Lovecraft And Priestcraft

[poliphilo]

A friend of a friend is frightened of demons. He puts it down to being a fan of Lovecraft's. And he puts the Lovecraft thing down to his good, old-fashioned Catholic education.

I can't be doing with Lovecraft. I find him completely over the top. He doesn't frighten me because I  don't believe in his mythos.

Maybe you need to have been brought up as a certain kind of Christian- traditional Catholic or hell-fire Protestant- to find Lovecraft frightening.

I was brought up as an Anglican with an elusive God who "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" and so the spook stuff that ruffles my feathers is the hinty, blink-and-you'll-miss-it English ghost story, as purveyed by the likes of M.R. James and Robert Aickman.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think there are non-human, discarnate entities out there. I reckon they mainly ignore us provided we ignore them.

Some of them may not be terribly kindly disposed towards us, but I doubt that they're "evil" in the full Miltonic sense of the word.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I reckon they mainly ignore us provided we ignore them.


Which brings up a point, the personal god, the god who "walks with me and talks with me while the dew is still on the roses."

I wonder sometimes What I am praying to, because I do pray, often, but I am long past God as a male hovering over my head with a hand to His ear, waiting for my requests (my letters to Santa).

I feel I have wrecked my religious life, in that I think of God now in terms of quantum physics and Jung's acausal events, and I don't have a clue what I'm doing anymore.

I sing in the choir and don't think about it, but when (as now, when my sister-in-law is very ill with ovarian cancer) things get rough, I want a "skin face" to tell me not to worry, so I seek out the Something that's waitinf for me in the garden by the rose bushes. Sometimes I almost believe Something's there and caring about me, and then I think, cynically: oh, really?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't have a personal God any more. But I hold on to the belief that the universe is basically kindly and wishes us well. If I'm anything, I think I'm probably a spiritualist.

I'm confident that there's a life after death. And if there isn't, well, I won't know anything about it, will I?

But these days I don't worry about theology. It's too much like chasing one's own tail. All one ever gets from it are bafflement and frustration.