

Edith Hamilton.

http://www.amazon.com/Mythology-Edith-Hamilton/dp/0316341517/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

So... what exactly are you looking for?
Websites/books to teach you? For us to just tell you what you want to learn? Questions like this are hard to answer because they're so broad, and you'll have to keep that in mind as you get answers or whatever.

First off, look through /r/mythology. They discuss all kinds of mythology over there, and seems like a pretty good resource.

Greek and Roman Mythology
These are intertwined. They are not the same, or competing. They are much more complementary than you might think.
I can tell you that Bulfinch's Mythology and Hamilton's Mythology are pretty much the standard as far as Ancient Greek Mythology goes.
Going through old IWTL posts, I found Beren's Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome. It's free!

Egyptian
I admit, I know pretty much nothing about this other than Ra, Set, Anubis and the Sphinx.
But, http://www.egyptianmyths.net/ seems like a pretty good resource.

Celtic Mythology
First check out this introduction. Then, check out the Celtic Myth Podshow if you like podcasts!

Mesopotamian
The Epic of Gilgamesh.

I'd like to continue this, as it's been a lot of fun, but I gotta go do a thing. I'll come back to this later, maybe

I studied philosophy in school, and one of the focal points of my study was philosophy of religion.

Actually, it started earlier that that. I went to one of those summer programs for nerds -- basically, it's like truncated college semester for high school kids -- and ended up choosing two classes. One was my very first introduction to philosophy, with a sly old man who looked like Prof. Farnsworth from Futurama. We noticed one day that all of the names he chose for illustrations of philosophical principles were drawn from 1960s sitcoms like The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island. Hooked ever since. The other class was Old Testament Literature, taught by a guy who looked like Penn Jilette. He was an ordained Southern Baptist minister, but also a huge proponent of [higher criticism][1], and that's how he taught the class. So instead of learning "Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible" and "the Bible had 42 authors but they were all divinely inspired" or what have you, we learned the Documentary hypothesis, and problems of translation, and the Babylonian exile and so on.

Well, obviously, that combination of topics blew my fragile little mind, and it's been an ongoing interest of mine ever since. College expanded it into an interest in other religions. And since then, I've just been struggling to keep up. It's an endlessly fascinating subject. Just the other day I bought an introductory book on Sikhism, but I'm waiting until after my upcoming vacation to start in on it.

Realistically, you could take it back even further. I was a precocious reader as a kid, and at some point when I was still in double digits, my parents gave me a fishing pole and a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I eventually outgrew the fishing pole, but I still have the Hamilton.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_criticism

Bulfinch's was already mentioned, so I'll recommend Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I read it many years ago and credit it with sparking my interest in the subject of myth.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton is the gold standard.

Bullfinch's
http://www.greekmythology.com/Books/Bulfinch/bulfinch.html

The Golden Bough
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

Edith Hamilton, Mythology (1998)
http://www.amazon.com/Mythology-Edith-Hamilton/dp/0316341517

I picked up a book on classical mythology with a book order a few years back, and have actually found use for it a number of times since then. It covers all of the primary Greek and Roman stories, as well as a smaller number of Norse ones.

The book is Mythology by Edith Hamilton.

I just like the stories of things. From what I can tell this is a fantastic book of them.

Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" is pretty good.

Edith Hamilton is pretty much the go to book for Greek mythology.

Edith Hamilton's book on Greek mythology is great. It is sort of academic, but it reads very easily and she is absolutely the expert on the subject. And if you're interested, she's also studied and written about Norse and Roman mythology.

I wouldn't say it alone made me an atheist, but the book that solidified my non-belief was Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

While reading it for a high school class, I had an aha! moment where it hit me that ancient Greeks & Romans took their gods every bit as seriously as current religions take theirs, and they also used them as explanations for all the natural phenomena which they didn't understand, again, just like modern religious people still do.

This seems to be a pretty popular go to book, even if it's not strictly Norse.

Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" is a good place to start.