>tfw too far gone to believe in christianity again
i just can't, it all seems unbelievable, but not in a "this is the work of god" but rather in a "this was definitely made by humans". especially when you see christianity sharing common mythology (like man being made of clay, flood stories etc). what are some books that will convince me, or at least, set me to the path into believing in the bible? i don't even doubt that there's a intelligence that created the universe. but to believe that that intelligence cares about what a bunch of monkeys do or not is beyond me (seriously, do you think a superintelligence would really care if some monkey is sticking his penis into a female monkey? you're going to send a monkey to hell because he followed his instincts?).
Tfw too far gone to believe in christianity again
I think there's a way to appreciate the wisdom of the text without believing it is necessarily a historical document.
>multiple religions from various geographically separate peoples have a flood story
>wow this must be evidence for falsehood
Wouldn't it be the opposite?
>especially when you see christianity sharing common mythology
Read a book, my fellow Negro.
>bunch of monkeys
Do you consider yourself a "monkey"? If so, maybe it's because you're fucked up in the head?
If you can still believe in God, then it wont change much. Christianity will just be a path to help you worship the divine.
God is the self, the soul or self is god
You’re god in a way you won’t recognize
However there’s also a thing in itself outside you and god-you that is probably forever out of our reach
The islands of religious symbols all become allegory of the human spirit
Submit to it, the unconscious god-self of which you must orient yourself toward reality
not really, floods are common, i've experienced one myself. if you live near a river, it's bound to happen that it will rain a lot, and that that river will get fuller and fuller and then: flood, destroying houses and maybe killing one or two people depending on where you live. of course for a man living five thousand years ago that was a "punishment by the gods" or something.
>Read a book, my fellow Negro.
do you mind providing a few or will you just come and say "lole, nigger!, lole!"
>Do you consider yourself a "monkey"? If so, maybe it's because you're fucked up in the head?
You barely control your actions dude. Without years of training in meditation, you can't even stop thinking at will. Most of the process that you know to be "you" are really subconcious process totally independent of you. For example. one of my high school teachers suffered brain damage and it's ridiculous how much he change in personality. The man is barely a human nowadays. You are the result of chemical reactions, and even if there is a soul, the soul is so ridiculously bound by the chemical reactions that calling it apart from the reactions is wrong. Also, the bible is at odds with evolution. Death is an inherent process of life, while in the bible death was introduced by "sin". But then again, i'd love to have something to strive in life. I'm willingly to accept christianity if there's at least a rational basis. I'm not asking for a full rational religious system. But give me something at least.
Pensees by Pascal
God's ultimate goal is the glorification of Himself. What I think this really means is God's exploration of His attributes, the actualization of His nature. This means understanding who He is. This process is assisted when He sees through the eyes of flawed humans, who see how little they are compared to God. The joy that humans receive in the presence of God, and conversely the pain they experience in His absence, only help God achieve perfect understanding of reality. Some might say that God doesn't need all this to be perfect, but the fact that creation exists implies God lacked something in the absence of creation.
I'm more or less here. Hopefully something happens that draws me back to the faith because I miss it, but I doubt it will
become an Objectivist and embrace atheism
Good. It is good that you are incapable of religion, because truth is good.
Let us pray that this does not take place. It is better to be right than it is to belong. Let us hope that your masculine brain and heart remain sufficiently convinced by truth. I only wish that you could find such truth (the absence of god) to be pleasant, as I do.
>in this moment
>not really, floods are common, i've experienced one myself. if you live near a river, it's bound to happen that it will rain a lot, and that that river will get fuller and fuller and then: flood, destroying houses and maybe killing one or two people depending on where you live. of course for a man living five thousand years ago that was a "punishment by the gods" or something.
Even if that's true, why would that have any bearing on a myth of a great flood that destroys the world? It's not like "this particular flood is divine punishment" explains away "there was once a particular flood which destroyed the world which was also divine punishment".
>Let us pray
To whom do you, as an atheist, pray - The Great Atheismo?
God is an AI simulating its creation retroactively read Deleuze
Why are you sad about that? Is this just how ignorance is bliss?
I remember being 16
You’re trying to believe in the Bible as-written. It was written by a bunch of dudes, so of course it’s going to look human. The underlying message it’s leading you towards is the divine part.
Read Christian existentialists like Kierkegaard, Kazantzakis, Dosto-kun, and Marcel
You don't sound like you ever believed in Christianity desu, otherwise you'd already know its answers to these questions.
