/lit/ - Literature

>>21323067
Correct

>>21323067
I KNOW only atheists make claims like this.
Also not lit for further proof.
Sage hide ignore

The Bible says this. Kierkegaard's logical induction at the beginning of The Sickness Unto Death proves this. However, Christ is the Lord. He is God, and is the only door to God. It's best to find out now, than later.

If God real, why bad things happen?

>>21323091
God, I hate ebonics so goddamn much.

I believe in god, but I don't worship him.

I believe there is a God-like entity outside this dimension but I don't necessarily think it's exactly like the Christian God.

>>21323105
>Ivan

Nice thesis but you should argue it better.

>Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
>Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

I believe there is a God-like entity outside this dimension but I don't necessarily think it's exactly like the Christian God.

>>21323091
This but unironically
Either God isn’t omnipotent, doesn’t care or activity encourages suffering (thus he’s an asshole)
Which does NOT disprove God’s existence at all. All it does it disprove American evangelism Judeo-Christian “Yahweh” God.

>>21323067
Yeah most sociology suggests this from what I've seen. Belief in God is naturally hardwired in humans, take that however you want.

>>21323067
it's true, when close to death everyone turns to God BUT you forget that this last prayer, like all other prayers, goes unanswered, it is not the non existence of God that leads to atheism but the silence of God.

there is a quote from Moby Dick that fits really well here (Ahab just slew a whale and this whale in his last moment turns to the sun( the divine other you speak of) :

"life dies sunwards full of faith; but see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads some other way. Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas; thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me. Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet!—that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable imminglings, float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living things, exhaled as air, but water now. Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"

>I don't believe in you because you have forsaken me.
this is why Jesus died as a failed atheist (my god, my god, why have you forsaken me) to feel the silence of God but unable to be without him, this is his and our all defeat.

>>21323173
I blame the disneyfication of God. The idea that God is only about "love and friendship" and all that bullshit. No, God should be feared.

>>21323067
Monotheist Jewish God isn’t a natural concept though. Oldest cultures called God “the One” “Brahman” “the All” etc. which doesn’t correspond to yhwh

>>21323234
Yhwh is just a big bully

>>21323099
>thinks that is ebonics
You're an idiot.

>>21323195
The thing is God is the highest level, so if love is not highest then all is lost.

>>21323234
>Monotheist Jewish God isn’t a natural concept though.
How is it not?

>>21323243
It is. He's missing elements from standard English grammar. It should be:
>If God [is] real, why [do] bad things happen?

>>21323250
Almost no culture developed it. Egypt because a single pharaoh tried to force it and they immediately abandoned it after he died. The Jews were originally monotheistic but one of their warrior deities, Yahweh, somehow became their sole object of worship, and Jewish schizophrenia (studies have proven Jews have 40% more chance of getting schizophrenia) created this completely insane theology based on yahweh. all other cultures were either animistic, pantheistic, or henotheistic.

>>21323246
God is not only about love =/= God is not about love

>>21323264
>originally monotheistic
Originally polytheistic*

Is there any belief system more depressing than materialist atheism?

>you are a cosmic accident
>and so is everyone else you ever knew or loved
>your life has no purpose
>your have no objective value
>God is a fairy tale
>love is a chemical
>free will itself is an illusion

thankfully there isn't an afterlife

>>21323246
I don’t even know what this word salad/platitude is even supposed to mean.
There is nothing intrinsically “loving” about a universal creator. The only intrinsic thing about him is that he created the universe. That’s it. Everything else is up to the individual believers and what they choose to project onto him.

>>21323276
>love is a chemical
Falling in love is due to chemical reactions in the brain, yes, but that lasts about two and half years. The love of your life happens to be the chick next door or someone from school, isn't that funny? But after the falling in love, relationships don't depend on chemicals but on other factors as well.

Yeah that's partly why I'm so skeptical in the first place. People like >>21323276 would be denying evolution if they could get away with it. I'm sure it's more "soulless" compared to creationism.
It's not like I want to be an atheist. It's not the choice I would make.

>>21323264
There were elements of monotheism beyond Jewish culture. Also, I'm not sure what makes it unnatural.

>>21323091
Good question! Maybe even the most important question there is. There have been attempts to answer this by various theologians but most of the answers provided feel unsatisfying.
Why did god put the tree of knowledge in the garden of eden for example when all that would possibly come from it was misery (which he already knew would happen since he's god).
I think the best answer is that he didn't want to predetermine his human creation but give it the possibility of choice. Without it there would be no free will. Also there's a question to be asked if you can truly be good without having the potential to be evil aswell. Another explanation would be "the devil made it this way by spoiling god's creation" but even the devil was created by god and by creating him he already knew lucifer would betray him since god is an omnipotent, timeless presence.
I don't know.
tl;dr Only god can truly answer it.

>>21323259
Poor grammar does not ebonics make, midwit.

>>21323067
Ultimately you can blame Christianity for western atheism, which has kept all of the former's nihilism

>>21323300
>But after the falling in love, relationships don't depend on chemicals but on other factors as well.

What are these other factors?

>>21323067
>science don’t real
Philo-sophist masturbation. If one lives a properly questioning life, one is atheist.
It usually just refers to religion, so this is easy once one accepts the reality of there being no creator or afterlife. One can even believe in a soul of sorts and still not be considered some kind of agnostic.

I don't care if God exists or not. I am here to do evil.

>>21323298
That's a very materialist view towards a metaphysical divine entity. Also it's flawed since every creator needs some sort of reason for why he creates. Love is a very satisfying answer to this question. To me at least. Feel free to provide another explanation though.

