Brute forcing a belief in god

Seriously, OP, read

Why is it so terribly important to you?

C.S. Lewis' apologetic works (start at Mere Christianity and keep going) and G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy are exactly what you're looking for. They'll do wonders for you!

I've gone to church, the youth programs and even had a gf for a while from there

Because the thought of eternal nothingness after death scares the fuck out of me

Based. I'll definitely have a look at these

>Take the hint Tolstoy gives to desperate truth-seekers like yourself
what is it

the fuck is you dualistfags deal? jesus fuckin christ

take the kafkapill

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If you weren't force-fed the principles of your religion since your early youth, there is little chance that you ever achieve your goal. I'd say that your best bet here is not reading (although it can help), but rather socializing with people who are already limited to the religious mental framework you are looking for. Also, severing the ties with anyone atheist/skeptical or that might distract you from your goal is likely a necessity.

How weak can you be to buy Pascal's artificial bigotry? High-school students dismantle the oncologic argument as one of their first contact to philosophy.
Aside from that, he followed the same path as OP, so I guess that it is relevant.

Elaborate. Destroy Pascal, you intellectual giant. I really want to see you do it

because Christian waifus ignore atheists

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You're unteachable and God won't give you the gift of faith. He made You to go to hell and suffer forever.

u cant

That post is complete retardation tho

why do you want to be a christian? or "religious"?

Why do you want to believe in something you don't believe in? Makes no sense.

Tolstoy didn't really believe in it either.

Why do you believe there is eternal nothingness? You don't know that.

There will be no eternal nothingness. In fact, there will be no time at all. It's not the lens of a camera forever covered, but the camera destroyed.

Augustine's Confessions

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it's not infinite nothingness, it's zero somethingness

have you read christian apologetics?

>forcing yourself to believe in god when you don't even believe in god

that's some seriously cucked up shit right there. take some responsibility for yourself, be as copkiller himself put it, the pitiless censor of yourself. life isn't easy. forcing yourself to believe in an omniscient deity is a submissive and dependent turning away from that.

if your own best open minded efforts resist belief how is that not a signal to you that you don't need belief? what you're looking for is brainwashing, it's mental illness, and if you keep it up you'll get exactly what you want. but it's not a game. i find the notion that someone would go about willingly damaging their brain like that in the reactionary fashion of the day sad and offensive to human dignity. some things cannot be undone.

>horse
she fucks it

wtf

gay

He was blessed I tell you

I'm a good christian boy myself but I don't think belief in God is just a logical exercise you can train yourself into, at least not true belief. Get your nose out of books and do things that will genuinely get you closer to him. Perform charitable acts, meditate in nature, see the world, talk to random strangers in the street about religion, stuff like that.

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Atheism is the only rational position. the end

Look at you. Your brain corrupted by porn or judaism.

The Phenomenology of Spirit.

No its not. Its damaging to the human psychology and it doesn't do anything to the betterment of humanity.

>inb4 muh science

The biggest breakthroughs were done by religious scientists.

>the absolute state of LARPers

“Certainly I’ll ask differently.” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch looked coldly at him. “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”

“I believe in Russia.… I believe in her orthodoxy.… I believe in the body of Christ.… I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia.… I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.

“And in God? In God?”

“I … I will believe in God.”

>Horse girl

I'm all for insane women destroying my life and living as a degenerate but that is even too much for me

>Its damaging to the human psychology and it doesn't do anything to the betterment of humanity
>inb4 muh science
Trying to replace religion with science is a mistake made my many contemporary atheists that don't understand that religion is about more than explaining why the world exist. Religion should be replaced by philosophy. Unfortunately this is not a labour the general population will undertake since it's basically only pushed by self help retards.

Some critics argue that Pascal's wager, for those who cannot believe, suggests feigning belief to gain eternal reward. This would be dishonest and immoral. In addition, it is absurd to think that God, being just and omniscient, would not see through this deceptive strategy on the part of the "believer", thus nullifying the benefits of the wager.[14]

Yep. Here's a relevant passage:

>'I confess it, I admit it, but even so ... Is there no way of seeing underneath the cards?' 'Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc' 'Yes, but my hands are tied and I cannot speak a word. I am being forced to wager and I am not free, they will not let me go. And I am made in such a way that I cannot believe. So what do you want me to do.'' 'That is true. But at least realize that your inability to believe, since reason urges you to do so and yet you cannot, arises from your passions. So concentrate not on convincing yourself by increasing the number of proofs of God but on diminishing your passions. You want to find faith and you do not know the way.-* You want to cure yourself of unbelief and you ask for the remedies? Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began: by behaving just as if they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc. That will make you believe quite naturally, and according to your animal reactions.'

