[Derek]

Soft Skin (Hisayasu Sato, 1998) -- 7/10

 

[A Thousand Threads]

You're Gonna Miss Me

 

Documentary on Roky Erickson. I'm a huge 13th Floor Elevators fan, so there was no way I wouldn't enjoy this. Everyone in that movie is fucked up in one way or another. Makes me want to move to Austin.
7/10

 

[!@#$%!]

4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS 2 DAYS

 

great great great fucking movie. horrible story but (unlike bullhead) not so hard to watch-- perfectly constructed, excellently shot, wonderfully acted, the writing is amazing

these romanians are really really kicking ass these days. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU was another great film. this one is better. i need to watch more. great stuff.

oh i remember a precursor of this wave… it was called THE OAK, i think. brilliant. these romanians, must be that shit living conditions make for great art-- at least it's how one deals. i'm really impressed.

[keep poppin pimples]

when she goes out in the dark&loud night to dispose of a certain thing that i won't spoil... it's exactly what it's like actually being in bucharest!

[dead_battery]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

4 MONTHS 3 WEEKS 2 DAYS

 

great great great fucking movie. horrible story but (unlike bullhead) not so hard to watch-- perfectly constructed, excellently shot, wonderfully acted, the writing is amazing

these romanians are really really kicking ass these days. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU was another great film. this one is better. i need to watch more. great stuff.

oh i remember a precursor of this wave… it was called THE OAK, i think. brilliant. these romanians, must be that shit living conditions make for great art-- at least it's how one deals. i'm really impressed.

nice find. i gotta go d/l all these now.

last i watched was end of evangelion - now old enough to properly appreciate it as the masterpiece it is.

[!@#$%!]

MONSIEUR LAZHAR

 

sweet, sad, good sweet sad movie. why do francophones get at life so much better than english speakers? i mean they get the meat of it without guns, effects, rodeos, gimmicks-- just put some humans together and make them talk.

i watched shanghai noon earlier today while sorting paperwork and while jacky chan is definitely a great clown and his gringo sidekick is hilarious, the movie itself is pointless and hollow fireworks with stupid "wisdom" like 'this is the west, this is not the east," oh duh du duh. yes, unfair comparison, but i think it illustrates something essential. it's not just a hollywood thing, even indies do this. im not sure i can put my finger on what it is, but i'm thinking outloud on the internet anyway.

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

nice find. i gotta go d/l all these now.

last i watched was end of evangelion - now old enough to properly appreciate it as the masterpiece it is.

j00 watch the reboot moovie?

(I wouldn't recommend it if you're a fan of the original plot)

[dead_battery]

i d/led the reboot.

just waiting to see what they do with 4.0. is it gonna be end of eva or is it gonna be the last two eps of the series?

[!@#$%!]

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

this was a lot better than i expected. great screenplay, great characters-- turns out it was written by the daughter of sydney lumet. who knew! (i didn't, till yesterday anyway).

 

when jonathan demme is good he's good, and he was very good in this in some aspects; but i wish he had cut a bit of fat from the film because at times it drags a little (or a lot, depending on your tastes). yes yes, some people like weddings, sure a lot more than i do-- still, this was about to become an endless carnival. like specialist gonzalez, i think he needed to put the camera down at times.

good fucking actors and all. as for the guests, i've never seen so many cool people in one room. i really like that not everything was so obvious, and there is a good measure of moral ambiguity and unsolvable problems, etc. that was very good, that was the screenplay, good screenplay. also the style of shooting was good-- naturalistic, near-documentary, but still good enough for the film screen, and mixed with "wedding camera" footage, good shit, good style, pleasurable.

4/5 for me. would have given it a 5 if not for the pace which did bug me.