>>21323322
Pidgin, ebonics, broken English. Who cares. It's all the same retarded thing.

Not everyone shares your delusions.

>>21323339
Lowest IQ post ITT.

>>21323319
>Only god can truly answer it
is fundamentally correct. Every other step pushes back to this point, because God, or even supreme "gods" generally have sovereign status over men. That is a part of what makes them gods, their divinity is usually attached to their sovereignty over the world in some fashion (though not always, there is a concept of gods that have divine power over things, and gods that essentially are the embodiment of some natural thing).

So even if you shrug and say something like "well God is just powerful and if you don't follow what he says then he will fuck you up", the question of WHY things are the way they are is just because it is at God's pleasure that they be that way. If you believe God is actually not sovereign through pure power, but also because he is some embodiment of goodness and perfection, then the answer still will fall back to how only God can know what is perfectly good, so the reasoning for why he allows evil to exist is beyond our understanding. God knows what is good, and we don't. So it turns out that "evil" must be necessary for the good in a way we don't see, so long as we believe God is perfectly good.

>>21323336
What nihilism is there in Christianity?

>>21323347
>Also it's flawed since every creator needs some sort of reason for why he creates.
True, I just tier this directly with creation rather than thinking of them as two separate entities. But this does not entail the reason, just that there probably was a reason. But even completely unintelligent animals have “reasons” for why they hunt, eat and sleep. They don’t have or need higher reasons for doing it. Maybe thats similar to God? Who knows.
>Love is a very satisfying answer to this question. To me at least.
Right, that’s what I mean. Its an answer you’ve come up with, and thats fine, but it isn’t necessarily true for everyone or God himself.
>Feel free to provide another explanation though.
Thanks bro.

>>21323067
Such useless sentimentalism is the reason why religion is disappearing. Instead of convinvcing with solid reasoning, modern evangelists try to appeal to emotion or intuition. This is the worst possible way for current age, since these channels are already occupied by Western liberal civil religion. And in the case it works, instead of actually converting someone to your religion, you just make them adopt some parts of it which are compatible with their current worldview.

>>21323264
Polytheism is cringe desu. It's basically just diluting the issue. It doesn't provide any additional answers and makes everything more complicated. Also every polytheistic pantheon still has an allfather/mother type creation deity that created the other gods and stands above them. Monotheism on the other hand encapsulates the quintessence of the divine experience. I'd even argue that monotheism is the logical ontological next step from polytheism which is why it has prevailed over time.

>>21323382
>since these channels are already occupied by Western liberal civil religion.
This guy has a point. The American worship of the Negro, for example, is an obvious replacement for the sentiment of organized religion. Have you seen that video of a bunch of Americans kneeling in front of three or so Negroes? It has become a communal thing as well. The Negro became the de facto martyr in the American mind, replacing Jesus Christ or Catholic saints.

>>21323357
Exactly.

>>21323396
I think it is a latent possibility in polytheism, but never "necessary" so to speak. Look at Euthyphro, Socrates asks the primary question there. If there is such a thing as piety, and if it is doing what pleases the gods, and if piety is connected to goodness (because it is taken for granted by Euthyphro that to be pious is to be good), then how do we explain the fact that the multitude of gods want different things? That is actually the role their multiplicity often serves, in polytheistic cosmologies the many gods play out the history of the natural world through their divine conflicts, they often shape the world by their struggles with one another. So how can one be "pious" to the gods when the gods don't even want any particular thing? And once you take that step, then you have to ask how you can judge when the gods are exhibiting a kind of unified morality, like what is the justice that the gods are beholden to, how can we tell when one god is at fault and another god is on the side of justice and goodness, and then you're judging the gods against a principle higher than themselves. So you reach monotheism, that the gods themselves are beholden to something unified and higher than them, a principle that you are able to discern and judge them by.

>>21323357
This is just Ockhams voluntarism. God that cannot be reasoned about even to small degree is poses plethora of issues, and the result is positively incoherent.

>>21323432
>Euthyphro
The debate of piety in this dialogue needs to be understood in wider context of Platos dialogues. Plato often undertakes an inquiry into some topic where several views are presented and refuted, only to leave it unresolved. You wouldnt say that fine things or courage dont exist just because they were not defined in Hippias Major and Laches. Plato usually tries to lead the reader into the Forms. Its same with piety, which is obvious since Plato writes about piety in later dialogues, along with resolving the issues with popular perception of gods.

>>21323339
>the reality of there being no creator or afterlife
Claiming this to be a reality is inredibly naive even from a scientifical standpoint.
Regarding the first part. Given the nature of reality everything points to the existence of some sort of unmoved mover at the beginning of time and matter. Be it a god or whatever else.
Regarding the second part. It's absolutely impossible to know. Claiming to know for sure is pure ignorant hybris. You don't have to believe in an afterlife but you ultimately don't know what happens to your consciousness after you die. To this day we can't really explain consciousness or rule out the possibility of live before live. I can't rule out that one day we might have a (better) explanation to some of those questions but until then it remains a gap of human knowledge and might aswell be god, witchcraft or something else.

>>21323361
World denial, the glorification of weakness as strength (i.e. it is a virtue to be psycho-physically incapable of even needing restraint), ressentiment, etc. See Nietzsche.

>>21323432
>So you reach monotheism
For the Greeks, and platonists in particular, henotheism is more precise.

>>21323370
Fair enough.

