Comment on Anon reads nihilist philosophy
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours agoI thought I’d get a lot out of reading the Gnostic texts directly, but it was mostly the same religious garbage I’ve outgrown. One thing that really kills the vibe for me is when people take religion, you know, religiously. Seriously unreadable trash, chapter after chapter about how GREAT God is, as if greatness automatically made something worthy of worship. Servile horseshit.
I got a lot more out the prison planet subreddit, which is sort of gnosticism redux for people with obvious delusion and people like me, interested in the power of a radically different perspective.
It’s really interesting that imagining the world as a place created as a prison to torture us IMMEDIATELY makes so much more sense than the tri-omni God of traditional Christiainity, but offering that as a possibility had to be heavily regulated at the edge of a sword… makes you realize how much of religious debate is based on a very narrow range of choices. Pascal’s Wager works in the popular imagination because the bedrock assumption is that there is only one God that exists and that we are choosing to believe in the right one. When you consider infinite gods and infinite risks of choosing the wrong one, the wager falls apart.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
Oh damn, this made me have to look up Pascal’s Wager in order to follow and that is NOT what I thought it was. And it’s not nearly as actionable as I was giving it credit for.
For sure, though. It’s not like Gnostic thought is terribly useful in a modern context. It’s just the joy of discovering old models of belief. Also they’re colorful. I mostly wanted to know if you have any favorite characters from it because most people who engage with that or pre-Christian cults tend to find a funny little guy that they latch onto.
There’s a couple people who I interacted with who have derived some personal viable uses from the Gnosticism, but it’s kind of way too specific to recommend widely.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Pascal’s Wager was intended to be taken seriously, but it sort of took on a life of its own.
Yes, and Gnosticism is definitely cool; just saying reading the source texts is a pretty miserable experience. Better to Monster Manualize it, boil it down to critters and cosmology without the lard of worship.
And, yes, there were a lot of people attracted to world-as-torture-device, but it’s interesting that can invalidate a philosophy when the countervailing philosophy of God Loves Us attracts a greater amount of disordered thinking… This is an artifact of exactly what we’re talking about–the need for people to avoid acknowledging existentially destabilizing realities. Check out The Last Messiah for more on that.
Back to Catholicism: it’s a religion. All religions have psychological and social value, lest they would not exist. There’s not any real point to rate and compare religions, because I believe they are simply the result of society and not its determiners.
sad_detective_man@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
Really? Maybe that’s how I got my misconception of it. My favorite thing about this thread is I’m getting a lot of stuff to reexamine, so this ones moving to the top of the list.
Dude, that would be so sick(complimentary)! I really love Monster Manuals! One of the Gnostic thought people I talked to recently actually showed me a video that was showcasing the different deities in a similar way, but as Tumblr art characters. Very entertaining.
I hadn’t considered that angle for our discussion here but that’s true. The biggest damage any Faith-based theology is doing to incentivising people to decouple from tangible reality. I won’t ever defend that, I just don’t know of a way it’s possible for anyone to widely convince people to stop doing it.
I’ll consider that last part. That seems like an idea I’ll have to examine for a bit. Thank you for engaging and for all the recommendations, Schipelblorp 🙂 Always a pleasure
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Did you read in the intended “not” into “Pascal’s wager was intended to be taken seriously.” ? Because I think it was an idle thought experiment that got taken up by Christians.
I have spent more time reading monster manuals than I ever have playing… it’s mythological crack.
If you want more, the person that’s pushed forward my thinking most recently is Britt Hartley of No Nonsense Spirituality on YouTube. She cheekily refers to herself as “your atheist spiritual director”, but there’s a lot of wisdom there. I think you’ll appreciate her attempts to separate the baby from the bathwater, as you have with Catholicism here.