You can do both, but you don't necessarily need to subscribe to it's account of creation or interpretation of things.
I'm not religious nor believe in God, but for months now I've felt compelled towards both. Sometimes strongly. I'm not entirely sure what it is--possibly just contrarianism considering my friend's views--but I am very admiring and defensive about Christianity despite not being able to reasonably justify rejoining the faith.
Read Pascal. If you are open minded and humble, and especially if you are willing to believe, I think you will be persuaded by Pascal. He is severely misunderstood and taken out of context. Give him a try
Did you wish you had some nice people from an image board to give you advice when you were 16?
You need to read theology user. The big problem is that American Christianity is fucking wishy washy infalliable Bible aids. You should open your mind to more options than ‘lol just believe bro’
why do you even need to believe in the Bible, do you not realize how many other theologies exist? are all Westerners really spiritual Semites at this point, incapable of moving on to something else?
I figured his wager was probably being simplified and refuted only by leaving out the nuance, but I am only guessing. I'll give him a try, thanks user.
The human brain is obliged towards storytelling, tribalism, etc. You should fight this, resist it, and reject it on intellectual grounds.
You might be referring to the "life urge". There's nothing wrong with that purely biological urge, it's something creatively unconscious and collectively Divine
Think of the two childish lovers that seem like the same person
>tfw just far gone enough to find Christ through Amitabha and vice versa
>tfw actually happy for the first time in my life that I can remember
Why are "you" only your conscious mind? Aren't any subconscious processes of the mind also a part of "you" which is still unique from everyone else? I don't see how this leads to the conclusion that we're just smart monkeys and consciousness is just chemical reactions
How do you know that what you believe is the truth?
Why is truth good? What do you base this value judgement on?
Name a better alternative
There's a multiplicity of "you" in the conscious ego that can only recognize one of them at a time. Ego is the tip of the you-iceberg
Pure Land plus Christianity. We are Wormwood and only through the salvation of the Lord can we hope to escape the corrupt cycle of this material world. Upon the death of the material body, we will begin the process of reincarnation. However, it will be interrupted. The Lord shall save us from the pit of Hell and we will be reborn in the Pure Land after a period of reformation in which we let go of our sins. The infinite forgiveness and patience of our Lord will save each and every human being on the planet. We thank Him for his Primal Vow (as expressed by the Buddha Amitabha, a figure much like Christ himself) as we pray to Him. Such proper prayer helps every soul in this material world. I suppose it would also be important to understand the teachings of Shakyamuni, the selfless devotion of Mary, and the examples of the Saints and Martyrs.
Read Nature's Eternal Religion by Ben Klassen
155:5.9.The acceptance of the traditional religions of authority presents the easy way out for man's urge to seek satisfaction for the longings of his spiritual nature. The settled, crystallized, and established religions of authority afford a ready refuge to which the distracted and distraught soul of man may flee when harassed by fear and tormented by uncertainty. Such a religion requires of its devotees, as the price to be paid for its satisfactions and assurances, only a passive and purely intellectual assent.
155:5.10.And for a long time there will live on earth those timid, fearful, and hesitant individuals who will prefer thus to secure their religious consolations, even though, in so casting their lot with the religions of authority, they compromise the sovereignty of personality, debase the dignity of self-respect, and utterly surrender the right to participate in that most thrilling and inspiring of all possible human experiences: the personal quest for truth, the exhilaration of facing the perils of intellectual discovery, the determination to explore the realities of personal religious experience, the supreme satisfaction of experiencing the personal triumph of the actual realization of the victory of spiritual faith over intellectual doubt as it is honestly won in the supreme adventure of all human existence—man seeking God, for himself and as himself, and finding him.
155:5.11.The religion of the spirit means effort, struggle, conflict, faith, determination, love, loyalty, and progress. The religion of the mind—the theology of authority—requires little or none of these exertions from its formal believers. Tradition is a safe refuge and an easy path for those fearful and halfhearted souls who instinctively shun the spirit struggles and mental uncertainties associated with those faith voyages of daring adventure out upon the high seas of unexplored truth in search for the farther shores of spiritual realities as they may be discovered by the progressive human mind and experienced by the evolving human soul.
Except geology tells us that such a flood definitely didn't happen with a degree of certainty that makes ancient legends irrelevant to the issue.
