/lit/ - Literature

>>12447169
pic rel has my favorite meditation on the nature of these things. in it, no less an authority than Lucifer himself tells the protagonist that in hell, you are the person you always feared you were, while in heaven, you might become the person you always thought you could be. and the thing is, in order to learn this in the first place, the protagonist is reminded - not told - that he is in fact in hell already, and he knows it it is true. now that to me is some top-tier psychology.

>I guess I'm in hell.
i tend naturally to sympathize more with people who feel this way than those who do not believe in any of it. even Land comes up with his own pretty brilliant theories about it: hell is the forge of value. if there is one thing you can count on down there, it's the reliability of contracts. conversely, for Bataille, the sacred was only ever produced through a catastrophic squandering, expenditure, and loss, or at least the destruction of something that never could be quantitatively measured. much readings on the subject of sacrifice and debt - Mauss, Girard, et al - followed. hell isn't pleasant, but doesn't lack for philosophy. it may not in the end be composed of anything else. Sauron could probably quote from Marx verbatim. it just wouldn't bother him all that much. the same for Judge Holden.

>Do I get to be a demon since I voluntarily came here?
i don't know, why did you come here? if you're a bodhisattva who came here to share your boundless compassion, maybe not.

>>12447239
>All of them run on a central assumed belief of Social Darwinism.
religion runs on an assumed belief in Social Darwinism?
>Everything else is just a variation on the same theme of Materialism based on Evolution.
idk about this one senpai. some political religions, sure. and some that do aren't even all that bad: Comtean Positivism, for instance.
>Evolution is the great myth of our time.
let's not get too crazy. i already took some flak in the last thread for talking about Hegel and evolution in metaphysics. the central puzzle is separating - or conflating - evolution with social progress, precisely because Marx (for one) cuts both ways. so does Nietzsche. hence at least two pretty fascinating variations on this: Left Nietzscheanism (Foucault) and Right Marxism (Land). again, i would say that separating these ideas - religion, politics, science - may actually be more useful than conflating them. or, if we are to join them together - as D&G suggest, at the end of What is Philosophy? - that we work with art, science and philosophy, rather than science, religion and politics. *failing* that, religion. because then nice thing about religion is that that is one thing that, done sincerely, you really can't fail, think.

t. a guy who failed. but maybe you'll have more luck than i did.