Gods Share Names With Massive Orbs?

One subject that really interested me today (1/24/11) was the Roman names of the gods. I'm sure everyone noticed that many of the gods shared the same name as a majority of the planets in our atmosphere. At first I thought the gods were named after the planets until I took a second to think about a logical timeline and realized that gods and myths were thought of long before the planets would have been named- logic can sometimes take time to arrive.
Anyways, I did some outside research on this and found some answers that may or may not have been part of these myths. On Answers.com I found an answer to the question "Why are the planets named after gods?" which stated that Romans noticed that the planets moved across the sky much faster than stars so the romans naturally believed that the planets were actually the gods moving around the sky going about their godly business. I don't know about the factuality of that statement but it kinda makes sense to me.
Then I found a site that explained WHY certain gods received their names. The examples include gods such as Venus, Mercury and Mars and all other planets ASIDE from Earth. Now you might be wondering "Why did they exclude Earth?", well that is because the ancient Romans didn't know that the planets they could see in the sky were the same thing as the mass they were living on. They most likely didn't realize Earth was a planet as well. The reasoning behind the god/planet connections made a lot of sense to me. Mars is the god of war and the red planet. War=blood. Blood=red. You get the picture. Venus is said to be the planet that shines the brightest so it is considered the most beautiful and Venus is the goddess of beauty and sex. Mercury is the planet that moves across the sky at the fastest rate so it seems natural that Mercury would be named after the messenger god.
If you want to check out the link to a site that has some additional explanations or whatever else, you can go here--> -http://www.syvum.com/cgi/online/serve.cgi/squizzes/astronomy/planets_gods.html
So that's what I learned from class today!