Anyone read this?

>just a lot of moaning about nothing
Jesus fucking Christ, His "moaning" was about some of the most powerful issues that a young man experiences.

>Daily reminder that Augustine was a crypto-Calvinist and he fucked up Western Christianity.

>waah i lusted that hot girl and could not help but peek at her ass, please father help me for i have sinned
yes i had these exact same experiences because i come from extremely religious (christian) background, that's why i read this book to begin with just to see if i can relate to augustine, but really his issues in this book were not particularly powerful or enlightening for me

Yeah we all gotta deal with hot bitches in yoga pants and porn on the iPhone

I don’t wanna just read about someone’s dirty laundry

Life changing, if you have the moral honesty for it. If you read it with your fedora on, its not going to do much for you. Also, read closely, his language is very prayerful but Augustine was a trained rhetorician and it shows, the form and method is extremely tight if you can look at it structurally.

Highly recommended.

Accurate, I enjoyed first half then it was quite a drag to get to the end.

Maybe your religious background is what's ruining it for you. It's not just about Catholic guilt it's about overcoming the coil.

STOP
READING
SCHOLASTICS

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Agreed. It's worth it. But it might not be the first theological work one should read.

Yea, [insert meme statement]

Boring christcuck shit you've heard all before.

How many times have you heard the story of some christcuck who converted to another religion then saw the light and came back to Jesus?

I suspect the whole thing became a meme and people unconsciously play out the same role over and over, they join some religion for various reasons which were valid at the time, then later for whatever reason they reinterpret their experience in similar terms as Augustine , imagining that Yahweh was teaching them a lesson all along, when really it all happened unconsciously, with one delusion replacing another, over and over.

>when Ambrose is reading silently

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The second half is the best part. What is wrong with you?

One of the best reads OP. His reinterpretation of the beginning of Genesis is GOAT. His life story is very relatable and you feel all the pain and struggle he went through to find religion in his life.

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>Babies who die are barred from heaven for the crime of being born
Based

>whenever he starts talking about his mother

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augustine is a patristic, not a scholastic

Man you sound really enlightened, I wish we could all be free thinkers like you

Because brainlets can't handle his more abstract philosophy and theology

Finally, a man with some sense

You are correct, and this thread is good evidence of this board being a bunch of pretenders

The last 3-4 books got too big brain for me but I really want to understand them better. Anyone have any thoughts on them? Should I read City of God next?

Kek

inane and insipid, hasn't struggled or wrestled with spiritual despair once in his life. someday you'll grow out of this cartoon world you're living in

Can you guys please stop with this cold reading bullshit. Not everyone who criticises religion is a fedora atheist.

One of the greatest and most authentic experiences of spiritual despair you can ever experience is the realisation that your religion isn't real and you have wasted a large portion of your life on a lie.

Whatever you have experienced which you consider to be spiritual despair was either no more than a delusion, as with everything else christcucks experience with regard to their faith, or some vain egoistic shit about not being about to stop sinning in jacking off to porn everyday. You are not special or loved, certainly not by some Canaanite storm deity who you have been told is the creator of the world by a bunch of faggot pedo priests.

>accuses us of cold reading
>claims to know the motivations and spiritual condition of others
>acts like a fedora anyway

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>despair from waking out of delusion
I imagined christfags were more like Yea Forums tulpa/waifu fags. Ie willingly self-delude oneself. Why despair over self-induced psychosis, it's a rational choice one agreed on seeing the obvious benefit of it.

You can tell tulpafag his hallucination is not real, and on some level, he knows it. Doesn't change the fact it's real to him.

Incredible book.

literally impossible to both know something is not real and still believe in it

Most people are surprisingly good with cognitive dissonance inherent to delusion. In extreme cases you can disassociate the contradicting thoughts to such a degree of full blown jekyll & hyde (debauched priest) syndrome.

>desire to steal pears intensifies

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That's when religion starts.

God is the truest form of existence, unknowable and infinite. Anything that exists does so only in so far as it reflects this true existence. We exist in time but cannot understand it; only by ideas of memory and anticipation. We experience no length of time, but can imagine what a length of time is because all of time is experienced by God all at once.

Hypocrite. If you had read Schopenhauer you would know that he uses the word "Scholastic" in a sense that includes the patristics. He says this clearly in the second volume of World as Will and Idea.

Beautiful book. Even if not Christian, you should read it to get to the last leg, where Augustine delves into his treatises on memory, the mind, time, and infinity.

I understand that there is always a certain level of madness that needs to be reached in order to justify having a 'waifu', but why go so far as to create a tulpa? Does it not sever your ties to reality even more? Is it not excessive to try and pass off a creation of your own mind not only as an independent being but one that you can feel in some form? Is that the point and I'm just not going far enough in my thinking?

It's not as hard as it sounds. For most of existence of humanity, we lived in kinda schizophrenic haze, *eagerly* believing in bullshit. Our brains are well adapted for this, it's rationality which is unnatural. For instance, falling in love and hero worship *forcefully* induces a bias to believe what isn't there - even if you're consciously aware of the bias. The only way to even realize this is happening is to be on guard, and even then there's only little of cognitive dissonance.

