Finding God in a Lovecraftian Universe
I’d like to identify as Christian as is my heritage, I really would, but there are two problems with that:
The modern Christian church is a boring toothless insult to God that retreats into a feminized “personal relationship with God” while civilization collapses around it. And the pope is a communist.
The universe does not contain or interact with God, and Christianity claims it does, among other false claims.
So it turns out that the church sucks and Lovecraft was basically right about the contents of the universe. Now what? Do we all shout and kill and revel and enjoy ourselves while the world flames in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom? No thanks.
God doesn’t exist. And yet there is a certain attractiveness in living for the Glory of God. What to do?
As far as I can tell, once you get good enough at philosophy, you can start breaking what you thought were the rules and rationally “believe” whatever the hell you want, as long as you don’t believe anything that’s going to mess you up. I can’t rationally believe that the actual universe actually contains an actual powerful god. That would cause me to mispredict on matters like evolution and history, and would cause me to reach out for His help where in reality there is nothing, and thus fail to help myself. But maybe I can believe in or at least tolerate a Glorious Christian God loitering around in the realm of myth that gives meaning and spiritual context to our lives.
From a pre-nihilist perspective, that sounds like a profoundly unsound reason to believe in something. From a post-nihilist perspective, there is no actual sacredness or meaning in the universe, so your beliefs about sacred meaning are going to have to be arbitrary and made-up according to your aesthetic preference.
I am genuinely unsure about what to do here. I will have to explore it more.
