Terrible aspects of God

Rational discussions on metaphysical and abstract topics.
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Gangleri

Terrible aspects of God

Post by Gangleri »

I was reminded of a dream I saw during my last year's rune cycle, where Ódhinn approached questioning me as an inverted hanging man made of the flesh of the dead. As I was in the room of my adolescence, already in the dream I felt like a scared little Balder who just saw one very terrible aspect of his Father.

There has been some talk here of Satan as the "terrible aspect of God" and in the recent Biblical discussion Nefastos called the Old Testament God as a terrifying "Satan-God" as compared to the lame Protestant description of God simply as "love". How have you witnessed or experienced this terrifying aspect of God? Have you ever felt the "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" with which Rudolf Otto described the mystical religious experience? How do you deal with this experience and what kind of recollections have you made from such an experience?
Seferoth
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Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Seferoth »

Hmmm, in my experience i have never felt "terrible aspect of God". I used to be a fundementalist christian and i always saw God as just and love, but with power and authority to do as he pleases. He created us, we messed things up and therefore whatever God decides to do with us is his right. Torment us, plague us with diseases, natural disasters and condemn us to hell which i used to believe we(every single one, child and adult) deserved. It was the concept of hell that started my first drift away from traditional christianity, in my opinion the annihilationism theory was bad enough. I mean if on the other side you have eternal life and happiness and on the other side is annihilation and being removed from all existence, therefore i would say being removed from existence is "punishment" enough when you compare it to reward for the other side. Did anyone here ever wonder why God did not kill Adam and Eve in the garden even though he said he would? It was because in the garden on the same day happened the first sacrifice...the animals whose skins were used for Adam's and Eve's clothing before they were driven out of the Eden. It's just a theory, but i like that one.
Seferoth
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Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Seferoth »

Sorry, i did misread your post and went quite a bit off topic there. Also i should have made more clear that what i wrote was how i USED to think. My entire worldview now is very different from what it was. Like how i see God as pantheistic like how Star of Azazel teaches, etc.
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Nefastos
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Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Nefastos »

One has to be factually dualist to deny the terrible aspect of God. This comes back to the problem of theodicy and the first one of our seven principles. One has to choose either the goodness or omnipotence of God, since from the human standpoint both cannot be true at the same time. It is a very important esoteric notion that they can be true from a superhuman standpoint, but that is not for us to choose.

Personally speaking, there is little in my whole existence but the experience of this tremendum that is God. And such a divine horror, inescapable hell of everything is named as Satan or Bhairava.

This spells out the paradox of a Satanist. One both adores and wrestle's with one's God, for such a God cannot be simply taken as an immovable idol, a maker of sundays' feasts. Things must change, existentially, radically, even though that process is so incredibly vast. Like the Buddhists say, one cannot remain idle in the burning house, or on the plains of red-hot iron. These are symbols for suffering of all beings one notices, and therefore must act.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
Gangleri

Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Gangleri »

Nefastos wrote: Thu Jul 01, 2021 8:37 pm Personally speaking, there is little in my whole existence but the experience of this tremendum that is God.
I kind of expected that answer from you, knowing about your daily torture. Do you consider it a blessing, a curse, or both?
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Nefastos
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Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Nefastos »

Gangleri wrote: Fri Jul 02, 2021 3:06 pmDo you consider it a blessing, a curse, or both?

Just today I made this same question rhetorically. It's both, of course.

I have a vivid recollection from year 1995. We had been visiting Helsinki with my girlfriend of that time, and I was standing between the moving railway wagons, thinking about different things, when a monstrous possibility hit me: What if this what I am feeling will still last for years and years? For I had suffered of the "fire" about three years, and had forced myself to think that it will pass when I carry it with dignity and suffer through the fire of transmutation. But until that time I had always liked to thought that it might cease any day or any week, or in the worst case, it might last for another year.

