Anonymous Coward · 23d
haha, i wouldnt be surprised if my fear of hell was my mind's defense against the concept of death, but i really feel like post-death nothingness wouldn't be half bad...i personally am not scared of the concept of annihilation (i very much used to be, but not anymore somehow) but rather the physical process of death. but rather the idea of there being a bullshit element of this world and i end up in the place i feared the most is what gets me. or even worse, what if i go to hell and its like zoroastrian or buddhist? but the catholic hell has the most fear-appeal to me. (i never should have read alphonsus liguori as a repressed queer teen lol). another thing that frightens me is niche analytical philosophy papers in favor of belief, but the more i start to understand the more it seems circular and like a thomist mega-cope...just reject a few of the base ideas and it all falls apart.
damn, reading Alphonsus Liguori as a queer teen? My kinsperson, same, I read a few of the ascetical works as a little catholic kid cause I wanted to show I was devout and serious about it, and most embarrassingly, that I was smart.
The analytical approach to proving belief is entirely circular: not even that the logic is wrong, it is often, if not correct, then at least correctable. But the actual foundations, the syllogisms that go into the logic, are unproven assumption that you can swat away safely. It is also, imo, simply undue to try to prove the sacred with logic: the sacred has always been what takes us beyond ourselves, the horror of human sacrifices, the taboo-breaking eroticism of the orgia, the terrible spectacles of sovereignty with their pomp that we subjects experience vicariously - in a word, all of those expenditures which go beyond everyday reason and logic which we use for effective and productive work, huge expenditures of resources and energy that seem pointless but bring us in continuity with the world at larger by literally forcing us out of ourselves, like a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis that was its body, metamorphosed.
To think one can "prove" this, or "experience it" even more so, with analytic logic, the logic of profane, day to day, useful labor... well, it is simply a very characteristically Christian bigotry, haha. So I say you should calm your nerves anon, though I know (from experience unfortunately) that rooting out childhood neuroses is hard... That said, to come to a rando like me with something like this, it's very Christian anon, I must say, it's very Confessional-esque.