>>21323067
I’ve never seen an atheist convincingly refute the idea that their secular values are just as much of a defined worldview as religions are. Nobody has truly lived a life of pure materialism and existential nihilism, literally nobody. It’s kind of like when you tell a Marxist that they follow an ideology and they insist that Marxism is an objective “science” instead. It’s just nonsense. Everyone is religious.

>>21323467
Yeah, but I don't think Socrates has a satisfying answer to these questions later. I think Euthyphro is a good dialogue that expresses this bigger dilemma, which is also directly connected to Socrates troubles in Athens. The whole dialogue is about Euthyphro's court case against his father, and in a sense Socrates is dealing with a similar problem with his father (the city). Except of course the city is turning and judging him, but there is a question of how to evaluate the justice of what is being done to Socrates in respect to either a higher sense of justice, or simply the raw judgement of the city through the court. Socrates is facing Euthyphro's dilemma, and the dilemma transcends just a religious dilemma about what is pious because it implicates principles of justice. Aristotle gets into similar territory later, but in a different way when he asks about what principle should found the good city, and after meandering for a while on the question he doesn't really answer it but just takes the first horn of Euthyphro's dilemma by declaring that virtue is what the good city seeks to promote. I'd say in some ways Socrates takes the first horn too when he accepts his death, because he basically elevates the city to a higher principle than himself, something that determines him (and is in effect his creator), and just observes its justice by killing himself rather than living in exile. But the first horn doesn't really solve the dilemma anymore than the second horn, it just terminates the question of how to evaluate justice and goodness with a response of faith. A person can declare their faith in God or in the principle of virtue or in the sovereignty of the city, and start there. But someone else can come and question it endlessly and be unsatisfied because they'll find that at the base of it the person their questioning is taking the first horn. They're just choosing the ground they want to stand on.

>>21323485
None of those are nihilistic. Nihilism is about void. Christianity simply has values you disagree with.

>>21323547
Which incidentally leads to this point too:
>>21323506
That I think Euthyphro highlights how religious thinking develops in humans around how to choose their ground, and what happens after they've chosen it. Or religious patterns of thought, I guess you could say. There is some perceived difference between traditional religion of divine things and a secular religion, but modern secular religions are derived from articles of faith as well that they just repress and try to spin back into something "objective" by constantly taking measurements. What European secular society developed after the enlightenment was the propensity for trying to keep tabs on God's promises. We think if we can keep measuring God that God will be more real than he was. Previously it was an article of faith that worldly evil was necessary in some way for God's plan, that when you passed from faith in God's goodness or justice to questions of how to evaluate it, the answer was that God would prove his goodness and justice in the endtimes. But the endtimes was postponed for a very long time, and eventually people started doubting that the Christian God existed at all. New secular faiths that were the reaction against Christianity started emphasizing a rational means of evaluating whether the principles of faith were leading to the kingdom of heaven, so we get GDP and standard of living indexes and all this other stuff. We get measurements of the public will, or their satisfaction with the ruling party etc. and these become oracles of founding principles like "democracy". Very serious and public people have what to me at least appear as pretty baseless and unhinged arguments about how present these abstractions are, how much we are truly observing them. It all looks very religious, and when you start questioning it you can even get some very heated people treating you like a heretic.

>>21323547
This is exactly where Forms come in. For Plato the Good, the Justice and the Piety are, of course, real things. He is a moral realist after all. As shown in Phaedrus even gods are, according to Plato, not above the Forms and merely have superior access to them. In Republic and Laws, Plato sets out his account of gods which is noticably distict from popular depictions of his day, and emphasizes their perfect goodness which must be understood in reference to the Form of Good and Forms which partake in it. The middle term between gods and piety turns out to be exactly this, the Forms and cosequent shared standard of Goodness which gods possess and mortals aspire towards.

>>21323553
It is nihilism to deny what exists and replace it with a bunch of delusions about how it's a good thing to be impotent.

>>21323091
Deus lo Vult.
>Its all Zeus Will.

>>21323234
>. which doesn’t correspond to yhwh
>Necesary Being
>not the one
Ok goy.
>YHWH not being a Quarternary as Christ-Crucified Is
Ok Goy.

>>21323640
That's not what Christianity and nihilism are

>>21323264
>t. Egypt because a single pharaoh tried to force it and they immediately abandoned it after he died. The Jews were originally monotheistic but one of their warrior deities, Yahweh, somehow became their sole object of worship, and Jewish schizophrenia (
>pic related
Keep your Anti-Semitism to the bare Minimum

>be me
>dying
>heart and lungs stop working
>senses stop working
>out of body experience begins
>I'm hovering slightly above my body
>Somehow my "self" is suddenly separate from my senses
>a massive light beams into me
>an entity is within the light
>wow I'm dead and God is real I can't fucking believe this
>Shit
>non-verbally communicate with God
>Communicate that I know that there is no reason for him to give me another chance and that I know ive been a repentless piece of shit my entire life but I would really like another chance
>I, an atheist, am fucking begging God
>I go back into my body
>My senses come back
>I stand up
>I'm shook as fuck
>Get baptised that coming sunday
>Maintaining my promises with God

I really thought I could use logic and objectivity to attain all of the answers to the universe, I was writing a philosophy book and everything. I had to throw all of it away. There is much more to this universe than meets the eye. The ego is lying to you. For the rest of my life I will do my best to be humble and righteous.

God is real. I am such an asshole I had to meet him to figure this out. Don't be me.