I.E.; You need to reduce your passions because clinging to them is what prevents you from believing.

What if he had a foot in it?

>implying human rationality is attainable or desirable

Utter faggotry.

>God is a psychological cop-out
you're just one step away from atheism yourself, friendo

Pascal explains this literally right after the wager. There are ways to improve your faith: read the Bible, pray, avoid sin, etc. “Seek God and God will seek you” kind of stuff. There’s no dishonesty about it. It’s not as if you’re saying,” Oh, I believe in God now” and you go on living exactly as you were before. God WOULD see through that, but that’s not what Pascal is suggesting. He recognizes that you won’t have faith immediately, that you have to strengthen it over time. The wager is just the beginning to becoming a sincere Christian. And then, God has no reason to blame you for being an actual Christian, even if you did so from the beginning for selfish reasons. Even if that were a sin, doesn’t Christianity cover her sins?

I will pray for your faith, bro.

>church
They don't have the right idea of God.
>Bible
Favorite book?
>nde
Pretty useless. It only instills a fear of dying and piety comes as a cope that "maybe next time I won't be so lucky and I'm scared of not living out of nowhere, so I'll pretend I get a better life if I do die"

I think faith is similar to language in that you have to have such a thing incubated in you in your developmental stage. It seems to me like most atheists who find religion were born into a family with some kind of religious framework, whether it be overt or latent

Based

(1/2)
Why? So you can join the LARPers or the genuine believers who believe in order to supress the fear of a meaningless existence, fear of death and dying, fear of never seeing loved ones again or a desire to find spiritual meaning in life, to die and go to an afterlife, to calm themselves with the belief that you meet loved ones again? To follow a set of beliefs in a book instead of creating your own rules out of original thought or piecemealing whatever you deem quality concepts from all books? To be told what to do by an ambiguous concept like "god"? To hold a personal god but call it the deity from whatever religion you adhere to? In all honesty though it can be harsh at times to resort to the mundane way of thinking, to deal with existence as is and not try to justify or make sense of things from within a boxed way of thinking, to look around and question reality, existence, why any of this is the way it is, if we've been here before, if we've existed before, if this all existed before, if it will all exist in the future, if we will exist in the future, etc. but by confronting it and analyzing it without abandoning the thoughts by suppressing them into the subconscious by invoking "mysterious ways" or "god did it" or just simply "god" you slowly gain mastery of the emotions that arise from the questions, while those that suppress and seek refuge are doomed to deal with it all in a shorter time frame once they - if they ever - take on this existence alone, thinking outside of any box, for themselves.

Considering the vast amount of people believe in scientific explanations and various zeitgeists, religion and rituals are more performance art, larping, and essentially just emotion, "god" is literally just positive emotions to people, prayer is just performance art mixed with wishing or hoping, sending thoughts out into the universe, metta, etc. god is a genie that grants wishes, their own actions are his actions, chance is attributed to this personal deity, and when they fail or when something doesn't go the way they want to then it isn't that god didn't provide for them it's just that he "works in mysterious ways," all texts being written by men who were "inspired" by "god" are somehow able to channel the exact desires of this vague concept into various languages each denying the existence of the other deity and the deities and religions prior to them, and the reading of these texts constitute to a person suffering from OCD going through the magical way of thinking and feeling positive emotions from their rituals, they read these texts to feel good and ignore anything bad in them to the point where they claim there isn't anything in them, but this is of course all psychological, it is required belief to have to continue to keep the crux of their respective desires: that they will continue to exist in a good place, that they will see their loved ones again, that "evil" is punished after death in the bad place (because it sure isn't punished here), that this all has meaning, that their lives have a greater purpose than going to a job they hate from 9-5, to keep going to their church/temple/monastery/etc. and gain access to that social circle, or if they're part of the priest-class then the incentive is obviously that their job continues existing and the believes keep on donating, if you were a priest in the middle ages then it wasn't mere financial but also a matter of the power you held, now that power is just the hold over your congregation so more a matter of ego; religion stifles you and keeps you in a box, the same box the zeitgeist keeps you in, the same box politics keeps you in, media/news, labels in general. If you are on the outside then you are free, it might be nice to believe in these things just as it would be nice not to deal with certain things, but life is a continuous struggle for existence followed by dying and subsequently death, to live with that in mind and adapt accordingly brings true peace based on a real foundation instead of hope, dreams, desire and other intangible spooks.

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The irony of you posting this on a board dedicated to reading is not lost on me.

I read books, not retards on Yea Forums

I'd still be a christian if communication with god wasn't so fucking ambiguous.

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I have to doubt you on this, I sincerely doubt you read either.

