Greek Mythology
This is not the case in all religions: many folk religions, especially ones dealing with ancestor worship, will treat good weather, favorable harvests, etc., as a sign that the gods are pleased, and will attribute disease or misfortune to their anger. Many polytheistic traditions portray their gods as feeling a wide range of emotions.
For example, Zeus is famous for his lustfulness, Susano-o for his intemperance, and Balder for his joyousness and calm. Impassibility in the Western tradition traces back to ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, who first proposed the idea of God as a perfect, omniscient, timeless, and unchanging being not subject to human emotion (which represents change and imperfection). The concept of impassibility was developed by medieval theologians like Anselm and continues to be in tension with more emotional concepts of God.
Read more about this topic: Impassibility
Famous quotes containing the words greek and/or mythology:
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)