[dead_battery]

evangelion 3.3

i hope someday the japanese are strong enough to kick all the americans out of the 20+ bases they've built in japan. because all that americans dream about these days is zombie apocalypses and murdering people as an upgrade of their failed religion. its post christianity - sorting a godless humanity into the damned and the saved. there are no more dreams of the future in the american imaginary that aren't barbaric. i hope the japanese are strong enough to realize that if it came down to it those american soldiers would start murdering and pillaging japan like they already do in the middle east.

eva 3.3 is intelligent enough to include themes of environmental destruction, post humanism in a way that isn't conservative. it's a sign of a culture that's growing rather than dying like ours is. the protagonist can't even find the will to live. our culture on the other hand is in total denial about its anxiety and failure, which manifests as the aggressive demand to be positive at all times which is omnipresent nowadays.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

evangelion 3.3

i hope someday the japanese are strong enough to kick all the americans out of the 20+ bases they've built in japan.

i hope so cuz otherwise china is gonna eat them for what they did in manchuria, nanking, etc.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

because all that americans dream about these days is zombie apocalypses and murdering people as an upgrade of their failed religion. its post christianity - sorting a godless humanity into the damned and the saved. there are no more dreams of the future in the american imaginary that aren't barbaric.

that's very fucking true. that's the thing about american morality that bugs me so much and i was hinting at after i saw that quebec movie. it's this fucking black and white thing, the absolutes, the goodies vs. the baddies, and even moral ambiguity always comes in extremes. which is why i liked rachel getting married (see above), in that it's a bit more blurry.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

i hope the japanese are strong enough to realize that if it came down to it those american soldiers would start murdering and pillaging japan like they already do in the middle east.

all soldiers rape and pillage. again, see the rape of nanking. oh shit they are afraid of what's coming.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

eva 3.3 is intelligent enough to include themes of environmental destruction, post humanism in a way that isn't conservative. it's a sign of a culture that's growing rather than dying like ours is. the protagonist can't even find the will to live. our culture on the other hand is in total denial about its anxiety and failure, which manifests as the aggressive demand to be positive at all times which is omnipresent nowadays.

which one is eva 3.3? i remember watching one where the kid runs this robot gets conscripted to find these aliens, his father is an abusive scientist and his mother is dead, kid works with other gifted/fucked up kids with the robots and at the end i forget what happens but i remember that it was all a metaphor of the author fighting his own depression, yes? which one was that and are there more? sorry i'm being lazy and not searching on my own but message boards are for talking, right? (unless you're suchfriends and you just post tired memes)

[dead_battery]

you're thinking of the original series

they did a reboot - 4 movies, 3 of which have been released so far.

-

the original tv show had 26 episodes and a movie called end of evangelion that retold the last 2 episodes, or perhaps came after it, it's hard to say what it was. unless you've seen that you haven't really seen evangelion. that movie is a masterpiece.

-

as for the post christianity thing-

so christianity dies in the mind of anyone who isn't brain damaged but it lives on in the unconscious. so you get this post christianity which totally dominates us now.

it's basically concerned with retrofitting the basic structure of christianity onto a secular and disenchanted world.

if you start to look for it you'll find evidence for it everywhere

the idea that if we can just find one "redeeming feature" in people then it's all worth it. the idea of an inner salvation through the self. the idea that negativity and making nihilism explicit are the symptoms of a damned soul, whereas positivity for its own sake and the denial of nihilism are redemptive. the idea that our entertainment industry constitutes a pure context free space of "enjoyment" which is like the sacrament, the holy ghost. the idea that a kind of belief in denying bad things is a substitute for morality. we don't want to face the truth so we use post modern relativism to make belief itself apparently meaningful. atheists are just as guilty of this, because they believe in belief. also, having good intentions is the replacement for faith in god.

but this ideology is really shaky and it doesn't really have a way of getting reality to confirm it.

the zombie and post apocalyptic genres exploded after the war in iraq was lost, which was a war to remake humanity into liberal democratic subjects (through murder). the suppressed rage at humanity for rejecting this imposition of a secular universalism that was supposed to bring it salvation, and the refusal to accept responsibility for what we did, which would entail questioning our very identity seems to manifest in zombie and post apocalyptic fiction.

there was no baghdad manhatten chase like the neo cons promised, no statue of milton friedman outside a baghdad mcdonalds which is what they ACTUALLY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. it wasn't a "zero casualities" war like they promised. it's not just that our invasion caused the death of over a million people, it's that it actually regressed the country to a state worse than what it was under a leader who was basically a secular dictator. we didn't economically benefit from the war, didn't even grab any loot. we basically just threw soldiers at it, and more of them choose to shoot themselves in the head than died in combat. we dismantled the government and destroyed the infrastructure and our dream of a free market utopia didn't magically spring from our imaginations into reality.