>>21323407
>A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks
>The present research provides the first systematic empirical investigation into superhumanization, the attribution of supernatural, extrasensory, and magical mental and physical qualities to humans. Five studies test and support the hypothesis that White Americans superhumanize Black people relative to White people
https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/a-superhumanization-bias-in-whites-perceptions-of-blacks

>>Another thing that struck me [in the American] was the great influence of the Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood. The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the American papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro.[3] American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro.

>>The vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete identity with all members of the tribe.
Carl Jung.

>>21323067
>Normies dont even know the meaning of the world Theos.

>>21323649
If I take that cross off, would you die?

>>21323662
Big if true. Glad you made it fren.

>>21323681
Thank you, I am truly grateful. I should be dead right now. All I have to do now is figure out what plans God has for me on this world.

>>21323067
>I'm convinced every human being has an intuitive connection to mayonnaise-based salad dressing that some people are just more in denial of than others. Regardless of religion or belief system that is. When saying mayonnaise-based salad dressing I speak of the concept of mayonnaise-based salad dressing as a divine flavor-boosting condiment of course, not about any specific one.
>When confronted with their own mortality most people that are in relatively deep denial will change their perspective. The ones that do not are in some sense even bigger believers than most religious people since they die in an functional act of communication with mayonnaise-based salad dressing, the communication being something along the lines of
>"I don't believe in you because you have forsaken me." which is a pretty big display of one's own faith in mayonnaise-based salad dressing.

>>21323091
>If creator of this world exists, why do bad things happen?
Well, why wouldn't they happen?
>But the creator is supposed to be a good guy!
Why? He only created the world once. The world is supposed to run "by itself". Do you wish he was there inside you animating you too, so you wouldn't act badly, nor anyone else would, and this world became merely his lonely theater?
Think hard on what you would prefer.

>>21323485
This. It’s because of Christianity that we have this nihilism now. Nihilism is a consequence of 2000 years of Christian rule, and there’s no going back.

>>21323407
Eh, I don't think they "worship the negro" exactly. Or I guess, I don't believe it is the way /pol/ presents it. Black people are sacred in some ways, but also sacrificial. They are something that proves to us the justice of our society, because we treat them as sacred. But at the same time people implicitly desire their sacrifice. I think it helps liberals to find examples black victims, who are in a similar position as a traditional sacrifice. Girard says that the innocent sacrifice is mainly a means of diffusing social potential for uncontrolled violence. When the modern sacrifice of the black victim happens and is acknowledged and ritually mourned, it is infused with some divinity and you get the martyr like quality of the image of the sacrifice being observed everywhere, painted on city buildings and such. Then everyone reaffirms that the example of the sacrifice will stand to remove or dispel such violence against others. Black people remain in a cycle of poverty and violence though, it isn't ACTUALLY ended. But the observance of the sacrifice helps renew the spirit of the people and repress potentially uncontrolled desires for retributive violence, like social unrest that brews into revolt or race war or something like that (which Girard calls the blood feud). Instead the status quo continues with the renewed promise that justice will be observed.

I imagine a /pol/tard might claim the riots counters this analysis, but the point isn't to say the sacrifice is 100% successful. The traditionally "religious" sacrifice can also fail to suppress uncontrolled violence, but I saw the Floyd protests first hand and the faithful (many black) were in the crowd exhorting people to have faith in the power of the sacrifice and not commit violence. The sacrifice has to be a precious one for God to truly accept it, and the mainstream move is to express how precious and innocent the sacrifice was to increase the feeling of loss. It was a child, look at its smiling face, it enjoyed sports and here are people saying it was a good friend to them. It's YOUR child by proxy, feel the power of the loss and God will hear and finally destroy injustice and evil.

>>21323730
To put it another way, society isn't actually for them. If we really wanted what we claim we do, we'd actually just give them everything. If we hated their poverty so much, we'd actually just build houses for all of them, give them all jobs, whatever. Some of that slips through, there are affordable housing programs and affirmative action, but much like the sacrifice these are just instances of the margins where black people either actually get what they want because they have political reps who are going around the normal rituals, or faithless heretics did it on their behalf. But the way average liberals treat them as sacred is a means of NOT doing those things. Like Girard said, it's a repression of the blood feud. There is an overt history of a blood feud between black and white people in America, that white people wronged black people and black people have grounds to seek vengeance. But white people, even when they appear liberal and cosmopolitan, actually don't want to pay for that injustice. They don't want to do work and then just give it to black people to enrich them as a settlement of their blood feud. So they repress it by ritually mourning the poverty of black people and taking part in sacrificial events that continuously renew the promise that things will get better and implicitly that there is no need for the blood feud to actually break out into violence, because the poverty of black people is a cosmic evil that only God can truly fix if we show we care enough.

>>21323067
>image representing god
get that out of my sight and kys pagan

>>21323485
Are you impliying that Nietzsche was a nihilist?
If yes then boy do I have some news for you.
It's a common mistake though.

>>21323824
Nietzsche was a nihilist. He admits it in his notes. The only reason he felt a need to overcome nihilism is because he was one.

>>21323276
What's supposed to be depressing about any of those things? Every one of them deserves to be responded to with 'so what?'. It's depressing only if you have some other desires and frustrations that aren't satisfied by these conclusions. E.g. you fear being valueless, so you need some system that tells you have "objective value", whatever that might be. Or you assume there's God, and someone claiming God is a fairly tale bothers you. If you don't care about something as meaningless (at least without rigid philosophical definitions, which I guarantee you can't provide) as "objective value" or about God's existence, then there's nothing particularly depressing.
Imagine being a Christian, and some ancient Greek complains that your worldview is depressing, because you think Zeus and Ares are pagan nonsese, and whoever believes in them will at best end up in the limbo.

