[469] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: Beyond Depression
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun Oct 23 01:51:04 1988
re 2. (goal attainable) being unreasonable--- not true! The restriction that
the goal be attainable eliminates entire classes of ``crusade'' and
``pursuits of unhappiness''...
As for the idea of `malign deities' consider the Gnostic school of thought,
which was especially popular turn of the century (I can try to dig up some
references, but it is an essentially `modern' school of thought) where there
is indeed a [Gg]od, but this god is NOT your friend, and is unimpressed by
worship, much less any other activity of `mere humans' ... and thus is nothing
for us to judge ourselves by --- we must find a frame of reference from within.
If you want to go Farther off the deep end, you can always discount the
existance of the outside world entirely... the idea that it is all a part
of your subconscious, which you cannot control with your conscious. This has
a few problems, but can be made internally consistent -- and usually leads
to long enough periods of meditation to distract you from your immediate
troubles {consider that all of the suffering in the world has become *YOUR*
fault... but it is still out of your conscious control. Leads to a much
mellower, more accepting outlook on things --- or else to suicide. More often
the former, it turns out.}
It is good to see that noone has argued your point about religions being
internally inconsistent. And sad to see that people are still holding to
these religions...
