/lit/ - Literature

>>16810053
Adopting the actual God and then continuing the query into God, soul, consciousness, reality and being was better than worshipping the ridiculous sitcom that was the Greek pantheon, yes.

>>16805548
But it isn't. I fastidiously calculate my base level of enjoyment and have discovered with absolute certainty that I am happy more often than not, that my joys are far greater than my woes, and that even in hindsight my sufferings appear comical and entertaining more than cutting reminders of pain.

The blithe (well, probably not blithe) assertion that hurfa durfa happiness doesn't exist suffering is everywhere seriously seems like a mental disorder, as though Schopenhauer didn't realize that maybe there was just something wrong with him. Perhaps your range of emotion, your speed on the hedonic treatmill, indeed your very ability to feel genuine emotions are all on a spectrum of gradiants that are expressed as your conscious experience.

In that case--which I would say seems very much the case--the statement is basically just the equivalent of saying "I'm a crippling alcoholic and it's not my fault, it's genetic."

But that's wrong. Because it is, by definition, your fault. It's a fault, you have it. This has always puzzled me regarding people who say things like "accident of birth" when no such thing could possibly exist in a deterministic world. There are no accidents. Faults are not actions or choices, they are states of being. You can and should be judged based on what you are.