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Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how religious folks always go for the body horror. There's no existentialism here; no Kafka's "The Trial", Camus' "The Stranger", nor Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" to force us to contend with each other and our cold vast empty universe. (Indeed, reading each of these three authors today, we are forced to grapple with their sexism, racism, and theology, because like all humans they were deeply bigoted and hateful.)

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"There's no existentialism here" is just fucking wrong, my man. PLEASE read http://www.2arms1head.com/

All humans, really? Most maybe, but hardly all.

I think we need to be taught how to resist the seeds within us that cause those things.

Yes, I claim that almost all humans partition humans into completely imaginary classes. I'm going to define a bigot as somebody who makes such partitions. Note immediately that there exists a partition of bigots from non-bigots iff non-bigots exist. Note also that, simply by being able to recognize the above statement as true, both of us (and any other readers) are bigots. It follows that there must only be finitely many non-bigots at most; almost all humans are bigoted.

Sounds like you've rediscovered original sin, renamed it bigotry and hypothesized the existence of a small number of non-bigots who, perhaps, we ought to refer to as saints.

Also, there's plenty of Christian existentialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_existentialism

Everyone is someone else's bigot.

Which books are you thinking of? The one on that list that most obviously sticks out to me as religious is A Canticle for Leibowitz, and I would say it leans much more in the direction of making us contend with the failings of humanity in a cold and empty universe than in the direction of body horror.

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