/lit/ - Literature

>>12365724
>Do you have more on LOTR/Christianity, or a place I can read about it?
whatever i have to say that's interesting along these lines i'll post here. one thing perhaps that i may talk about more: a newfound appreciation for Christianity in general. i know this sounds weird: given that my odious namefag handle is taken from one of the great Catholic writers of the 20C, you would think that i would actually be more into what he was into. i'm not a serious Catholic, or a serious Christian, for that matter. but i'm starting to come around to it. it strikes me as being among other things one of the great underdog faction-picks for the 21C, and there is always something in that. but also because despite the fact that i do believe in the perennials, that most religions share a pretty close core of overlapping ideas, what i think people want from philosophy - the part that drives them to radicalism - is in fact very much on tap with the Christians.

Christianity is not particularly *sexy,* but i'm increasingly okay with this. i think i like it very much for that reason. it is the religion of infinite suffering, and over things that while you can find a lot in the Tao, Buddhism, the Vedanta - the cozier Eastern mystics - there are some things that Christianity in particular does really, really well. namely, remind you that *you suck* and that is actually a kind of welcome and sobering reminder sometimes. the more i read into philosophy and get bewildered by perception, the more it dawns on me that there really is no point in critique. that is a major downer, for sure, but it also reminds me that i can probably do a lot more productive work on myself rather than trying to find the maximally outsider perspective by way of continental theory. noble suffering is incredibly based.

i also think that, politically, the three great modernist experiments in politics - communism, fascism, and neoliberalism - are really all departures from Christianity itself, in a sense, and have peculiar aspects of its relation to time. communism has all of its zeal about the future, fascism a sense of a Past When Things Were Better (and the utopian futurist zeal as well) and neoliberalism a kind of desperate need to shut out both of these, along with completely failing to recognize the dangers of superficiality and hollowness; it's basically a drive to forget religion altogether, and tends to produce the extremes out of precisely that impetus. and as time goes on the old-time religion just seems to have all of the things we expect to get politics, and are destined to be disappointed with. we want *moral civilizations,* but morality in politics is both inescapable and disastrous out the gate. all you wind up with is a perfect scapegoating of the Blue Team by the Red and vice-versa; each has the kryptonite of the other in a wheel of doom. neither are really classically liberal anymore.

but classical liberalism doesn't mean much without of interior depth.

(cont'd)