zombies originated as a myth that french slave owners in haiti told their black slaves in order to stop them committing suicide due to their harsh conditions. the myth was that if you killed yourself your masters, who were of course made in gods image, would control your soul and you'd become a puppet slave and tend the fields for eternity. it was literally a myth designed to make the black slaves work themselves to death instead of killing themselves.

then in the 60's romero rejigged the whole zombie thing. he was brought up a catholic and explicitly linked that to his zombie films.

i think zombies function now as a way for the western culture to desperately try and rediscover its disgusting fantasy of its "authentic humanity". basically its vanity and rage at its own technoscience disenchanting it from its sick religion. zombie movies always sort humanity into the damned and the saved, and the post apocalyptic thing is an obvious metaphor for the collapse of the US empire. the fantasy is that it hasn't collapsed, just imploded, and by hacking and slashing away all the damned traitors who didn't believe in it, secular man can remake the christian covenant in his own image.

the zombie is obviously a christian fantasy. it's a corpse without a soul. it's the excess of animality - raw drive and craving. it's the fantasy that the soul of a person lives within us and our experience since we now know it isn't going to heaven.

most zombie films use this trope - it's a secular way of sublimating the horror of annihilation. we see this beautiful person and then the tragedy befalls them and they become a zombie. we have to kill them in order to force judgement on them, cos if we don't then we're all just appetite driven monsters seeking the fulfilment of our drives, shuffling around until we die.

[dead_battery]

in evangelion, loads of the characters are named after japanese ww2 generals/battleships etc.

auska langely soru - a german with the headquarters of the cia in her name. also the organization seele which has a german name and motto.

evangelion deals with the kamikazee pilot thing. the berserker mode is obviously a sublimation of that. the fact that the soul of the pilots dead mothers live inside the eva. shinji is battling his fear of going into the eva, which mirrors the japanese anxiety about remobilising its empire. it knows it can't maintain its dignity living as hostage to america, and it also knows the last time it tried to assert itself it lost and sided with the nazis.

it's basically liberal democratic post modern japan grappling with its past defeat and present humiliation under the control of the amerinazi empire.

it's also one of the most important texts about christianity to emerge in recent history. the whole plot is basically a world wherein christianity is real! that's literally what the plot is. if christians in the west understood that they'd be calling for it to be banned.

i mean the thing is literally a japanese man reading the bible and writing a story set within a world where it is real. and surprise surprise, it's a fucking horror!

also whats so fascinating about it is that when the original series was broadcast, one of the directors who worked on it was a member of the aum shinrikyo cult, and they actually changed the plot of the series when IRL the aum cult started murdering people in japan and made a failed attempt to murder the japanese parliament. the plot of eva alligns with the actual real life activities of the cult in a really creepy way. talk about archetypes of the collective unconscious manifesting in culture!

in the movie end of evangelion the japanese government send troops in to slaughter the NERV organization. whereas IRL aum tried to kill the entire japanese government. it's fascinating!

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by dead_battery

you're thinking of the original series

they did a reboot - 4 movies, 3 of which have been released so far.

-

i didn't know this, thanks

Originally Posted by dead_battery

the original tv show had 26 episodes and a movie called end of evangelion that retold the last 2 episodes, or perhaps came after it, it's hard to say what it was. unless you've seen that you haven't really seen evangelion. that movie is a masterpiece.

i saw the whole thing yeah. it was okay but didn't blow my mind or anything. i get it that if you were 15 when you saw it, it would blow your mind. but having gone through extensive therapy for depression by the time i saw it, it didn't give me anything i didn't know (i think) except to see the value of the guy externalizing and resolving his own struggles as art.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

as for the post christianity thing-

so christianity dies in the mind of anyone who isn't brain damaged but it lives on in the unconscious. so you get this post christianity which totally dominates us now.

it's basically concerned with retrofitting the basic structure of christianity onto a secular and disenchanted world.

if you start to look for it you'll find evidence for it everywhere

of course. it's all over, everywhere--institutions, political systems, etc. it's what nietzsche called "the shadow of god" which keeps on living for centuries or millennia after god is dead.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

the idea that if we can just find one "redeeming feature" in people then it's all worth it. the idea of an inner salvation through the self. the idea that negativity and making nihilism explicit are the symptoms of a damned soul, whereas positivity for its own sake and the denial of nihilism are redemptive. the idea that our entertainment industry constitutes a pure context free space of "enjoyment" which is like the sacrament, the holy ghost. the idea that a kind of belief in denying bad things is a substitute for morality. we don't want to face the truth so we use post modern relativism to make belief itself apparently meaningful. atheists are just as guilty of this, because they believe in belief.

