/lit/ - Literature

>What god drove them to fight with such a fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king he swept a fatal plague through the army-men were dying and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest...

>>9699825
>jdm
>The gods are good, and we are indebted to them for all the good things we enjoy: we owe them praise and thanks. But the gods are just and we are guilty. They must be appeased and we must expiate our sins; and, to do this, the most effective means is sacrifice.

source:
http://maistre.uni.cx/enlightenment_sacrifices.html

>Such was the ancient belief and such is still, in different forms, the belief of the whole world. Primitive men, from whom the whole of humanity has received its fundamental opinions, believed themselves culpable. All social institutions have been founded on this dogma, so that men of every age have continually admitted original and universal degradation and said like us, if less explicitly, our Mothers conceived us in sin; for there is no Christian dogma that is not rooted in man's inner nature and in a tradition as old as humanity.

>But the root of this debasement, or this reification of man, resides in sensibility, in life, in short in the soul, so carefully distinguished by the ancients from the spirit or intelligence. Animals have received only a soul; we have been given both soul and spirit....

>From four centuries' experience, we know that wherever the true God is not known and served by virtue of an explicit revelation, man will slaughter man and often eat him.
But who or what is that True God.

>I by no means accept the blasphemous axiom, Human fear first invented the gods.
Knowledge then?

The other thing about War is that it is almost invariably an aesthetic phenomenon. Cue your gorgeous aristocratic ecstasies of squandering and violence (at least at the movies, IRL not so much). Not crazy to speculate that if people worshiped gods of war instead of gods of peace we might have a different understanding of this.

It might be baked-in to the accumulative logic of capitalism. That which we don't give back to the gods the gods find ways to seduce us into giving back to them one way or another.
>gnostic garbage kys
>y do we like 2 see sexy violence at the movies tho
>y do we like 2 play violent vidya
>&
>c

NB: I do fuckface gnostic speculation. War with a capital-W seems to require it. But War and excess are arguably regulators of inhuman economic process that are hard to understand without being retarded. Or do we talk about literature and Fate instead and not talk about economics. Idk.
>this is also dumb, stfu
>everything you write is dumb
>you're on a roll inner self
>thx

And I am feeling retarded, esp today. But v. interested in this thread. Hope it thrives. Bump.

>>8833377

And yet another: the Annihilaser from Planetary Annihilation: a gigantic eyeball-laser that stares holes through planets. The Staring Eye of Death seems to be a pretty appealing trope. Nothing satisfies quite like a doomsday weapon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDmdlpn4F4

And apparently there's some other cult movie that involves this. It's got a bunch of space hippies and a mystical Eastern version of Oscar the Grouch and one or two shots that lift directly out of John Ford and much else from Akira Kurosawa. The name escapes me.

>>8833795

Never!

>tfw the onion speaks the truth so maybe tho