/lit/ - Literature

>>12423178
Show me the last time Zeus made a statue weep.

>>10319667
Because it makes sense of a world that can be incredibly strange.

There is, don't forget, an extent to which Christianity back in the day relied on evidence and testimony. The Gospel of John even mentions eyewitnesses to the Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Indeed, much of early Christian teaching is a matter of making sense of things that really happened, rather than building a philosophical system out of theories and premises.

>>9728590
The greatest argument against Nietzsche from a Christian perspective is pic related, and everything like it.

Nietzsche's arguments fall flat when the supernatural is real. Nietzsche assumes an atheistic, materialistic world, or at least that's what he seems to posit. When the Christian God provides proof of his existence, philosophical critiques ring hollow. But of course /lit/ doesn't take the miraculous seriously.

>>9693929
It doesn't look like the thread is autosaging, so we could keep it alive a little bit more if we like. So, then, Girardfag--assuming after all that it's you--I'm deeply curious: how religious are you, really? Or, perhaps in a more interesting question: how superstitious are you?

When I read you and others talk about Hegel, Heidegger, Girard, writers who deal with metanarrative and "loops of causality," I often feel the one thing that lurks just below the surface is actual magic, and everything that ties into that. Supernatural stuff, I mean. Talking about Capital as an all-devouring god means one thing if you're a strict materialist and atheist, but it means quite another thing if you're somebody who takes the idea of gods deadly seriously. Or, in the Catholic context, entities that pass as gods.

And of course Hegel was well aware of this, which is why Hegel was a practicing occultist. I'm sure everyone's read this by now:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/magee.htm

But I always see references to it slip through the cracks in threads about Hegel and all the philosophers that followed and responded to him. This, to me, seems like a grave mistake. I feel like, to shorthand it, there is an inescapable element of Hegel and all subsequent Continental philosophy that belongs on /x/. And I feel that those philosophers who engage in Hegel and his descendants without reckoning with this vein of hermeticism--this magic, this real magic--don't actually get rid of it, they merely let it work on them unawares. Which may be part of the magic spell that Hegel, the sorcerer, intended to weave.

And then of course Girard and others were Catholic, which carries with it its own /x/-level implications. Pic related. We contend not with flesh and blood...

>>9624832
I suppose most of my objections to Land are actually not philosophical, but mystical and supernatural. Land seems to believe that capitalism has generated its own kind of mystical continuum. In keeping with his theme of Capital as God, he seems to think it's created an entire mystic framework: souls, an afterlife, ghosts, fairies, the whole old medieval reality, the true numinous because back in the day it was invested with a belief in its actuality, its genuine reality. It seems to me Land thinks that there's almost a new "capitalist supernatural" that's arisen and replaced the old stuff.

I find myself in conflict with this as a devout Catholic, since of course I believe the old supernatural never really went away. It's like the old nerd debate of science vs magic, but it's actually real instead of being confined to the pages of comic books. It's a matter of either believing in digital ghosts or spectral ghosts. At least that's how I see things.

>>9606243
Why, exactly?

Are you afraid of the monsters under the bed? The ghosts in the closet?

>>9378684
>the souls in Hell beg Dante to remember them
>the souls in Purgatory beg Dante to pray for them

>>9263138
>Next stop is /x/ of course

Indeed.

Nietzsche is a dead-on analyst of post-Christian, unChristian Western civilization, which was already in place in his own time and has fully flowered in ours. Like the poison that kills the snake, he is a useful weapon against those who purport to follow him, but in reality are trapped in their groundless moral frameworks. Notice how effective he is against Sam Harris, for example. Everyone who claims to build or follow a purely secular moral system is vaporized by Nietzsche.

His complaints about Christianity would also make sense if Christianity were a totally human invention. But it's not, so they don't. The exorcist and the faith healer answer Nietzsche's complaints perfectly well.

Do you believe in miracles, /lit/?

I take the supernatural completely seriously and never rule out a supernatural explanation in any given circumstance. Some of this is due to my own life experiences; the rest is due to what I feel is a preponderance of testimony and evidence. It seems to me that automatically ruling out the existence of the supernatural is the true intellectually dishonest position. It's as much an article of faith as any other religious belief, especially when there seems to be a lot of recorded data to the contrary.

Academia doesn't like the Occult because the Occult is 'spooky.' It claims to mystically penetrate the secrets of reality, and in many cases also offers its practitioners the chance to control those secrets, to use them for material gain. It's fucking magic, and so academics are allergic to it.

Now, religion is also spooky, if you get right down to it. But there's enough philosophy and theology wrapped up in religion that academics can generally ignore the parts that make them uncomfortable.