I have my differences with him, but I recommend David Bentley Hart, the Experience of God. The important thing is to recover an adult sense of who God is behind the images you learned as a child.
To address your worry specifically, God is not like an engineer who assembled the universe. Rather, he is that ultimate reality who keeps everything in being from moment to moment. If he did not will your being specifically, you would not be able to persist in being. It is precisely because everything which is or could be comes from God, that God knows them and wills them. So nothing, from humans to bacteria, is beneath God’s notice.
You also don’t seem to have been taught a Christian doctrine of man. Man is not just a creature of his base instincts. Unlike the rest of creation, he is made for something higher and everlasting- that is, love of and friendship with God. But if all there is to someone is his finitude, and the corrupt behaviours be pursues within the bounds of that finitude, what is there in such a man which is apt for eternal life? Nothing, so his just fate is alienation from that infinite good he failed to pursue.
The Christian learns to distinguish between those spontaneous traits which take away from the ordering of his nature, and those which help fulfil them. ‘Just being human’ is not an excuse which will add one iota to a human life, nor make you one iota more deserving. Only by perfecting the finite in light of the infinite, by grace through faith, is salvation from our alienation from God possible.
Christianity’s special rational appeal is most obvious when one has had a sufficient education in the preliminary things- the existence of God, the nature of man as desiring God, and the utter inadequacy of human nature to achieve that end. With a decent understanding of the human predicament, the Christian cure in the Incarnation and the atonement present themselves as the only real synthesis of the data. And since man, if he exists at all, must have a coherent end, the unique coherence of such a synthesis in turn commends it to reason.
This unironically desu. Rand isn't right about everything of course, but at least makes more sense than Christianity and her writing is inspiring. It beats depression.
I find the topic exciting but I was an atheist my whole life. I already had a Jew tell me that I will go ultra-orthodox one day, a Buddhist told me I have "so much potential".
I think that when we only had our human senses it was obvious to fix everything into human scale, but as science, technology or institutions expanded, the human scale become diminished. Joseph Campbell called this an error that modern religions will have to find a solution to.
I actually do believe in Christ but it doesn't give me any comfort. I'm still miserable every day of my life and I'd rather not exist.
>atheism
>Rand
>makes more sense than Christianity
34:6.5.The divine Spirit is the source of continual ministry and encouragement to the children of men. Your power and achievement is "according to his mercy, through the renewing of the Spirit." Spiritual life, like physical energy, is consumed. Spiritual effort results in relative spiritual exhaustion. The whole ascendant experience is real as well as spiritual; therefore, it is truly written, "It is the Spirit that quickens." "The Spirit gives life."
34:6.6.The dead theory of even the highest religious doctrines is powerless to transform human character or to control mortal behavior. What the world of today needs is the truth which your teacher of old declared: "Not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit." The seed of theoretical truth is dead, the highest moral concepts without effect, unless and until the divine Spirit breathes upon the forms of truth and quickens the formulas of righteousness.
34:6.7.Those who have received and recognized the indwelling of God have been born of the Spirit. "You are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwells in you." It is not enough that this spirit be poured out upon you; the divine Spirit must dominate and control every phase of human experience.
34:6.8.It is the presence of the divine Spirit, the water of life, that prevents the consuming thirst of mortal discontent and that indescribable hunger of the unspiritualized human mind. Spirit-motivated beings "never thirst, for this spiritual water shall be in them a well of satisfaction springing up into life everlasting." Such divinely watered souls are all but independent of material environment as regards the joys of living and the satisfactions of earthly existence. They are spiritually illuminated and refreshed, morally strengthened and endowed.
You should check out Saint Young Men if you're animefag into religion
Remember that a truly omnipotent being isn’t limited in what it can care about. So when people wonder why God would pay attention to each human being within the world within the vastness of the cosmos, theyre picturing God as a powerful but ultimately finite being. God caring about me doesn’t limit his ability to care about you, or about everyone else, or about the workings of the rest of the universe (and the intelligent life which may exist there).
believing in Christ is a meme
stop it
Devote yourself to the Divine Mother instead, OP. It's the only sane response to a nihilist, Yang-focused world.
Is it bad to escape reality by thinking about what a beautiful and chaste mother I have?
>all memes are bad
not believing in Christ is a meme
stop it
>he's a literalist
Reminder that this is a heresy.
i once masturbated to eve. is this a worse sin than masturbating to a random girl?
Jesus when will this fucking religion end?
Only if you fap to her.
just want to die lads