i couldn't follow you here because it's a bunch of ideas that i think you're presenting as connected but they're very densely packed, so i can't see the connections (or the root of them) clearly. also i don't really understand the word "negativity" outside of a colloquial ("oh don't be so negative") context. also i don't know which variety of nihilism you're referring to so this is confusing me-- e.g., to me, christianity is a nihilism in that it devalues this world in opposition to an inexistent one. there's also the post-christian nihilism that says that withouth a god the world has no meaning and without a meaning life is not worth living. existentialism however rescues value from the face of absurdity and godlessness without a return of belief. i like the holy ghost metaphor but i don't see how it operates it in real life (but i'm odd, so, maybe it happens to others.).

Originally Posted by dead_battery

the zombie and post apocalyptic genres exploded after the war in iraq was lost, which was a war to remake humanity into liberal democratic subjects (through murder). the suppressed rage at humanity for rejecting this imposition of a secular universalism that was supposed to bring it salvation, and the refusal to accept responsibility for what we did, which would entail questioning our very identity seems to manifest in zombie and post apocalyptic fiction.

there was no baghdad manhatten chase like the neo cons promised, no statue of milton friedman outside a baghdad mcdonalds which is what they ACTUALLY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. it wasn't a "zero casualities" war like they promised. it's not just that our invasion caused the death of over a million people, it's that it actually regressed the country to a state worse than what it was under a leader who was basically a secular dictator. we didn't economically benefit from the war, didn't even grab any loot. we basically just threw soldiers at it, and more of them choose to shoot themselves in the head than died in combat. we dismantled the government and destroyed the infrastructure and our dream of a free market utopia didn't magically spring from our imaginations into reality.

right. i love this.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

zombies originated as a myth that french slave owners in haiti told their black slaves in order to stop them committing suicide due to their harsh conditions. the myth was that if you killed yourself your masters, who were of course made in gods image, would control your soul and you'd become a puppet slave and tend the fields for eternity. it was literally a myth designed to make the black slaves work themselves to death instead of killing themselves.

sounds good but i doubt the veracity of this tale. there's this fish toxin that actually produces zombie-like effects. and the black slaves in haiti overthrew their masters-- with the help of their own religion.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

then in the 60's romero rejigged the whole zombie thing. he was brought up a catholic and explicitly linked that to his zombie films.

i didn't know this.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

i think zombies function now as a way for the western culture to desperately try and rediscover its disgusting fantasy of its "authentic humanity". basically its vanity and rage at its own technoscience disenchanting it from its sick religion. zombie movies always sort humanity into the damned and the saved, and the post apocalyptic thing is an obvious metaphor for the collapse of the US empire. the fantasy is that it hasn't collapsed, just imploded, and by hacking and slashing away all the damned traitors who didn't believe in it, secular man can remake the christian covenant in his own image.

ha ha, this is great!

Originally Posted by dead_battery

the zombie is obviously a christian fantasy. it's a corpse without a soul. it's the excess of animality - raw drive and craving. it's the fantasy that the soul of a person lives within us and our experience since we now know it isn't going to heaven.

i'd like to hear your thoughts on the vampire fantasies that ruled before zombies take over. and why they went (mostly) away.

Originally Posted by dead_battery

most zombie films use this trope - it's a secular way of sublimating the horror of annihilation. we see this beautiful person and then the tragedy befalls them and they become a zombie. we have to kill them in order to force judgement on them, cos if we don't then we're all just appetite driven monsters seeking the fulfilment of our drives, shuffling around until we die.

then again you could read the zombie myth as a disenchantment with consumerism, a world in which the pure consumers (zombies) become a civilization-ending plague. it's also the myth of the back-to-basics survivalist.

the thing with these popular myths and the way they resonate with society is that they are hard to reduce to rational explanations and people will project different things upon them. in other words, they aren't simple devices for purging simple contradictions (even though they may serve to purge them)-- they are both conservative propagators of ideology and subversive doors to the imagination. there was a paper i read ages ago, i forget what it was, that showed how "rambo" was read in different cultures, and each one appropriated it for their own person rather than simply "take" the american meaning of it.

