/lit/ - Literature

Ha Ha! Great post OP.

It is nice to know that we don't have to live with such guilt today!

In more enlightened times. My dealings with Religion ended with Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens.

Best to put religion behind us methinks!

>>16617131
shut the fuck up retard, I can be a christian and think stealing a single pear isn't a big deal. Probably calling you a retard is worse.

>>16617118
>ONE pear

Ahem.

>In the second book of his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo famously recounts how one night in his sixteenth year, he teamed up with a couple of friends to break into a neighbor’s garden:

>>“There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night – having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was – a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the pigs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves.” (II, iv, 9)

>Augustine's account is thus a sort of re-enactment of the biblical “original sin” – a concept that Augustine introduced in Christian theology shortly before writing his Confessions.

>Yet the way in which Augustine first presents the pear theft seems markedly different in this respect. Not only is there no “serpent” in his story – the boys seem to have come up with the idea all by themselves. They also seem to have no subjectively good reason: it is the lack of point of the pear theft that Augustine emphasizes most. He suggests the boys knew that the theft was wrong, and further emphasizes that the fruit was “not tempting either for its color or for its flavour.” Nor was it for some gain that the boys committed the theft – Augustine has the boys end up feeding the inedible stolen pears to the pigs.

>“I ask what delighted me in the theft, and I find no item” (II, vi, 12), Augustine says, and he states: “Let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself” (II, iv, 9).

>>16617272
Thanks anon. I haven't read the confessions because I thought it was literally just him confessing about stealing one pear.
I think I confused it with J. Alfred Prufrock.
I guess I'll read it now.

>>16617154
Cry more christshit. Your irrational philosophy is irrelevant and cringe.

>>16617118
>bro, ONE pear? It's not that big a deal

It's called having an overly conscientious and obsessive personality. (I imagine Kant also suffered from such an infliction given the irrationality the concept that the categorical imperative should never be transgressed under any circumstance.) I have obsessive compulsive disorder, which makes my life miserable, and I frequently find myself operating under similarly nonsensical problems of conscience.

>>16618450

>>16618433
damn this guy can’t catch a break

I read a post on a Catholic forum claiming that stealing a pear with friends was code for committing gang rape. I don't want to accuse St. Augustine of committing gang rape but it's an interesting interpretation and I wonder whether they just pulled it out of their ass or read it elsewhere

>>16618479
I can't see that being the case unless it was some hyper-obscure meme (lmfao dude beans is actually an allegory for voting!) in which case, how do we know about it?

I also can't see the case of this dude just admitting to fucking gang-rape and then it not being an enormous issue. Ignoring what the church thought of it internally (I'm pretty fucking sure even then, baptism didn't forgive you in the eyes of the law for gang-rape, to say nothing of the fact that half of the Church thought he was a heretic that needed to be murdered), Augustine is also the guy who openly told other Christians to shut the fuck up if they were going to open their fat mouths and make the religion look bad. I can't see him admitting to gang-rape even if he did actually commit it

>>16618479
No doubt because a voluptuous woman's backside is shaped like a pear.