>>21323730
>Black people are sacred but also sacrificial
Interesting take. Never thought about it that way but it makes sense.

>>21323718
>and this world became merely his lonely theater
Every time I see decent Christian replies on /lit/, I sort of start thinking I should finally read the Bible and study the stuff more seriously. Then I see this sort of shit, literally returning to "God = old man in the sky"-tier thinking.
Yes you fucktard I would prefer the world to be better than it is. I seriously don't give a shit about an omnipotent being feeling lonely or bored. He can make himself a she-god to fuck or whatever, he's omnipotent after all.

>>21323859
Modern people love sentimental rhetoric which is shallow as a puddle. Dont get discouraged by it though, this stuff is really interesting and worthy of serious study.

>>21323276
It's a hard pill to swallow, I envy people who can spit it back out and live blissfully. Personally I read ancient letters as a coping mechanism. The more I read about how horrible some people's lives were in the past, the less bad I feel about the meaninglessness of my life. Just some time ago I read one of Seneca's letters about how a spartan child bashed his head into the wall to kill himself after being captured, preferring to die free than to live in bondage. That boy is a greater man than me who willingly chose to live in the safety of a cage from fear of the non-existence that follows death.

>>21323834
Personally I think that is exactly the point in a way, at least in our modern, secular theologies. It has to be repressed that that is what is going on, the sacrifice has to appear real. Again, I'm drawing really heavily from Rene Girard with this interpretation, but he talks about how sacrificial animals can be given human names and treated like a human before the sacrifice. The point is for them is to avoid the human sacrifice itself (maybe a real human is too precious, often human and even child sacrifices show up in larger societies like city-states whereas smaller populations will opt for a cow or something). But you still want it to be precious for the gods, so you try to imbue it with some humanity.

In our case I think we are ironically quite fanatical because we make it appear so real as to be indistinguishable from the real thing. Like, there are always disputes over how truly innocent the sacrifice was, and faithful liberals will generally push away and furiously silence any suggestion that the victim might not have been ideally innocent. It's sacrilegious to just shout at the sacrifice of the cow "That wasn't even a great cow! And after killing it you all cut up and ate the best parts of the cow anyways! Is this a sacrifice or is this because you guys want to feast and feel good about it?"

Which is basically what I think the modern sacrifice is. The black victim gets killed by who (generally)? A cop. What do cops do structurally? They protect property and maintain law and order. Who doesn't have property? Black people. What do poor black people do? Steal, commit violence, shuffle around city streets in rags. So what is the radical demand that happened after the last bout of sacrifices? END THE POLICE! That is both demanding the end to the sacrifices but also functionally the end to what they really do, maintain the system of social inequality and property. That is why liberals got tense about it and kept diffusing that demand. In the case of someone like Biden they just laughed, because Biden is an old liberal and he just thinks that rhetoric is obviously insane. But younger liberals and media people tried to change what it meant by saying "actually if we get rid of the police nothing would really change! what abolish the police really means is hire psychologists as crisis responders to talk people down!" etc. while some communists and black radicals and such said what it really meant, which was ending the police but avoiding violence by just giving black people a bunch of stuff. They might also not see it the way I do in this religious lense, but they implicitly get what is at stake. If you remove the police then there will be the potential for uncontrolled violence, the blood feud. But how do you avoid it? By paying black people not to steal property. In this case, paying meaning something like free housing and shit, basically reparations.

>>21323834
>>21323922
But then you come back to the irony that the police the liberals claim to hate for their violence against black people are actually psychologically necessary for them, they serve a theological function at the same time they serve a real function of controlling the blood feud. So liberals nervously try to step the abolish the police stuff down to "reform the police", because they don't want to pay the real settlement of the blood feud. Which is why I say they crave the sacrifice, they actually don't want to end it, they create it. Not in the sense that they send a priest to grab a victim and execute him, they do it in an even more outrageous way. They point at a cop on guard duty for all of their property and shout "oh my god, he killed the innocent victim!" and manufacture the social event of the sacrifice almost like a cursed lottery on a random cop. They create the event of the sacrifice out of thin air. Cops are killing black people all the time, but every so often liberals point at one of them and scream "the horror!" and everyone cries before eventually moving on.

>>21323827
Well it's not the band deciding what genre their music should be called.
It's determined by critics that listen to their music using objective criteria.
Same goes for Nietzsche. No matter how many people repeat this error it stays wrong.
Nietzsche as a philosopher was not a nihilist. Like Karen Swassjan aptly puts it in his Nietzsche Biographie:
>"Because like no other he taught to affirm through negation, to accept through renunciation, to love through hate."
Especially his Übermensch concept is in fact quite the opposite of a nihilistic idea. It is the idealistic notion of freeing oneself of norms and values escaping the eternal return through spiritual improvement with the aim of perfection on an individualistic aswell as a societal level. Striving for this existential goal against all resistance and difficulties obviously gives the otherwise meaningless and wasted life of the individual a higher transcendental meaning or rather purpose.
For Nietzsche, nihilism was synonymous with misdevelopment due to the decadence of the West.
He himself used this term against the Christian religion. In fact, however, our modern definition of Nihilism is a world view that assumes the complete nothingness and meaninglessness of being. If you still really want to frame Nietzsche as a nihilist you could at most call him an optimistic, private or semantic nihilist (would be a lot cooler if you didn't though).
His philosophy however has never been a nihilist philosophy.
Nietzsche himself was (again citing Swassjan here):
>"An unrepeatable and inimitable tragic warrior of knowledge, who tuned his thoughts according to the index of radicalism and catastrophism and thought himself to the point of madness and death."

