/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13957557]

There was an anon on here a few weeks ago who posted something to the effect of: humans and animals are kind of like Manichean demons because organisms devour the energy (light) of other organisms just as demons devour the light of God.

I just wanted to thank that anon because that post me down a fascinating and fucked up rabbit hole. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.13957565]

>>13957557
Share more, nigger.

[Anonymous No.13957604]

>>13957565
These are gnostic ideas but they're very in line with Manichaeaism/what that anon was trying to communicate:

>Just as the semen of man, the minute, invisible seed possessing a scarcely measurable weight, acquires size and weight as it develops, so do the primordial seeds, the potentialities of a hyper-cosmic world, acquire weight by falling into the lower world, becoming more and more dense in substance.

>It seems, then, that for the Gnostics there exist several states of matter: an igneous, superior state which belongs to the hyper-world, and successive states corresponding to the different circles, graded as the seeds materialize and take on darkness, opacity, gravity. Our own matter, that of the earth, plants, and all living creatures, is in some way the seed of the ethereal particles of the hyper-world, but grown infinitely heavier.

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[Anonymous No.13957628]

>Our matter, because it is heavy, because it is dark - the darkest and heaviest of all - is also the least dynamic, the most immobile, as fixed
and as heavy as atoms reduced to their nuclei. Immobility, the glacial cold of matter and flesh
deprived of primal fire and sinking ineluctably towards that absolute zero which is the final
stage of material death.

>Weight, cold, and immobility are at once our condition, our destiny, and our death. To surrender oneself to weight, to increase it in all senses of the term (by absorbing food, or by procreating, weighing the world down with successive births), is to collaborate in this unhappy destiny, to ratify the primordial fall which is the cause of it, to ally oneself with the work of death undertaken by the being or beings who provoked this tragic cleavage. In modern terms, it is hastening the trend towards what we call entropy.

I have some contemporary stuff on the Manichaean views on food and consumption if you're interested

[Anonymous No.13957663]

>>13957628
sure

[Anonymous No.13957670]

>>13957557
How can anyone still take anything remotely Manichean seriously? Their only possible importance in this day and age can be how thoroughly they were blown out by Augustine.

[Anonymous No.13957685]

>>13957670
Mani's "theodicy" is superior to Augustine's, because Mani just calls it like he sees it, while Augustine & friends twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain privatio boni.

>>13957663
Here:

>The human exists ordinarily as an instrument of evil, guided by greed and desire, governed by astrological forces, taking nourishment from
plants and animals which are themselves "the mixture of the gods" containing both light and darkness, and reproducing on the basis of
this same nourishment which is appropriated by the personified greed Az and formed into another useful vessel for her purposes.

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[Anonymous No.13957688]

>>13957685
>Mani is superior to Augustine, because Mani offers no justification, while Augustine actually does the hard work of demonstrating.

[Anonymous No.13957715]

>>13957688
Demonstrate what? That evil is the lack of Good? Why should the Good lack?

>>13957663
>As a conglomeration of divine substance, concentrated in sufficient quantity to cross the threshold to consciousness, the human soul
possesses the potential to hold itself together and continue along a process of ever-increasing re-unification. If it fails to hold on to that consciousness, or if it fails to find "the open gate" through which it can continue its ascent, that soul will, at death, fly apart once again
into its separate components.

>Salvation comes by means of establishing an integrity for the self: an identity beyond contingency.

>The Manichaean Elect form a perfected soul within themselves, that is, a full collection of all of the soul substance within their bodies, solidified and scaled in its ideal form, and so able to hold together as a packet at death and ascend directly the realm of light

[Anonymous No.13957725]

>>13957557
Can someone boild this philosophy down to 1 sentence and not schizo please..

[Anonymous No.13957765]

>>13957725
God and the Devil are the only things that are real and man is imprisoned in a land of darkness.

[Anonymous No.13958197]

>>13957715
>Why should the Good lack
Why not

[Anonymous No.13958215]

>>13958197
Because it completely demolishes your theodicy

[Anonymous No.13958531]

>>13958215
What's theodicy and explain how it demolishes it.

[Anonymous No.13958700]

>>13958531
If God is absolutely Good, and Evil is simply a lack or privation of the Good, then that doesn't explain why Good should necessarily deplete itself in the first place.

[Anonymous No.13958708]

>>13958531
>>13958700

To add to this, radical dualism is based because it doesn't pussyfoot around the issue: God IS absolutely Good, but so is the Devil who is absolutely evil.