Gods didn’t mind atheists, if they were deep, hot, fiery, atheists like Simony, who spend their whole life hating gods for not existing. That sort of atheism was a rock. It was nearly belief. (SG)
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'He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.' (SG)
Gods don’t like people not doing much work. People who aren’t busy all the time might start to think. (SG)
Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time. (SG)
There were all sorts of ways to petition the Great God, but they depended largely on how much you could afford, which was right and proper and exactly how things should be. After all, those who had achieved success in the world clearly had done it with the approval of the Great God, because it was impossible to believe that they had managed it with His disapproval. (SG)
'I said, that’s blasphemy!’
‘Blasphemy? How can I blaspheme? I’m a god!' (SG) The trouble with being a god is that you’ve got no one to pray to. (SG)
... the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight. (E)
It was the ritual that was important, not the gods. The gods were there to do the duties of a megaphone, because who else would people listen to. (P)
Throughout the history of the Disc most high priests have been serious, pious and conscientious men who have done their best to interpret the wishes of the gods, sometimes disembowelling or flaying alive hundreds of people in a day in order to make sure they’re getting it absolutely right. (P)
The gods are great believers in justice, at least as far as it extends to humans, and have been known to dispense it so enthusiastically that people miles away are turned into a cruet. (P)
In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven’t got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. (WS)
Tragic heroes always moan when the gods take an interest in them, but it’s the people the gods ignore who get the really tough deals. (M)
... gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human
fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches. (ER) He could, though, just make out a miniature replica of Cori Celesti, upon whose utter peak the world’s quarrelsome and
somewhat bourgeois gods lived in a palace of marble, alabaster and uncut moquette three piece suites they had chosen to call Dunmanifestin. It was always a considerable annoyance to any Disc citizen with pretensions to culture that they were ruled by gods whose idea of an uplifting artistic experience was a musical doorbell. (LF) ... on the disc, the Gods are not so much worshipped as blamed. (COM)
No-one is more worried by the actual physical manifestation of a god than his priests; it’s like having the auditors in
unexpectedly. (P) The god currently gaining popularity was Om, who never answered prayers or manifested himself. It was easy to respect an invisible god. It was the ones that turned up everywhere, often drunk, that put people off. (SODW)
'Tell me,’ said Blind Io. ‘Is there a god of policemen?’
‘No, sir,’ said Carrot. ‘Coppers would be far too suspicious of anyone calling themselves a god of policemen to believe in one.' (LH) He envied those philosophers. They nodded to their gods and then by degrees, destroyed them. (TG)
'I don’t hold with paddlin’ with the occult," said Granny firmly. ‘Once you start paddlin’ with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’
‘But all them things exist,’ said Nanny Ogg. ‘That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.' (LL) 'Round everyone up. My study. Ten minutes,’ said Ridcully. He was a great believer in this approach. A less direct Archchancellor would have wandered around looking for everyone. His policy was to find one person and make their
life difficult until everything happened the way he wanted it to.* *A policy adopted by almost all managers and several notable gods. (IT) Mort was one of those people who are more dangerous than a bag of rattlesnakes. He was determined to discover the underlying logic behind the universe.
Which was going to be hard, because there wasn’t one. The Creator had a lot of remarkably good ideas when he put the world together, but making it understandable hadn’t been one of them. (M) It is said that whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. In fact, whosoever the gods wish to destroy, they first hand the equivalent of a stick with a fizzing fuse and Acme Dynamite Company written on the side. It’s more interesting, and doesn’t take so long. (SM)
Most gods were people-shaped; people don’t have much imagination, on the whole. Even Offler the Crocodile God was only crocodile-headed. Ask people to imagine an animal god and they will, basically, come up with the idea of someone in a really bad mask. Men have been much better at inventing demons, which is why there are so many. (LH)
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