In the last years, when I have at the first time thought in retrospection should have I done something differently in my life, I've always come to conclusion that should I for some reason been happier – if the fire would not have been inside me to force me in this – I would be only a shadow of a person I am now. My own happiness would have been my greatest obstacle. This is, of course, just an assumption; but it seems quite likely.

Also recently I have thought the subjectivity of time. When I am in this hell, time goes extremely slowly for me individually, and as a paradoxal result, even while almost everything is very hard to do, still things get done quicker as a result. (It's like I would see everything moving in slow motion because of the constant stress, and as a result, people around me see me acting quickly.) In those extremely rare moments when the flames burn lower and I do not feel this constant pressure, of course the work itself is so much easier, but also there are other things to do besides work. A day could pass very quickly & easily because it is not made of bricks of torture that are actually seconds as grains of sand dropping through the hourglass of spiritual agony. But "luckily" I have approximately one such day per year; just enough to see that that too would be theoretically possible. (At the time of writing Discordamelior I had come to conclusion that those times are given for one in order to keep the suffering as vivid as possible, because there remains a point of reference; and that any less good in this world would actually be better, because the system would no longer function in case the evil would be one drop greater. Today I try very hard to see things in the light of Hope, instead.)
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
Gangleri

Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Gangleri »

All i can really right now say that I feel for you, brother, and I understand very well what you are speaking of. My consolation for now from the same stance where days are like eternities is my latest record where I speak of these things and shout my guts out in this eternal wilderness that is the modern world; wept by god's fallen angels, where there is no way out of this agonizing hell, where one is at once in the nirvanic states and avitchi sensing state of being and all that between at the same time, and where every turning of the hour glass is another hell, where one must play some part of an insect, consuming other living beings.

I'll join this here:

The Hanged Man

You see me hanging on the world tree
Upside down, glancing into eternity
What your profane eyes don't see
It is the world that is upside down

Crows feed on my corpse and pick my eyes
For as long as there is something to feed upon

Until death is profound and total
There will still be an experience of time
And the suffering and despair it entails
So let there be an end to all of this

The desert seems eternal and it is everywhere you look
What a cursed journey into the center of everything

Does not every day seem like it's infinite
And have you not become weary of this damned sacrifice
That seems to have no end in sight

Hangatýr, hear my invocation
In your name I have sent a call
Glance into my soul and grant me thy blessing
For these long days and nights

The serpent of the abyss mocks me
The rocks do not seem to have hewn
And there is no food or drink to share

The spear is as if it has sharpened its self
And my guts are torn inside out
The mead of poetry is sour
And the golden ecstacy is nowhere to be seen

The titanic giants of this world think they are wisdom itself
And seem not to have learned their lesson

Will you let the world collapse on its own
And forget the machinery
Or will you violently fight it
And still carry the world inside yourself
Gangleri

Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Gangleri »

So we must reach upwards! :roll:
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Polyhymnia
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Re: Terrible aspects of God

Post by Polyhymnia »

Gangleri wrote: Wed Jun 30, 2021 12:11 am How have you witnessed or experienced this terrifying aspect of God? Have you ever felt the "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" with which Rudolf Otto described the mystical religious experience? How do you deal with this experience and what kind of recollections have you made from such an experience?
Not quite what you're looking for here, but I grew up very confused by the concept of a loving God. I could never reconcile the God of the Old Testament with the loving God my pastor father always preached about. Also, my father was a very strict disciplinarian, and it was his belief that he represented God in our house, so I had a hard time reconciling a loving God with a father who used a leather belt on me. God was always terrifying in one way or another.

Closer to the experience you speak about, I always feel this terrible awe and majesty in situations involving death. Especially death in close quarters, when someone or something dies in front of me. Luckily, this is only something I've experienced a handful of times, but I specifically recall holding my father as he passed away and feeling (along with the horror and grim realizations of the moment, of course) this sense that I was in the presence of this terrible holiness. Something I could only describe as a dark face of God.
"Limited love asks for possession of the beloved, but the unlimited asks only for itself." -Kahlil Gibran
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