/lit/ - Literature

>>23345614
The Doom of Sarnath is also a favourite of mine. Lovecraft lovingly describing this opulant massive fantasy city with its own empire, rich and powerful at its height to be blown away and destroyed as a consequence of the actions of its founders .
It reads like being a little kid lining up your little soldiers ust to have them all killed, or building a city just to destory it with your cool monster/dragon/dinosaur.
Also the 'men' of Ib did nothing wrong and one of the alien races of Lovecraft that are genuinely portrayed as being wronged by humans and are not monstrous due to their inhumanity/ alien nature.

>>22697490
>When did you outgrow atheism
After getting into complex adaptive systems, nonlinear differential equations and strange attractors.

>>22246990
>I’ve never even heard of a convinced atheist returning to religion
It is undignifying to return to placating spirits, that are shown to be your delusions and superstitions

>the conviction disallows for questioning in the one thing which would allow you to question your conviction
No-no-no. At some point, the boundary between 'theism' and 'atheism' start blurring.
It is the return to the Jewish/Platonic God is impossible. But you can always just bite the bullet and embrace an abominable counterintuitive lovecraftian monstrosity, welcoming it inside your heart. Such a God, devoid of intentionality, morality, human-like goals and human-like cognition would be still plausible.

>>21636138
What Rose is unwittingly laying the ground for here is not epistemological certainty, but total epistemological nihilism. I am frequently disappointed when I see people attempt to use his arguments in defense of theism because to be frank they are among the weakest. If followed to their logical conclusion, without bias, they should lead to radical skepticism.

He admits right there in that excerpt that you can't actually reach the truth with knowledge. You literally can't know anything. Rose claims that his particular religious sect offers the correct set of presuppositions and infallible "truths" necessary to overcome this, but why should we believe him? What is the value of replacing one set of unverifiable presuppositions with another set of unverifiable presuppositions?

He claims that his specific sect contains a divinely-revealed truth that surpasses all other schools of knowledge. Every other religious group and ideology makes the same claims. The only way to figure out which one is the "true" truth would be to compare and contrast them against some kind of external standard; but Rose has already made it clear that that's impossible because you can't use thought to reach the truth. Therefore, if you're measuring any set of truth claims put forth by any group that claims to have it, you necessarily have to pick some set of presuppositions to hold to and then judge the rest of the truth claims by (all of them will fail compared to yours of course because you've already decided on what the truth is by presupposing it). But how can you decide which "truth" to presuppose when you have no external method of verifying which one is correct? Effectively, randomly picking. You pick whatever you feel like, a.k.a, relativism - ironically what Rose has been trying to avoid the entire time. (We will leave out the added trouble of Rose's worldview containing demons that can invade your mind, deceive your senses, and control your environment, but this only adds to the epistemological confusion a la Descartes.)

Everyone presupposes that their viewpoint is objectively correct and automatically dismisses all others by the very nature of that presupposition. No one actually has external assurance that they picked the right "truth" because there's just as much of a chance that the other guy chose the right viewpoint as you did. Conclusion: NOTHING can actually be known or externally validated because the foundation of all knowledge is totally unverifiable and inaccessible to human minds. All reason is useless because none of it can be authenticated with certainty. Atheism, theism, and agnosticism are all equally useless because we are ontologically incapable of confirming their alignment with ultimate reality - whatever that is.

Pyrrho wins again.

Explain to me without sentimentalism, appeal to emotion, ad hominem, or unsubstantiated dogmatism why Gnosticism isn't the most logical and consistent form of Christianity.

>>21608051
I've ordered myself a tonne of Lovecraft's letters to people from Hippocampus Press. Dawnward Spire: Lonely Hill, (the letters between CAS and HPL) seem promising. I'm currently researching scraps of information and enrichment to Yog-Sothothery that Lovecraft mentions in his letters, letters which are relatively unplumbed by the surface Lovecraft "fans". I'm on a mission on gathering small portions or insights into some of his monsters, especially the likes of Azathoth, Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath to bring light on more information about them. These letters don't get much talk or references when talks of the Cthulhu Mythos arise amongst online circles, and Lovecraft wrote MANY letters, around 3500 exist but as many as 10,000 or even closer to 100,000 are estimated to have possibly been written.

As proof in showing how little his letters seem to arise to his fanbases attention, copy-and-paste some of the quirky letter openings in >>21608026 into Google and see how little shows up.

>>21331691
>I believe in god
Which one?

>but don't accept his authority, what does this make me?
Lovecraft?

>>21041963
>Besides, the afterlife is unknowable and likely a bullshit cope,
For people who fully comprehend how bad existence is, the potential for an afterlife is possibly a worst case scenario

If "God" is some sadistic inscrutable monstrosity like in Calvinism, or really any model of things that includes eternal torture as a possible fate, the afterlife is an unrivaled horror; even if you're "saved", your "reward" is watching countless people (most likely including at least some of your loved ones) scream in agony for all eternity (and perhaps even more horrifically, "God" will brainwash and remold you into something that will enjoy the spectacle)

While they can both be used as copes, I don't think either position is actually a "cope" in and of itself since they both have ample potential of being immeasurably terrible (although I think that in the end, the annihilationist view just ends up collapsing back into the Buddhist view of rebirth since it implies the aggregate nature of consciousness and the lack of any permanent ego)

>>20986661
>>20986666
The Rats in the Walls can be seen as a descent into the subconscious. "It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors,
and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth‘s centre where
Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot fluteplayers."

>>20814511
>When our (Christian) descendants are looking back at the joke that was the modern age, they will wonder how anyone ever fell to Godlessness
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

>"Lovecraft" fan
>calls the entities of Ultimate Chaos "Outer Gods" instead of "Other Gods"
>thinks his entities fit into fictional versus-battles Goku-anime Godzilla tiering faggotry
>thinks the universe is inside Azathoth's dream
>doesn't agree with his opinion on niggers
I hate normie cunts like this.
>b-but there's definite ordered and categorized groups of beings that each god fits into!
there's only references to Great Old Ones and the Other Gods. The relationship between is vague at best.
>b-but the universe is inside Azathoth's dream and when he awakens everything goes! I saw it on Youtube!
Azathoth mutters his own dreams he can't understand which may be a metaphor for him being the source of pure chaotic energy. The waves from the flutes by chance give every lower cosmos it's law. Again this is all poetic.

>>20343727
autism bump

bump

>>20000132
I think what Lovecraft is insinuating is less about "intelligence" per se, but more to do with the fact that any human logic or reasoning is unable to ascribe anything to these entities that make any sort of ordered sense.