/lit/ - Literature

>>18754989

2/2


You will tell me again that Free Will is very valuable because it lets us truly unite ourselves with God. Who are you to place that notional, hypothetical value above the suffering right in front of you? How can YOU, right now, comprehend something that will be WORTH the millions upon millions of suffering, ignorant, tortured lives that children and adults and animals have struggled through on this planet (and probably others) for untold millennia?

How can you comprehend ANYTHING on that scale? You can't, you can only say "It will be revealed in time." And the emptiness of that sentiment is utterly obvious when human suffering is right in front of you.

The only purpose it serves to look forward to a time when you believe you will be united with God (through Free Will or 'Greater Goods from Evil' or whatever) is that it makes it easier to ignore the horrors right in front of you. And if you stop ignoring them you will see that you can never comprehend a Plan that would make crib death necessary to Cosmic Love. You will see that you 'humility' is an evasion, and that you and God are truly, truly alien from eachother at the MORAL level.

And all of this assumes, of course, that you will be amongst the saved. But all but the most New Age of Christian doctrines present a criteria for Heaven that is both burdensome and circumstantial. Born to impulsive, weak, sickly, retarded or too far from the folds of Christendom? Sorry, it looks like Salvation is not for you. Elijah says that the number Saved will be 'some thousands'. And it doesn't matter if how you define Hell, whether its oblivion or brimstone or whatever, the point is that its eternal punishment and the litmus test was incomprehensible and blatantly unfair.

So tell me how a moral sane human being could possibly get on God's train save through fear of God Himself? Fear of the fire?

>>18711671
>don't desire Enlightenment but work for it
>the nihilism is intentional to prepare you
>its esoteric tho
>its a religion of practice

Humans are not creatures of practice they are creatures of expectation, goal seeking. If you make a goal of Enlightenment you have a goal, no getting around that. Especially not with the word 'esoteric' which refers, in this case, to literally nothing. Anything that doesn't make sense can be called esoteric.

It may be an empirical fact of the human mind that defocusation results in euphoria due to eliminating stress responses associated with planning. This does not mean that Buddhists get a pass for their religion of explicit contradictions.

True religion attempts to grapple with Man's nature as it really is, with Good and Evil, Choice, Identity and most importantly, Tragedy. The real and coherent wisdom that comes from grappling with these operatic human themes is what can truly be called esoterica.

>>17792301
Don't listen to these sophists, you are totally correct:
>Mathew 5:17-18
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished”

So unless our dogmatic friends want to say that Heaven and Earth have already disappeared, then they're fucked. Besides, the OT is eschatological, and we haven't had an apocalypse.
>inb4 Jesus did us a secret apocalypse
Why are you fucks waiting around for him to come a second time then? With a second set of (cherrypicked) laws from NT? Admit that you are just doing mental gymnastics to defend a religion whose closed minded laws don't measure up to the (admittedly excellent) rhetoric of compassion that crops up in certain passages of Jesus' teaching. Lashing yourself to the Bible is making you bad Christians.

>>17793564
>>17793037
>>17792358
>>17792323

>>17532711
I can't believe I skipped over this reply because its so cogent. It is very reminiscent of CS Lewis, in the messenger/message bit.

Couching the Church in terms of Christ's actions and continued presence is also a powerful way of framing it.

But it doesn't really change the logic of the scenario: "Accept things you don't like because they seem to have been tacitly/explicitly approved of by Jesus or his friends."
The problem is that "Jesus" in the above sentence is an entity that could be unpacked as (the real life individual who, though flawed and context-limited, was nevertheless inspiration for articulating a metaphysical principle of Love, Incarnation and Redemption that is so powerful as to have divine perogative and perhaps even a kind of otherworldly Reality). When you unpack the term this way its a really hard sell to have to swallow "no gay stuff" and "life begins at conception" etc just because of the historical happenstance around a really powerful idea. Its like if you had to drink ouzo and eat souvlaki in order to be allowed to participate in Democracy.