Believe whatever you want

She's nearly perfect, but there is something to be said about women who love horses.

It makes perfect sense. Think, for example, of what it takes to get saved. Often you need absolute dedication to a holy life. In order to have such dedication you need to be very inspired, maybe even to have a powerful religious experience. Neither of those things are under our control. We cannot choose to be inspired. So who gets saved and who doesn't is arbitrary. Consider the case of Saint Paul. He was hit with a life changing spiritual vision while on the road to Damascus. If this hadn't happened he would have died a sinner. Why doesn't an angel come down from the sky and give you or me a spiritual vision? Who knows? It's probably completely arbitrary. Maybe the particular spiritual being that came down to Paul just liked him for some reason. Maybe that particular being was bored and thought it would be fun to throw some spiritual crumbs down to poor old Paul. The heavenly hierarchies are an arbitrary and corrupt organization.

>less "thrifty"
>doing a Post grad in art history

she's a rich man's daughter and you're seeing her PR side

spend a day sat in nature by yourself and have a big long think about it all. dont bring your phone.

>I just don't know how to spark that faith within me
This is your problem here, YOU don't spark faith within yourself. The one thing you didn't list in your op was prayer. You have to pray, ask and it will be given etc. Genuine faith is something you live out, you don't meme yourself into it.

I'm not sure that prayer can inspire faith, since genuine prayer can only be done by a person with genuine faith. I've a hunch faith finds people of its own accord, regardless of whether or not they are consciously looking for it. I think that's the idea of being moved by the Holy Spirit. Prayer can maintain faith and build religious discipline, but I don't think prayer in itself can help a person "find" faith, largely because as far as I can see you don't find faith, it finds you.

It came to me a couple of months back when I started having dreams about a church near enough to where I live. A couple of weeks later I was passing and on a whim decided to pop in. It was completely empty and when I went inside I was pretty disappointed with it until I turned about and saw the light catching in the rose window above the door just as the shitty background music they had on in there hit a swell. Could very easily be dismissed as a coincidence but it struck me as a genuine religious experience of the sort I didn't think people actually had. I've been trying to attend regular masses and engage with scripture since.

The issue with relying on books, argument or persuasion to give you faith is that those things are by definition rational, whereas faith is arational, or even irrational. It's like trying to cut down a tree with a hammer. If you can rationally defend your faith, it isn't faith.

and everyone ITT :
Read the Ethics by baruch spinoza

this is just sophistry, you have to basically have an emotional crisis which you can later refer to as epiphany

if anything this makes me think christianity is even more retarded. an "angelic bureaucracy" but why, if it's incompetent, would that make me want to follow it, let alone cause me to suddenly believe in it?

That's the point, it wouldn't. Kafka was exposing the absurdity of Abrahamic religion.

based

oh alright i thought that it was a case *for* christianity. my bad

a few weeks ago i was at work wagecucking in the starbucks drive through one day and an asian girl pulled up. we were making small take while she paid and i waited for her order. then i gave her her coffee and before she left she looked me in the eyes and said "im sorry if this is weird, but god just told me that youre meant to be a leader. youre going to be a great one and inspire many, especially the youth. god bless you." and then she drove off

That's pretty much what I was trying to say, my post is a bit ambiguous. What I meant was: an individual doesn't inspire faith in themselves, faith is a grace. But it does require an open mind.

No, there's nothing emotional about it.

religious people, especially converts, all have a story about a moment in which they experienced the grace of God, which always coincides with a moment of personal turmoil or crisis. It's basically the same mechanism by which a virus gets past your immune system

>It's basically the same mechanism by which a virus gets past your immune system

kek

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Pussy

Blessed man

It's a common trope across literature and mythology that ascension to a better spiritual or psychological place comes after a descent into a worse one. In sterquiliniis invenitur.

You can rationalize it all you like but at the end of it presenting a person with rational arguments against what they believe they've been given by Revelation is like mixing oil and water. It's a waste of time for both parties.

OP, the best advice I can give you is to remain open to God. He will enter your life when the time is right. You'll know when it happens.

Don't know, Ecclesiastes was a life changing read for me
Try Kierkegaard, Pascal, Chesterton or life of saints or Augustine

>art history
>not some fucking veterinary school
lel, jesus

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Well I'm going to study art history (no homo), any problem?

>snake eyes

Sure thing, sweety. Have at it.

It scares you and you desperately want to believe something else yet you cannot because you'd know it was hopeful thinking that gave birth to your belief. You know just how persuavive a truth is you don't want to know of. The greatest burden of the unholiest truth. You're infected and there's no cure. We're all dying in this rotten world. Enjoy your stay in hell.

i'm going to slam my lil dingus in a bible to become ungay