>>21323910
>It's a hard pill to swallow
No it's rather obscene masochism.

>>21323691
Read the Bible, repent for your sins and pray. Put your faith in the Holy Spirit and He will guide you

wHERE ELSE WOULD IT COME FROM
?

>>21323829
>Imagine being a Christian, and some ancient Greek complains that your worldview is depressing, because you think Zeus and Ares are pagan nonsese, and whoever believes in them will at best end up in the limbo.
That's a comedically false equivalence anon. You'll eventually get to a point in live where you silently pray to god. Consider yourself lucky you lived a relatively sheltered life so far. If that's not the case then I'm sorry since you had to deal with shit that made you lose faith in god but I'm sure he won't blame you for that since it's still an act of faith.

>>21324011
sneed

>>21323910
It's funny to me how this "atheist" quote is the quintessential conflict of frankenstein's monster which recognizes a very similiar struggle in the character of lucifer from paradise lost to whom he strongly relates to.

>I'm convinced every human being has an intuitive connection to god

Which one?

>>21323910
>We have expectations of a just an moral world.
Those expectations didn't just pop up from out nowhere.
They developed over millenia and ultimately stem from abrahamic faith.

>>21324060
>before Moses, people would just randomly murder and rape each other fot no reason

Monotheists are such fucking idiots, holy shit

>>21324065
Not murdering people =//= expectations of a just an moral world

>>21324068
And you seriously believe people didn't have this before some Jew moron plagarized some cult shit from a mentally ill Pharaoh? You must be American

>>21324072
By the way, by 'jew moron', I meant Moses, and by 'mentally ill Pharaoh', I meant Akhenaten, in case anyone mistook me for some nazi fucktard

>>21324072
A lot of what we today consider normal indeed comes from abrahamic scriptures anon. You just take it for granted because you literally can't comprehend life without it. If you look at tribes that had no contact with modern civ today while they might not like people killing each other they absolutely have no concept of a just and moral world. Weither you like it or not the holy scriptures of judaism, christianity and islam (yeah granted the last one a little less) are the foundation of our western belief system. Besides the greeks nothing influenced western philosophy as much as those texts and yes it laid the groundwork for our morality even if that's a pretty hard to grasp concept. We do come from monkeys which didn't care all that much about morality. Humanity had to develop it and the influence of monotheistic religions in that can't be overestimated.

>>21324093
No my dear, it doesn't. Most of what you read in Abrahamic scriptures are slight variations on religious themes that had been around for millenia before monotheism was even properly formulated. If you view the Bible as the starting point of our western belief system, you just show you have a very basic view of history. Most of what you mention is the middle, or even the end of the Axial Age, with boatloads of essential cultural concepts before the ones you mentioned omitted, probably because they don't fit your preconceived worldview

>>21324119
>Bible
>Starting point of our western belief system
That would obviously be the Torah anon.
And no I'm obviously not saying it's the "starting point". Things don't just pop into existence from nothing. I'm saying abrahamic religions did A LOT of the dirty work regarding the development and commitment of morality for humanity to eventually reach the point were at today.

>>21324146
Yes, and the religious traditions that Abrahamic religions are built on did even more dirty work, what's your point?

>>21324165
>source trust me bro
You realize that romans still engaged in ritual human sacrifice right?

>>21323974
I am reading and praying daily and I have repented and continue to repent

My eyes are open more than I thought they could ever be, I am so absolutely awestruck.

>>21323083
Who?

Atheists are incapable of recognizing that it is because of the grace of the Holy Spirit in the first place that some of the better ones of them are/feel "okay" with dying.

>>21324679
Ok cum genius

>>21324679
Examining everything objectively is a midwit mistake

>>21325105


You mean: "(material) reductionistically", not: "objectively".

>>21323276
Might as well commit suicide if you believe that shit. Especially if you don't believe in afterlife. Like who should even care about you? You're a genetic accident anyways...

>>21325285
I'm fine with that phrasing as well

>>21323099
Ebonics is "why bad things be happening."
And it's a good question, kill yourself if you think "because he wants to give you the free will to rot in hell" is a good answer, god is a sick freak

>>21323276
I don't know how the fuck people find this "depressing".
Oh wow you're not the main character of the universe, life is a mess. Big deal, grow up.
At least you don't have to worry about burning forever just for having lustful thoughts, people you like aren't gonna suffer the same thing for not believing in God the correct way, life doesn't start and end for a random Jewish carpenter.

Christians are so fucking insufferable, it makes me miss the angry smug atheist days when creationists were still running around.

>>21324695
Did the pedo Spaniard stop with the caps lock? What happened?

>>21323276
Religtards be like: "it makes me feel bad fee fees so therefore it can't be true"

>>21325524
>Oh wow you're not the main character of the universe
You are though. Read Uexküll

>>21325639
You get the fucking point

>>21325624
I remember hearing some atheist going "religion is just shit people make fun of because they' never learned how to handle death". I thought that was stupidly reductive, but after seeing shit that frogposter spouted again and again and again, I'm starting to understand where he came from.
"You are a cosmic accident", and? Are you going to fucking break down if you parents told you were an accident? Who gets an existential crisis out of this? And why is Christianity supposed to be the specific one that somehow makes you feel better? "Your life has no purpose", and praising some guy in the sky we never see is supposed to be fulfilling?
The point is shit like >>21325331
It's some sly backhanded passive aggressive way to tell you to kill yourself. Childish.

