How Cormac McCarthy's Religion Changed His Writing 

@pedorodek - You can read brains but can't access your own heart. You've polarized in the wrong direction and you've been blinded by your new power. Have fun lol!

Must have been Foote! McCarthy never interviewed with them!

My teachings are easy to understand and easy to put into practice. Yet your intellect will never grasp them, and if you try to practice them, you'll fail. - # 70 Stephen Mitchell

@@WriteConscious Not to worry -- the thought never crossed my mind.

Glad you're here!

Murakami, Ishiguro, Louise Erdrich, James Ellroy, Atwood, Walter Mosley, and T.C.Boyle are all mainstream authors I like. Read all of their books. I like probably 200+of other living fiction or poetry authors that I wouldn't call mainstream though!

lol

Haha, funny you say that Stephen. Just started taking a magnesium supplement two days ago. It does make me feel very relaxed. However, I am good now! Yesterday was just an adjustment day to get me back to my 4am wake up time! Hopefully won't fall off the horse again. Electrolyte water changed my life. Thought I would have to quit teaching because I kept getting migraines, started taking them and haven't had a migraine at work in years lol.

@@WriteConscious awesome 👍 glad you're doing well now

Never said he was an atheist?

@@WriteConscious he described himself as 'pretty much a materialist' in his interview with Krauss didn't he? However there are christian materialists like the metaphysician Peter van Inwagen! Is the ending of THE ROAD compatible with atheism? "once there were brook trout in the mountains...vermiculite patterns on their backs that were maps of the world in its becoming *maps and mazes* .." But maps and mazes are by definition *designed!*

@@stephenglasse2743 I read a post on reddit where someone who met his brother Denis McCarthy after the interview and asked him about the entire "mostly a materialist" quote and Denis responded that Cormac's views on god and metaphysics "depend on the day that you ask him". Basically the same response as he posited on Oprah.

@@SSSadvakas Yeah that's the impression I get. I think sometimes he looked at creation and art and philosophy and thought, 'Sure, God exists' and other times at all the suffering and the doctrines of Darwin and Krauss and was more sceptical. Probably similar to a lot of people.

@@stephenglasse2743 Men do not turn from God so easily. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot e fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he came to believe terrible things of him. - The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy I'm sure he believed in God, but I'm not sure he was entirely sure that he was a purely benevolent entity. Cormac had a cosmology very close to that of Gnostic Christianity, and I think the question that really tackled him more than anything else was wether or not there was another opposite force to creation as we know it (Islam for example IMO provides a much more concise answer and framework for answering this question than Christianity IMO). Basically he was a Gnostic but he wasn't sure there was anybody beyond the Demiurge, his I'm basically a materialist response should be interpretated as "I don't think theres a secret platonic world beyond ours where God in a identifiable form resides, all concepts of good/evil and the like are inside of this world". However, I don't think he was always too sure (from where we get all the fire allusions in BM/The Road - hinting at there being trapped divine pneuma in our world.