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John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer Quotes

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Famous John Michael Greer Quotes

“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.”

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Book:The Occult Book: A Chronological Journey from Alchemy to Wicca
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“Few ideas in all of human history have been more thoroughly misunderstood than the simple concept of evolution. Intellectuals in Victorian England, eager to use the science of their time to bolster a class system already cracking under the weight of its own injustice, invented the notion that some living things- and thus some people- are "more evolved" than others. That turn of phrase is still much used today, but in the real world, it is quite simple nonsense. Every living being is just as evolved as every other, because every living thing has been shaped by evolution over the exact same period of time since life first evolved”

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Book:Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth: An Introduction to Spiritual Ecology
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“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”

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Book:A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism
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“The local political and religious officials were more than ready to take action and began rounding up suspects at once. Anyone who was accused of witchcraft by at least three witnesses was arrested. Those who confessed were burned at the stake; those who refused to confess were tortured until they said what their accusers wanted to hear and then were burned. Clerk of the court Johannes Fründ, the author of the most detailed record of the Valais witch trials, noted with amazement that some of the accused kept insisting on their innocence until they died under torture; like most of the officials involved in the trials, he assumed that every person accused of witchcraft must be guilty.”

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Author:John Michael Greer
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“It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods.”

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Author:John Michael Greer
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“One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.”

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“Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.”

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Author:John Michael Greer
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