[dead_battery]

PS. - i forgot the most important thing about post christianity, which is that it totally fails to do away with the fucking atrocity at the core of christianity, which is the myth of creation. we basically still worship this myth only we want artists and entertainers to embody it. the idea of creation is the idea of a supernatural self that has agency above and beyond causality. and if this part of the myth is intact, then post christianity, atheism, secularism etc. are just as bad as what they want to replace. maybe a bit better because at least you can get a mangled version of darwinism and some science (as long as its not shit like evo bio or evo pysch which disproves liberal myths and therefore is evilll!).

[dead_battery]

right - the zombie and post apoc thing is obviously about consumerism and the regressive fantasy of reverting to survivalism. this is why it disgusts me. it's trying to block off the interesting parts of consumerism, which are the parts that allow us to see ourselves as weird entities existing coterminously with non humans. it's basically human supremacy. it's a way of putting us into a scenario where we don't have to look at how our consumerist lifestyles don't save us from death. we sublimate this by killing people, and non people, to survive.


-

vampires - well, i think its more simple. vampires have always just been stand ins for the rich, upper classes, ruling classes, whatever you want to call them.

it's a sublimation of class and the identity that brings. becoming vampire is usually a fantasy of becoming rich and leaving ones class behind.

i mean, in true blood sookie is literally a poor hick waitress who doesnt have to go to work because millionaire ferrari driving vampires bring her on adventures.

by the 3rd season they had run out of ideas and it turned into an explicitly nihilistic murder fest where they said "fuck" a lot. kind of mirrors the sad and useless hedonism that most rich people today are consumed by.

every subsequent seasons plot was about internal divisions in the vampire society. there's nowhere else to go with this concept because once you become a vampire that's it, you're top of the food chain. all you can do is consume the underlings until you eventually get sick of it all and die.

when you become a vampire you have to feed off humans. so its like becoming rich and having to feed of the labour and servitude of what were once your brethren. that's it. so the only way out of this narrative deadlock would have been to make the war of humans against vampires that true blood often alludes to in the backround actually happen. but they didn't do that because that would have been actually interesting. instead in the next season they are going to introduce zombies. yawn.

so i guess what i'm saying is that after vampires comes marxism. and funny enough after twilight came the hunger games!

-

i'd also say the recent vampire fictions were trying to deal with secular life in a really clumsy way. twilight is obviously about a females sadness that all she can do is feed off the capital of dying interchangeable men. this sad state of vampiric consumerism is wiped away by the introduction of a immortal vampire love object who gets her out of this bind and gives her something to submit to that isn't just her cannibalistic drive to consume fuck and breed using hapless mortal men as resources in this sad project of perpetuating death after death by breeding more useless dying humans.

[Antagon]

Dallas Buyers Club - 8/10

[!@#$%!]

watched a bunch of things this weekend…

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP

 

i love watching michel gondry's movies because it's like getting inside the mind of a very imaginative child with awesome toys. having said that, i didn't like his main character too much because of his arrested development condition. i laughed a bit when i heard it was all autobiographical (in a way). poor guy! but a fun movie. first time i see charlotte gainsbourg, she has her dad's face and her mom's body and hairdo.

--

THE DAMN UNITED

 

i liked it, but this one needed to restore some deleted scenes, because the final print is incomprehensible without them. i wish they had the "extended version" option on the disc because what the fuck was that man doing in his office during the game? had he been sent off by the ref? was he shitting his pants? no? jeezus… fucking incomprehensible. good story and good characters (even though i understand much was fictionalized), and there's an extra on the disc about "the changing game" which as a nice addition.

LIFE OF PI

 

gorgeous, visually, and amazing story, i just didn't like the whole religious angle which is supposedly the backbone of the whole thing, but still, what a spectacle, fucking wow. only weird thing was looking at his CGI uncle with the weird body, the way his face moved was creepy as fuck. as for the rest, jeezus, tremendous visuals.

