Quotes from John Michael Greer

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.

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.

Both beliefs take the temporary habits of an age of excess and treat them as necessities, and both of them box our collective imagination into a futile quest to sustain the unsustainable instead of looking at the real alternative to the extravagant use of fossil fuels.

using incantation as a nonchemical tranquilizer to ward off stress, and to assure yourself that everything is fine when everything is emphatically not fine, is much more problematic. In a time of crisis when keeping a level head and going on with life is crucial, it can have a valid place, but if it's being used to drown out the still small voice that warns of approaching danger, it's an invitation to disaster.

Notice how our economists still act as though replacing human labor with fossil fuel-derived energy is always a good idea, even at a time when unemployment is pandemic and the cost of energy is a rising burden on economies around the world.

Hardin, Garrett, Filters Against Folly (New York: Penguin, 1985).

When it comes to strong miracles, the empirical situation tends to be "jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today.

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.

the more egalitarian a group claims to be, the more it depends on baboon politics to maintain group cohesion and direction

Somewhere behind the bland emotionless labels favored by contemporary culture lies a tangled realm of unmentioned motives and murky passions, where petroleum – the black blood of the earth, as shamans and loremasters in a surprisingly large number of cultures call it – has become an anchor for fantasies of omnipotence and dreams of destiny, and that realm must be confronted directly in order make sense of where our civilization is headed.

As the blood of the Earth runs dry, a great many assumptions at the core of the modern project are going to have to be discarded. The toolkit of magic is one of the few available options we've got to make that difficult transition a little easier, and to begin making sense of a future that has not yet even begun to darken the dreams of most of today's humanity.

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.[

As a result, the facts concerning nearly every significant crisis we face can thus be divided up neatly into two entirely separate categories. The facts that most Americans are willing to talk about belong to one of these categories. The facts that matter belong to the other.

Consider the way that so many people nowadays use the word "imaginary" to mean "unreal." In actuality, of course, what we imagine is real in its own way, and it can be powerful and important as well.

If God is benevolent and almighty, why should there be so much suffering in the world? Luria's answer was that the forces that cause suffering and evil in the world are remnants of the universe before ours- a primal cosmos of unbalanced forces- and the mission of human beings, and Jews in particular, is to redeem the powers of evil through religious observance and Cabalistic disciplines.

No, I thought, there's no way to tell in advance what's behind the cloud that hides the future, but maybe -- just maybe--I can make a difference.

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).

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.

In a certain sense, of course, that's exactly what was going on. I say "in a certain sense" because it's very difficult to talk about magic in modern industrial society and be understood clearly. That's not because magic is innately difficult to understand. It's because our culture has spent the last two thousand years or so doing its level best not to understand it.

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.

The poor person dreams of having a million dollars; the rich person dreams of adding another million dollars to the millions he or she already has. As a result, accumulations of money block the real flow of wealth and poison nearly every aspect of our collective lives. In such an environment, it can be difficult to remember that money is simply a tool for managing the flow of real wealth among people...

The kind of SUV environmentalism that waxes rhapsodic about all the things everybody else ought to do for the environment, while doing few or none of them, is not a viable response to the crisis of our time.

In an age of scarcity, that easy option no longer exists, and social conflicts heat up rapidly. That's the unmentioned subtext for much of what's going on in politics on both sides of the Atlantic just now. The

This is not good news for our modern industrial civilization because its capital stocks are supported by winnings from the geological lottery that laid down fantastic amounts of fossilized solar energy in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas. Even the very small fraction of our resource base that comes from the "paycheck" of agriculture, forestry, and fishing depends on fossil fuels.