>>21323349
If you're going to criticize others over imperfect grammar, you should probably be precise yourself.

>>21323091
Because free will exists, thus allowing Humans to make evil choices and throw their lot in with the Devil.

Intelligence is all around you and you can utilize it but the mistakes begin when you believe this intelligence is yours

>>21323123
Who wrote this? Who are you quoting?

>>21323246
If love is highest then so is hate, because they are complementary and can't exist apart from the other. One can't have it both ways. It's actually more ideal to have something higher than love at the top, which is what a lot of romantics and mystics don't quite get (and atheists too when they take the implicitly romantic view of God when trying to refute him through Epicurus's reasoning).

>>21325524
Cope. Nihilists pretending to be happy always amuses me. I've saw myself as an atheist most of my life. It's fucking miserable.

>>21325676
I live in my universe and you are just potentially relevant noise I am picking up.

>>21325524
>At least you don't have to worry about burning forever just for having lustful thoughts
Yeah, it's so much better just... burning forever for absolutely no reason whatsoever with no escape. Nothing to worry about whatsoever, just eternal, necessitated, purely natural reincarnation as swine to the slaughterhouse for eternity. Great.

>>21326439
>reincarnation
Well to be fair to the guy he didn't mention any of that.

>>21325694
Am I wrong though? If everything has already been lain out before you what else is there to do but die?

>>21323276
I'm starting to think the pagans who describe secular humanism as an extreme form of Protestantism are correct.

>>21323067
God = unifying principle

There is no unifying principle.

>>21326462
It's implied by naturalistic materialism, at least far more so than "eternal black" which atheists comfort themselves by believing.

>>21325694
So you aren't afraid of death huh? And you already know how you are going to deal with him when he knocks on your doorstep?
Sounds like we got ourselves a badass over here.

>>21326481
>It's implied by naturalistic materialism,
Can you elaborate on that? Is it something about law of conservation of energy?

>>21326378
Hate = Ego = Amygdala = Fear = Reptilian threat response

Love = Soul = God = Collective consciousness = The universality of our existence

>>21323173
I don’t know about you and your life but personally I believe the trials and the pain we go through in life adds value to the experience of life and makes us stronger as we persevere. What is bravery if there is no fear? The best stories are of men and their struggles and accomplishments.
The idea that God needs to intervene otherwise he’s an asshole is like a child being angry at his parents for not giving him whatever he desires. Life has a way of rewarding those who are grateful for their blessings and that’s why faith saves us from the torment of questioning our creator’s methods. This world is perfect to me, it’s the people who are flawed.

>>21326498
Hate is not a fear response. It is the complement of love, because to love something in particular you need to love it to the exclusion of something else. And if there are particular objects of love, there must be particular objects that are diametrically opposed to the object of love (which would be an object of hate because they oppose the object of love). The Demiurge creates a particular universe after one paradigm because he loves that paradigm to the exclusion of other possible paradigms. Love and hate are the poles of the Demiurgic sphere of divinity (the sphere of activity: creation, maintenance and destruction), God properly so-called transcends this polarity of love and hate, basically He transcends all activity.
>Hate = Ego = Amygdala = Fear = Reptilian threat response
If we are trying to biologize emotions, then I can just as well biologize love by showing how it is related to oxytocin. Love is just as egotistical as hate.

>>21326478
They just replaced god by science and still are unable to answer any of the important questions of the universe. Also it's funny to me since the scientific method wouldn't exist without judeo-christian and islamic thought. They are literally worshipping a false idol. Even their own most important fields of study namingly math and physics in the form of methaphysicst is hinting at them being wrong about pretty much everything they believed in so far regarding the foundations of the universe. They are sect. Eventually most of them will realize this.

FYI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKuvoHitExo
>inb4 ze jew hurr durr
Please cool it with the antisemitic remarks and just watch the video. If you are going to critizize what's being said try to do it on a content level.

>>21324679
Yeah, probably because they're not retarded like you

>>21324237
They demonstrably didn't, that was banned by the Roman senate about a century before Jesus was even born.

>>21326523
Hate literally occurs pre-rationally in the amygdala this is well known with brain scans

It is the only pre-rational emotion

Hate is a problem for the physical body of humans, love exists outside of us and we access it freely

>>21326493
More to do with the principle of proportionate causality (PPC). Any effect is contained in its total cause; if the total cause is material (ex hypothesi), and matter can't be created or destroyed (ie, is eternal), then the effect (consciousness) must be eternal (given the other normal presuppositions of naturalism), even if transient (ie changes states, like matter and energy).

>>21326531
>Also it's funny to me since the scientific method wouldn't exist without judeo-christian and islamic thought.

Completely false, and probably American

>>21326523
and you are very wrong about love being related to the ego, you are saying opposite words here and anybody that claims love under egotistic circumstances is mistaking it for lust and other feelings

in regard to oxytocin, see the point that hate is the only pre-rational emotion, all other emotions must be willed, and then the molecules occur

>>21326562
>Hate literally occurs pre-rationally in the amygdala this is well known with brain scans
Love pre-occurs in the brain pre-rationally as well through the release of oxytocin after the immediate perceptual reaction to a loved one. This is easy to assert because we have no idea what consciousness is scientifically, so every emotion can be said to occur pre-rationally in the brain. What does it matter which part of the brain it pre-occurs in? I can link love with the breeding instinct and the selfishness of motherhood (favoring the lives of her offspring at the expense of many other living beings) just as much as you can link hate with fear. It's a non-argument.