TREASURES IV: DISC 2

an unmitigated borefest. 11 minutes of fog moving off a hill "to teach us how to see" (thanks, professor). a fast-forward tour of new york in the 60s. some lady in a hammock, and jack smith making faces or giving a blow job to a balloon. the unlistenable "music" of angus maclise. a drag queen giving a blow job to a banana (more obvious please). 9 minutes of people in an escalator (clever-- but 9 minutes!?!?). 36 minutes of some other thing i decided to skip because no avant-garde anything should last 36 minutes (ha ha, no, i didn't have time to watch it and just wanted the next movie in the queue sent).

the singular wonderful exception to all this nonsense was george kuchar's I, AN ACTRESS, which had us laughing hard and we watched twice. george kuchar was indeed an amazing actress!

 

there was also the first segment of ken jacobs's "little stabs at happiness" featuring jack smith, which was pretty great and disturbing, but then he has to keep adding more and more segments and boring footage until you just want to kill him.

one thing i noticed in all or most of these people or at least a lot of them they were ivy league dropouts. correlation or causation?

[SuchFriendsAreDangerous]

As the "resident SYG theologian" I feel somewhat obligated to take the troll bait here..

Originally Posted by dead_battery

the zombie is obviously a christian fantasy. it's a corpse without a soul. it's the excess of animality - raw drive and craving. to heaven.

I believe you have this backwards, a zombie is a soul trapped within a corpse..

Originally Posted by dead_battery

-

as for the post christianity thing-

so christianity dies in the mind of anyone who isn't brain damaged but it lives on in the unconscious. so you get this post christianity which totally dominates us now.

Christianity thrives and continually mutates precisely because it is a composite of the previous philosphies. The moral truths of Christianity aren't unique innovations by Christians, they are self-evident even in the altruism we observe in animals and nature. Also, following the reasonings of Joseph Campbell, Christianity is a product of the universal themes of the human subconscious, not a cause. We aren't carrying around Christian baggage in our heads, rather, Christianity is prevailing philosophy which is constructed existentially to explain and value these subconscious "Archtypes" in the language of Carl Jung. Our brain is filled with imagery, structure, meaning, which our art and culture build on. So Christianity didn't invent what is in the brain, it is just a way of trying to make sense of what the brain is naturally doing.


if you start to look for it you'll find evidence for it everywhere

the idea that a kind of belief in denying bad things is a substitute for morality. we don't want to face the truth so we use post modern relativism to make belief itself apparently meaningful.

TO THIS I CAN AGREE COMPLETELY. The quasi-Christianity which dominates the mega-church culture definitely is a kind of substitute morality, meanwhile the tradition of Christianity as perpetuated by the Patristic writers and commentators are about the deeply introspective, contemplative, philosophical, in other words "the examined life." Christianity at its root is more akin to the deep self-examination of Buddhism than the stone-age Christianity passing itself today.

.. cos if we don't then we're all just appetite driven monsters seeking the fulfilment of our drives, shuffling around until we die.

Well, I can't argue with that!

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

e.g., to me, christianity is a nihilism in that it devalues this world in opposition to an inexistent one. there's also the post-christian nihilism that says that withouth a god the world has no meaning and without a meaning life is not worth living.

That is the heretical and flawed quasi-Christianity perpetuated by Calvinism. Non-Calvinist Christian thought is perhaps the opposite, its the belief that THIS LIFE is important, has value, has purpose and meaning. Remember the underlying premise of Christianity is the "Second Coming" and the manifestation of "the Kingdom" all on earth. In fact, the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, bodily, is in fact the very definition of Christian materialism. The material world which we currently exist is so important to the human experience, that after death the body comes with us. Further, the idea of "the Last Judgment" if anything OVERVALUES the experiences of this material life, because by the logic of this teaching "God(s)" will judge mankind for what they did, hence nihilism to the material is incompatible with most Christian teaching across the past 1900 years of the institutional Church.

existentialism however rescues value from the face of absurdity and godlessness without a return of belief. i like the holy ghost metaphor but i don't see how it operates it in real life (but i'm odd, so, maybe it happens to others.).

How is the self exploration of the contemplative life of the Christian NOT a variety of existentialism? If anything, the Patristic commentaries are ALL dealing with existential matters of philosophy.

[dead_battery]

but i dont believe in christianity. so i dont think there's a soul at all.

christians talk about "soul" because they worship self. their concept of self is individual and not intrapersonal like it is in the far east/india.

if anyone wants to buy my soul btw, im open to offers. you can pay me by paypal.