STRIFE or CHAOS?????

[Agrippa]

Then why name it after her?

Because:  'Eris godess of strife with purpose' sounds less cool then 'Eris godess of strife'
Those greeks where weird anyway

[LMNO]

Anyway, i dont think discordianism is about strife itself.

Then why name it after her?

To intentionally cause strife by giving her the wrong portfolio of control?

[Triple Zero]

i still gotta watch that movie. but i heard this exploding head guy scene is in fact the best bit of the entire movie, is that correct?

[LMNO]

Pretty mcuh.

[Triple Zero]

how lousy does that make the rest of the movie?

i mean, it is the exploding head guy ..

[LMNO]

It's early Cronenberg, so it's fairly low budget (spent it all on the exploding head, probably).

Most of it is suspense/action, focuses on xenophobia, and has a weird twist ending that no one really has a good explanation for.

I'd say see if you can get it on bitorrent. 

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Well, I think that initially Thornley and Hill may have used Eris as a catch all for philosophical absurdism. Camus held that A) God was dead. B) Life was meaningless (ie. Life is chaotic and unpredictable) and thus C) No purpose exists for living. Camus wasn't nihilistic, but he did stress that happiness was fleeting, because existence is absurd and chaotic.  Thornley and Hill turned this standard Absurdist philosophy on its head. Rather than happiness and Chaos being opposites in a duality, the PD promotes the idea that happiness can be found in Chaos and Order equally.

However, they make pretty plain in the PD that the "Greeks got it wrong". That is, Eris of the Discordian Society (or POEE's anyway) is not the Eris of the Greeks and Romans... or at least she's a version of Eris as seen by people that don't fear strife and discord. As for Kaos, I think that metaphor doesn't really cover the sort of things we use the word Chaos for now... Kaos was formless and empty, rather than an unpredictable black swan from Mr. Taleb.

Chaos seems important to absurdist philosophy, since chaos was one of the reasons Camus  held that life was meaningless. Unpredictable events, which could destroy the life's work of an individual... or an unpredictable event that would take the life of an individual. In this Chaos, absurdists saw failure... but Omar and Mal-2 saw something different. Eris as a metaphor for all of that seems to work better than what would have been involved in trying to make things fit precisely.

[LMNO]

Rat has reminded me that since Hill/Thornley basically rewrote ancient history ("The Greeks spread lies and slander about Eris because she kept cheating at poker"*), so this whole issue of "But ancient history says she's Strife, not Chaos!" is moot.  If you're a POEE cabal member, of course. 

The rest of you are on your own.



















*Fun Fact: She didn't cheat, she would just get the other gods drunk.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Rat has reminded me that since Hill/Thornley basically rewrote ancient history ("The Greeks spread lies and slander about Eris because she kept cheating at poker"*), so this whole issue of "But ancient history says she's Strife, not Chaos!" is moot.  If you're a POEE cabal member, of course. 

The rest of you are on your own.

Prexactly.

Also, I think they wanted to make clear that they weren't laem reconstructionist pagans

[hooplala]

My original point was, though, that they never bring strife up, only chaos.  The greeks already had a goddess of Chaos, so why not just use her?  Why even bring Eris into it?

[LMNO]

Cuz she's sexy.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

My original point was, though, that they never bring strife up, only chaos.  The greeks already had a goddess of Chaos, so why not just use her?  Why even bring Eris into it?

Well... it depends.

According to legend, Omar had a dream about a goddess that talked of chaos and strife. So maybe Eris brought herself into it.

Or, Eris was a female (which would appeal to the Goddess Worship that was becoming prominent in neopaganism), she was anthropomorphic as opposed to formless and the Golden Apple story worked well to illustrate several of the points they wanted to make... Kaos didn't really have any interesting adventures that would lend themselves to metaphor quite that way.

Maybe.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

My original point was, though, that they never bring strife up, only chaos.  The greeks already had a goddess of Chaos, so why not just use her?  Why even bring Eris into it?

Well... it depends.

According to legend, Omar had a dream about a goddess that talked of chaos and strife. So maybe Eris brought herself into it.

There it is... if, indeed, the PD was the result of Divine Revelation (however you may define "Divine Revelation"; for example stoned out of my gourd, or perhaps just an "Aha!" moment), there is no "why", there is only "is".

[hooplala]

Fair enough.

I think -personally- they just wanted an obscure female goddess who could be crazy.  Eris fit the bill.

[Requia ☣]

Wasn't a big part of the point of PD that people has been mistaking all chaos for strife, and all strife for chaos?  Curse of Greyface and all that.  So Eris was goddess of chaos, but got called the goddess of strife, since the Greeks couldn't tell the difference.