>>21326562
>brain scan says it, I believe it, that settles it

Can you get more scientism than this? Holy shit

>>21326571
wrong, oxytocin is not released pre-rationally

>>21326572
I am actually not ruling out demonic possession/attacks with my statements

>>21326560
97 BCE wasn't the starting point for monotheism anon. Also that date is suspiciously close to the emergence of christianity.

>>21326570
Love is especially egotistical when it is unrelated to lust. Lust is more sensual than egotistical. Love in the proper sense is fundamentally a projection of the ego, which is why we usually want to "have" the things we love (more than we want to "have" objects of sensual lust, which are just temporary possessions).

>>21326578
>a date BC
>suspiciously close to the emergence of christianity.

American thinking moment

>>21326582
Love is absolutely separate from the sense of self, you are a very stupid person. Coveting, lust, desire, etc, none of these things are even remotely close to love. You don't know what love is. You know what materialism and making value assessments of humans is.

>>21326567
I'm german and you didn't provide any evidence against this. The development of science is a history of abrahamic thought.

>>21326587
>filtered by math

>>21326595
How about literally the whole of Greek philosophy? You don't think Pythagoras was relevant? You think the Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians just magiced their way into those massive palaces and temples of theirs? What is wrong with you?

>>21326590
>Coveting, lust, desire, etc, none of these things are even remotely close to love
Which is exactly what I just said.
> You don't know what love is.
I'm starting to think you are the one who does not understand love, and better yet you lack the ability to put forth any coherent arguments. That is to say you also lack the rational faculty of mind necessary to comprehend what is even being discussed. You've already used multiple faulty assertions which do not hold up to scrutiny, by associating love and hate with contingent mental faculties of human beings.
>Love is absolutely separate from the sense of self,
This is not an argument, it is just an assertion. Define love unambiguously in a way which doesn't turn it into something entirely different, and then perhaps I might take your non-arguments seriously. More particularly, I want you to show unambiguously how love can be accurately defined without reference to its complement.

>>21326601
>Christianity should take the credit for things that happened before it even existed

I thought pride was a sin

>>21326609
All of those are relevant but if you look at the major inventions and breaktroughs that constitute our western understanding of what science is the vast majority of it comes from a tradition of monotheism.

>>21326614
>*tips fedora*

>>21326613
Love having the precondition of unconditionality negates the possibility for any sense of self, it is spontaneous, and free. It is a universal energy from God, it has roughly nothing to do with the fun and games that people have on a day to day basis. You have experienced fun, joy, happiness. These are all things that can be attained via the value assessments of humans. Love has nothing to do with these things. Love is accessible only through the submission of the ego to the higher power. One must trade their capacity to fear, to hate, in order to love.

>>21326624
No, they usually just come from trail and error. Ironically, this linair model of science, with one singular thing 'causing' science is exactly the core of scientism. It's the idea of neat and clean causes and effects, instead of a messy affair. Science has arguably been around ever since shamans started to measure the path of the sun in the sky, so that we would know when winter solstice came, and people could start planting their crops. The ifea that a singular thing 'caused' science is utterly laughable and has been refuted over and over again

>>21326629
>I have no counter, so here's a dead meme

>>21326687
Nice strawman

>>21323067
But how do I know it's real? The only reason I believe in the spiritual is because of a vague religious drive I feel. But how do I know that's not just delusion? I don't know man, this is like my 6th crisis of faith.

>>21326714
Faith is important, if you know something to be absolutely true then faith goes away. Blaise Pascal struggled with this, as he witnessed an angel and therefore he knew for sure. Wittgenstein had trouble with this, because he wrote out enormous proofs for God's existence, and frustratingly added "anyone that needs this much proof has no belief at all".

>>21326714
>But how do I know it's real?
You don't.

>>21326721
So I just need to see an angel? Enochian magic here I come!

>>21326744
That's my point, dingus.

>>21326745
It would be better if you didn't, because like I said faith is important.

>>21326755
Lame.

>>21326764
I'll let you know something, I really didn't want to believe in God. I was very dedicated to atheism. I went kicking and screaming into Christianity.

>>21326755
>>21326764
I shouldn't have just replied with lame that was rude of me. But why shouldn't I seek out divine revelation? What makes faith better than gnosis?

>>21326782
Faith will lead to gnosis, you can do it in the opposite order, as I did. It's a much rockier road and I wouldn't recommend.

>>21326793
You didn't say what made it better.

I saw picrel when tripping on a 200µg dose of acid once before my inner eye.
Plus a crown of thorns that is. Not that this proves anything but I think it was a pretty neat experience and it feels related. Wasn't a believer at that time but found god years later. Only realized pictures like this existed afterwards btw.

>>21326809
It's a much smoother path, anon. My statement should have implied that when I said the other path was rockier. You're going to have a really hard time pretending you can have all of the answers to the universe. Your ego will devour you. Or perhaps it is something more malicious devouring you. You'll feel a lot better when you apply some faith to this situation.

Gnosticism is an interesting thought experiment but that's pretty much it.

>>21326857
I committed myself to a semi-marcionite belief system

>>21326845
I know the risks. I know the occult has the power to over inflate your ego and destroy your life (see Aleister Crowley). But I've also seen it's ability to create truly great people who can shine light in this dark world. I need to see things for myself.

>>21326874
Do what you need to do nobody could tell me otherwise either, best of luck.

>>21326874
>I've also seen it's ability to create truly great people who can shine light in this dark world.
Care to provide any examples?

>>21326886
Dion Fortune and Eliphas Levi to name two that inspired me.

>>21326886
Simone Weil

>>21326915
based answer