>Does it not sever your ties to reality even more?
The magic sauce is to limit it to the tulpa, and only the tulpa. Schizophrenics become the way they are because they extend magical thinking to everything, making them unable to function within a system lacking empathy to stay in tune with em. This is why religious schizo cults can stay coherent - they reinforce each other bullshit and stay in tune. Individualized delusions, however, are dangerous.

Excellent book for many reasons. 1) general knowledge and cultural influence 2) its influence in christian history 3) intellectual influence (mainly thinking about books 1113 when he deals with the concept of time)

The despair is from the fact that you got fooled. People genuinely think it was real initially.

>Not everyone who criticises religion is a fedora atheist.
and yet you continue to be one

Here is something you must understand.

Augustine of Hippo clearly suffered from at least high functioning autism or bipolar disorder. You can only truly completely understand him if you have been extremely alienated by the world and/or you feel extreme amounts of guilt or shame because of base and autistic things you have done in the past.

You should read Plotinus, given that his metaphysics strongly influenced how Augustine interpreted the world and Christianity.

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>
its good. but youre right. I had a better time having him BTFO epicurians stoics and pagans in city of god

>falling in love
Even with a real person? Being 'in love' with a fictional character isn't impossible if you ask me but it's either a form of self-love from the idealized shape created in the individual mind or is detached just enough from the individual in order to prevent him from falling into a state of despair allowing him to function properly or better in real life than before, while still effectively permeating the entirety of his mind and body. I don't know if I'd say it's nothing more than base delusion but it certainly is closer to the spiritual than to the rational and can be beneficial with the right mindset.

>Individualized delusions, however, are dangerous.
In the sense that delusions without any reinforcement from outside the individual are dangerous? I can definitely see someone convincing himself to an extreme degree since he can't communicate his thoughts to anyone else, but that can happen with just about everything that has anything to do with vague and incredibly uncertain topics. You say that self-delusion is more natural than rationality but I suppose you don't consider that to be entirely positive.

>You say that self-delusion is more natural than rationality but I suppose you don't consider that to be entirely positive.
I'm a big fan of approaching self-delusion as a rational choice, as opposed getting deluded ad-hoc without my rational consent (deceit, groupthink). Self-delusion can be as little as repeating into mirror "you're great" to raise self esteem. It's objectively a tiny one, yet it is consciously installed and there's probably rational benefit for doing so. Same can be done with tulpa (feeling lonely? you'll be less lonely), or even christianity now that it ceased to be automatic groupthink. This indeed works best if it can be piggybacked at capacity for love - love oneself, love waifu, love christ. You know how young people get infatuated over someone they never spoke to, and simply project idealized qualities on em in their head? They fall in love with the image they built in their head. Such a fanatic zeal can be exploited elsewhere if you "accept christ in your heart".

>In the sense that delusions without any reinforcement from outside the individual are dangerous
The danger is when you believe some private delusion zealously and loudly, and it's something most people empathetically disagree with (cia niggers hunt me! god speaks to me!). Most tulpafags are zealous about their waifus and talk about her to no end, but compared to cianigger schizos, its fairly harmless - an imaginary friend is generally considered just a personality quirk.

Society-scale mass delusions are extremely common as a matter of memetic groupthink - It used to be christianity, now for instance manufactured consent in democracy and infallibility of consumerism. Both have stabilizing effect on society, even if both are complete bullshit rationally or even disastrous in the long term. Most of what we know about world we learn through implicitly accepted groupthink. The memes in there are darwinian - they thrive by virality and/or impact (heil Trump!). Whether those are true or false (mass delusion) is inconsequential and has no bearing on meme virility. Christianity didn't lose because it's a delusion, but because it lose competition against new memes of modernity.

>You know how young people get infatuated over someone they never spoke to, and simply project idealized qualities on em in their head? They fall in love with the image they built in their head.
I am very intimate with it. Then if the image is just a frozen instance of a specially constructed ideal, if the base for this was a fictional character to begin with there's not too much of a difference. I feel like an ideal is what gives a person drive but it has to be out of reach for the entire duration of one's lifetime in order to keep the fervor all throughout (though losing steam is definitely possible). It's just that delusion is a term that's almost always used with negative connotations so even when used to describe what someone considers a positive use, it's hard to get away from the usual implications.

>The danger is when you believe some private delusion zealously and loudly, and it's something most people empathetically disagree with (cia niggers hunt me! god speaks to me!)
That can get out of hand, I agree, but if it's persuasive enough to the individual he'll be hard-pressed to keep it to himself, especially if a series of lucky coincidences or quaint associations start to seem like 'fate'.os

>Most tulpafags are zealous about their waifus and talk about her to no end
They don't even need to have tulpas to be zealous and obsessed, believe you me. If it's not talking about it's thinking, if it's not thinking it's observing.
>but compared to cianigger schizos, its fairly harmless - an imaginary friend is generally considered just a personality quirk.
Not so sure, feels like it could easily go from being just a personality quirk to being a defining character trait, though the most experienced would probably know how to keep it to themselves in regular conversation.

On the other hand with the vast amount of general information, studies and debates over Christianity it definitely has more to defend and dispute than the relatively recent and minor phenomenons of tulpas and people who have feelings for fictional characters. Somebody would need to achieve something quite impressive before their position is taken seriously, but I don't see why they couldn't eventually bring about an intensely creative individual.