Zorba the Greek Lesson Plan

When the narrator thinks, "Woe to him who cannot free himself from Buddhas, Gods, Motherlands, and Ideas", what do you think that he means by this? What harm might be represented in each of these four words?

What the narrator probably means to suggest by this statement is that those who cannot free themselves from the service of abstractions are bound to lose a great deal in the end. However, this question is much more interesting when left open-ended. Students probably already have fairly divergent ideas of what makes Gods and Motherlands harmful, for example (that is, assuming they can agree that Gods and Motherlands are harmful in the first place). For this sort of...