A World Full of Gods Quotes

“We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“As polytheism is in religious belief reflected in the recognition of moral complexity, so henotheism in religious practice is reflected in the recognition of moral diversity. To worship different gods is to align oneself with different ideals, and to embrace different moral standards. The example of the mother and the judge shows one way in which this works out in practice. The mother places parental love above impartial justice, while the judge does the opposite. In the language of Greek Paganism, the mother bows to Hera, the judge to Zeus Dikaios, and both are right to do so.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Questions about what counts as knowledge are at the heart of most dissensions about religion.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Is insisting that one can only be saved by the best possible god so different from insisting that one will only ride in the best possible car?”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“The irony here, and it’s not a small one, is that our culture is anything but bereft of myths.  Whatever the sources of our many problems, a myth shortage is emphatically not among them.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Amythia,” the pathological lack of myths, has been diagnosed as the root cause of any number of modern sociological and psychological evils.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“There are perhaps seven broad claims about the afterlife, with innumerable variations and combinations of belief.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Thus the community is within its rights to set and enforce a minimum level of acceptable behavior, but it strays outside its rights if it goes beyond that and imposes ethical demands on its members beyond that. The minimum is business of law, while the effort to go further is the business of ethics-and thus of individual choice. The laws of a community, the measures of acceptable behavior, take shape by the same processes of dissensus as moral choice, but the goal is different. The lawmaking process does not seek the highest possible moral good; it seeks a workable comprimise between individual freedom and the needs of the community. Laws are thus best when they are few, clear, generally accepted, and strictly enforced”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“These terms are borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien, whose unequaled mastery of the language of myth gave the twentieth century one of its great works of mythic literature.  His comments are relevant to any thoughtful study of myth: “...I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.  I much prefer history, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.  I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”[”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Ancient Pagan moralists centered discussion on what philosophers call the moral agent, the person who makes decisions with moral consequences.  Much moral thought nowadays, by contrast, focuses instead on the moral patient, the entity – not necessarily a person – who is affected by a moral decision.  This is valid when it leads others to give the moral patient a voice in the decision, making the patient an agent; such concerns are central to the logic of democracy, and to most concepts of fairness and justice as well. But this is not what many of today’s moral crusaders do.  Instead, they claim the right to speak for the moral patient, even when it is necessary to shout down the moral patient in order to do so.  The”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Virtue ethicists, taking their cue from Aristotle, define moral behavior as behavior that expresses virtues, which are principles that lead to excellence in human life.  Some virtues derive from others, but there’s no single principle from which all virtues unfold.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“The enactment that made the North Wind a citizen of Thurii was anything but unusual in the Pagan Greek world.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Yet this latter statement is a very common one, and so far no attempt to produce a symbolic language capable of making exact sense of religious experience seems to have succeeded very well.[”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“A large part of the trouble has been caused by incautious use of the words “immanent” and “transcendent.”  These terms have too often been treated as labels for absolute qualities, when they properly define the relationship between two specified things.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“When it comes to strong miracles, the empirical situation tends to be “jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“To the Wittgensteinian fideist, religion is such a form of life – a mode of discourse with its own internal logic, which cannot be judged from any outside point of view.  It sets its own criteria for what is true, relevant and meaningful.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Another holds that while religious statements are referential, and subject to discussion they only have meaning within their own context and cannot be discussed productively from any outside point of view.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“One claims that religious statements aren’t referential at all, but purely expressive in nature; they communicate nothing but the emotional state of the person making them.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“Even within monotheist religions themselves, conceptions of divinity vary wildly.  The quest for a single concept that will embrace these diverse conceptions quickly turns to a search for the lowest common denominator of godhood.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“H.P. Owen’s book “Concepts of Deity” provides a good standard version: “Theism may be defined as belief in one God, the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent” (Owen 1971, p. 1).”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism