Quotes About Gods

Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.

accuracy. The sun and the moon might still be gods, but they were gods who obeyed strict laws, apparently without any exceptions, if one discounts stories like that of the sun stopping for Joshua.

He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

Those whom the gods love grow young.

Gifts, believe me, captivate both men and Gods, Jupiter himself was won over and appeased by gifts.

By some beneficence of the shift-scheduling gods, Sam and I both had a day off.

Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't.

Creating gods who can see everything, and who hate cheaters and oath breakers, turns out to be a good way to reduce cheating and oath breaking.

Groups that were able to put their by-product gods to some good use had an advantage over groups that failed to do so, and so their ideas (not their genes) spread.

The gods of hunter-gatherers are often capricious and malevolent. They sometimes punish bad behavior, but they bring suffering to the virtuous as well. As groups take up agriculture and grow larger, however, their gods become far more moralistic.

Angry gods make shame more effective as a means of social control.

Whatever its origins, it's a great metaphor for the role that gods play in Wilson's account of religion. Gods (like maypoles) are tools that let people bind themselves together as a community by circling around them. Once bound together by circling, these communities can function more effectively. As Wilson puts it: "Religions exist primarily for people to achieve together what they cannot achieve on their own."43

the groups that used them to construct moral communities were the ones that lasted and prospered. Like those nineteenth-century religious communes, they used their gods to elicit sacrifice and commitment from members.

Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

This is the question of questions for biblical faith. Paganism then, like secularism now, had no such doubt. Why should anyone expect justice in the world? The gods fought. They were indifferent to mankind. The universe was not moral. It was an arena of conflict. The strong win, the weak suffer, and the wise keep far from the fray. If there is no God or (what amounts to the same thing) many gods, there is no reason to expect justice. The question does not arise.

I see. Yes, you kill, you lie, you rob, you hit old men and steal their boats. I only thanks the gods you draw the line at swearing — it would have been just too dreadful otherwise.

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

Don't fear the gods, Don't worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure.

The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?

If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another

The opinions held by most people about the gods are not true conceptions of them but fallacious notions, according to which awful penalties are meted out to the evil and the greatest of blessings to the good.

Governments had risen and fallen; men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had fought, had been tortured, had died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion. Men had learned to sniff the heady dreamstuff of the soul and wait impassively while the lathes turned the guns for their destruction. And through those years, Dimitrios had lived and breathed and come to terms with his strange gods.

The time has come for us to admit our insignificance by making discoveries in the infinite unexplored cosmos. Only then shall we realize that we are nothing but ants in the vast state of the universe. And yet our future and our opportunities lie in the universe, where gods promised they would.

Erão os Deuses Astronautas?