Unless the gods deceive my mind,
That man is forging fetters for himself.
--
Lines 539-540, as translated by Dorothea WenderTheognis of Megara
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The gods are not magicians who transform themselves; neither do they deceive mankind in any way.
Plato
The gods, (if gods to goodness are inclined—
If acts of mercy touch their heavenly mind),
And, more than all the gods, your generous heart,
Conscious of worth, requite its own desert!John Dryden
It's so much easier to create our own gods; gods that are fully knowable. Those are the gods of atheism, occultism, religion and sometimes even Christianity. Then, of course, there are those prejudices that we demand of our gods. Women who take offense at a "male" God create for themselves a female or neuter god. There, we have all the racial gods, the black gods, white gods, and cultural gods, the Spanish gods, African gods, Indian gods and so on. All of them called god. And yet none of them are truly Him. Some may be tiny glimpses of Him. Maybe His big toe or little finger, but nothing more. Others are not even that. They’re only delusions from our prejudices.
Sean Sellers
Underlying even the so-called problem of knowledge there is simply this human feeling, just as underlying the inquiry into the "why," the cause, there is simply the search for the "wherefore," the end. All the rest is either to deceive oneself or to wish to deceive others; and to wish to deceive others in order to deceive oneself.
Miguel de Unamuno
Do we, holding that the gods exist,
deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams
and lies, while random careless chance and
change alone control the world?Carl Sagan
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