Beasto: You didn’t answer my first question. You didn’t answer my second question. You didn’t answer my fifth question. And I see you didn’t READ AGAIN. You’re terrible at following directions. Congratulations, you’re on your way to becoming a Discordian. Hail Eris!

NO SRSLY,

Do you have a better philosophy/religion? What is your “grown-up book?” I’m not being sarcastic; I actually want to know. I think it’s important. Because I still insist that the PD is a satirical and light-hearted but accurate attack on the follies inherent in Western philosophy, and those follies are deadly serious. Because I take Malcalypse the Younger seriously, I am free to take Plato foolishly (or do you actually believe that behind what we witness as reality is a world of Perfect Forms?)

While altogether ridiculous, the PD lends itself quite easily to serious literary analysis/philosophical discussion. For example, look again at

Page 65

What we have here is a pretty obvious spoof on the “proofs for the existence of God.” If you’ve had a basic philosophy course they should be very familiar. The folly, of course is obvious – people get caught up in rational cause/effect argument when they were trying to prove something essentially irrational.

The folly of atheism is to bumume that because you cannot prove rationally the existence of God/Goddess (or anything, for that matter), it cannot possibly be true. It is as dogmatic as theism, really.

The fact of the matter is that reality is not rational, and even if it were, we wouldn’t know about it, because we are not experiencing reality but our own personal reality-tunnel, which is influenced by cultural bias. The bumumption that the order we project on the universe is actually inherent is the Aneristic Illusion. Does is bother you to have a silly name for a serious thing? We could call it something else instead. How about, I dunno, Objectivism? Log in to see images!

Religions and philosophies that operate under the Eristic Illusion are important because they train our minds to deal with problems that cannot be addressed by Aristotlean logic (to bumume these problems simply don’t exist or aren’t important, as many atheists do, is the most ridiculous type nihilistic hubris I’ve ever heard). For instance, my five-year-old asked the other day:

“When we die, are we awake or asleep?”

(The correct answer, of course, is “Mu.” Without Discordianism, I would not have known this.)