/lit/ - Literature

>>17885452
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>>17888211
Only good ones so far.
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>>17888231
I can see why Tang emperors were disgusted with this filth. Those who worship the human form, with all its fleshy protuberances, will never grasp infinity. Golden Age Illustrators like Kay Nielsen, Maxfield Parrish, Walter Crane, Beatrix Potter, etc. blow this shit out of the water. You have vapid tastes.

>>13945595
Maxfield Parrish is a very good artist. June Skies is one of my favorite pieces by him.

>>13927594
Frankly, the afterlife is a jumbled mess in the Bible. There are arguments to be made for soul sleep, temporary spiritual heaven until the resurrection (but how would you have a concept of time in god’s presence?), purgatory (or maybe not), and for the unrepentant wicked, while we know their fate is undesirable, Jesus and the other New Testament writers were not exactly explicit as to their precise fate—is it really eternal burning/physical torture? Is it simply a shadowy state of deprivation, a continuation of life which is only hell by comparison to the joys of Heaven? Is it annihilation (after all, what does a fire do? Burn things into ash.) Is all hell purificatory and everyone will eventually be saved, as Origen thought?

One thing that is for certain is the Resurrection and the New Heaven and the New Earth. We know for sure that everyone, regardless of their deeds, will be resurrected, judged, and either allowed to join the New Heaven and New Earth or not. New EARTH is an important part to remember that gets left out for some reason. Earth will be restored to a paradisiacal state. The chosen Resurrected will have glorified bodies, meaning they will have powers comparable to those of Jesus after his Resurrection. It’s even plausible to say they will possess some of God’s creative power.

Basically the point I’m trying to make is that no, a Nirvana like spiritual oblivion is NOT the end point of Christianity.

>>13734212
Maxfield Parrish

Wherever there is an obsession with the One, there will be hints of nihilism since light and darkness are treated as "two sides of the same coin" or "darkness is merely non-existent while only light is real". In some sense, all monism, monotheism, nondualism, and etc. logically entail antinomianism, and this means such cultures based on ideologies of the One were always nihilistic.

In Abrahamic faiths, good and evil were created by a megalomaniac God and on higher levels of realization, one sees a unity between good and evil. Little care is given to the action of compassion, minimizing suffering of sentient beings, and so forth. God has a sadistic element to him for creating the conditions of suffering, and darkness is treated as non-existent and only an absence from such a dumb God.

In the nondual philosophies of Heraclitus, Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism (note, earlier Buddhism was dualistic), the Absolute is treated like being immersed into Azathoth where there is "no one to suffer". Good and evil lack distinction or rigid border, and the it is argued one cannot privilege any pole of the duality due to undecidables or indeterminacy.

Only dualistic ideologies like Empedocles' great philosophy, Manichaeism, Catharism, early Buddhism, Mandaeanism, Zoroastrianism, etc. can logically be considered moral because good and evil have a clear, rigid distinction. Good is not evil, evil is not good whereas nondual Zen Buddhists would argue otherwise. Monotheists would claim to care about good and evil, but it is merely deceptive on their parts because moral command theory has significant limitations, which would take more time to analyze.

It is the issue of cannibalism. Only in the dualistic religions can cannibalism be called a definitive bad whereas in the other religions listed it becomes circumstantial. What Robert Aickman feared was inherent in all religions that worship a One.

If you care about being a good person, you would accept me as a prophet and help end the "Tyranny of the One". We much go back to "Two", which is the only moral thing to do.

There's no "Problem of Evil" in ditheism. In monotheism, one worships a single megalomaniac sod responsible for both good and evil whereas in ditheism, one worships a god of pure benevolence, which is in continuous conflict with the god of destruction. You cannot have an all-good god in monotheism whereas you can have one in ditheism. I think the reason people don't give ditheism a chance in the modern world is because the Gathas and Cologne Mani Codex are relatively unknown.