/lit/ - Literature

>>16452380
>>16452667
Swimming pools are deep or shallow, deep is a physical property. Calling a thought "deep" is no different than calling it "wicked sick" it's just that "deep" is the form of pidgin English used by gays who hang out in coffee-houses.

>>16380039
The wisdom literature corresponds to the three stages of growth a person who begins worshiping God undergoes. Part one is is represented by Proverbs, where we follow God out of self-love, because God's laws are natural and good. Ecclesiastes is the second level of love of God, in which a person starts to doubt this moralistic image in their mind. Job however corresponds to the third stage of divine love in which a person is securely attached to God and loves God because he is worthy of love, rather than according to the trials of earthly existence.

Job is therefore obviously and objectively the best wisdom literature, since it integrates the two previous installments; Job is a virtuous person, this represents the Psalms, Job suffers trials, this represents Ecclesiastes -- since the Preacher in that book says that he has seen good people perish in their goodness, and evil people prosper in wickedness -- but Job decides not to curse God and to continue to hope in him, and this represents faithfulness.

>>16189293
>>16189600
This, Pascal was a Theological obscurantist which is namely that certain truths of religion are accessible only to those who have been spiritually awakened in the first place. I do not however, believe that it is entirely the case that we are without agency in relation to God. Sometimes we make free choices, and can believe things that pertain to religion on the basis of reason, but free choices and uncluttered reasoning happen very rarely. Usually our reasoning is from our worldview, and our choices are conditioned by external factors.

But the wager is way too pessimistic about our ability to use reason in relation to God. Even though we may only shuffle very slightly towards religious faith, good reasons, though we find it nearly impossible to explain, got us started in that direction, not just the sin of gambling.

>>15657395
There is no coherent theology of a literal hell in the Bible where people are tortured for not believing in God.

Don't forget that God is likened to bread and wine, and His life-giving power is likened to water. So God is something to be experienced, like food is to be eaten. Religion is about bringing a person into contact with that Ultimate thing. The direct experience of God is truly incommunicable, but washes away all self-importance, so it seems like it's about morality, when it's often just about reality, and a level of maturity that only that experience of God can give.

So it's important to understand that hell is just basically zero. Paul says that "sin leads to death," not "to hell" because death, zero, hell etc. are basically the same. It's not where you go for never having sought God or never having known Him, hell, zero, or death is simply what you actually are without Him.

>>15666231
Because I feel as though there is an adventure still to have. And to quote; an adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. Lockdowns are a very boring adventure, I'll admit, but I want to see what happens on the other side of Corona.

>Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

How will Nietzscheans ever recover?

>>10336293
>thinks he lives the literary lifestyle
>isn't an Anglican who became a Catholic

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, on materialism:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours ....

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

....

Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.