/lit/ - Literature

>>18715944
>I have to smoke weed and drink beer
This is why you read philosophy

>>18715949
what do you mean though? i like doing those things. even if i didnt though. howdoes reading philosophy equate to an altered state of mind brought on by a consumable substance?

I just like reading other people's schizophrenic architectonics.

>>18716003
hey thats a cool word. ive never heard that word before

>>18715944
>have to
>come home and smoke weed and drink beer
You don't have to.

>>18715958

The point of philosophy, and any real philosophy that touches on the actual nature of reality, is that you learn why relying on temporary pleasures is shit taste, including altered states of mind from consumable substance, since you're letting the desires in your body control you, instead of being in control of your desires.

Letting yourself be dominated by your desires is not the same as actually being in control of them - at the moment, your mind & soul is entangled in and confused with the matter your body is made of. and it's supposed to be in control of your body, not controlled by it.

Filling yourself with temporary material pleasures is a surrogate for being filled with Truth. It's Truth, deep down, that everyone craves, but are brainwashed by the society we live in to believe that Truth does not exist, that Truth is a figment of our imagination, and that we can create whatever Truth we want.

Eventually, this search for Truth brings you face to face with Truth incarnate - Christ. Then, the question is which group claiming to be Christians are the legitimate heirs to the tradition laid down Truth Himself. Spoiler: It's Orthodox Christianity, but you might not be ready for it yet.

>>18716137
Holy shit its the only other orthanon on the server again, spitting facts again

Exhomologisthe tou Theou ton Theon, alliuia,

Hoti is ton eona, tou eleos aftou, aliluia!

>>18716137
ah if you are being serious then that's not going to work on me man. I was raised catholic and went to a catholic highschool. but by the end of highschool I was finally able to admit to myself a feeling that I had felt since I was a kid: I do not believe in God.
I had been suppressing that feeling for as long as I can remember.

>>18716181
I attended church every sunday and also went to a catholic school. Wasnt until my mid 20s I was able to admit to myself that the crime loving, rebellious, Godless streak of my youth was nothing more than petty rebellion against the institutions of my childhood.

>>18716195
You can be a good human being and not be catholic. How Catholics don't understand this boggles my mind.

>>18716137
what book do i start philosophizing with, then?

>>18716214
There is no such thing as a good human being.

>>18716220
You pick, I picked Kant and Schopie both at once, and I still ended up in Holy Orthodoxy. I honestly think that many more streams end in Christ than anybody would expect

>>18716181

Why would any rational person believe in the Roman Catholic God? I grew up an atheist, in an ex-Catholic family of atheists - I looked at everything Protestant, and saw that it was obviously a car salesman scam. I looked at Roman Catholicism, and it was obviously a pedophile scam. I was way more attracted to eastern stuff - buddhism, hinduism, etc, but I only ever picked and chose enough stuff from them to let me justify being a hedonist.

I've lived decades in the same decadence you are in, drowning depression in all sorts of drugs(booze, weed, lsd, shrooms, amphetamines), reveling in it and enjoying it whole-heartedly, all because I believed the unquestionable dogma of the world: That there is no such thing as Truth, and that if there is no such thing as real Truth, that I can just make up whatever I want to be true - and so then hedonism becomes the obvious option. Just drown myself in pleasure - I've decided my own meaning, and was following it for decades.

However, eventually I had to actually admit a feeling that I've been denying the whole time - That I believe in Truth. I had no idea why I knew this deep down, but I had broken off so many false friendships because I had always been committed to the Truth, no matter what it was, even if I didn't like it. That made me lonely as fuck, because people are more comfortable lying to each other to keep each other company, than to sacrifice anything for the sake of Truth.

I've attached a document for you to read that spells out exactly how Catholicism is to blame for the shithole the Western world has become, over the past 1000 years, from committing to the Roman Catholic heretical ideas that split them off from the Orthodox Church in the first place.

I don't blame you for not believing in the Roman Catholic God. Their God isn't truth -it's a false God - and an evil one, at that. Frankly, if you even look at what the Roman Catholics actually believe, they don't even believe that God is in their life, since God is fully locked away outside of our reality - instead, the Pope is, in all practical ways, their God.

http://orthodoxaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/course.pdf <- Here's a pdf for you to read - It's called the "Orthodox Survival Course" - it's a transcription of a series of lectures about the development of ideas from 1000 years ago, when the Roman Catholic church split off from the Orthodox Church in the Great Schism of 1054, and how the modern world we have today is the result of 1000 years development from that rejection of the Orthodox Truth.

At the very least, if you read it, it'll be a cool history lesson from the perspective of how ideas develop over 1000 years, and the causes of their developments, from the perspective people that actually believe that Truth is real. No-one writes from that perspective anymore, nowadays, so it will at least be a breath of fresh air.

>>18716289
>Based Fr Seraphim Rose

If Christ is merciful and I am saved, the two of us are going to have an extremely spirited debate about the value of Kant.

>>18716289
I appreciate this whole thing you wrote and ill check this pdf thing out. Its funny that you say all this, years ago the deacon at my local church got arrested for possession of child pornography. Pretty fucked up.

So what is "The Truth" you speak of? what do you believe in now?

>>18716220

A good one to start with is Nihilism by Fr Seraphim Rose, link to pdf here -> https://www.docdroid.net/SlxAMji/nihilism-seraphim-rose-pdf

It's basically a giant pill on what society at large believes, how it enters into our lives practically, how it eventually unfolds over time, and why it fails to work.

Other than that, Plato's dialogues that have Socrates in them are pretty good and simple - they're refreshing, compared to modern writing, because they're actually talking as if they want to figure out what the truth of a matter is, what goodness is, what justice is, etc. The simplicity of approach, of actually wanting to know the truth, is the most important part of them.

>>18715944
>if i still have to wake up and go to work everyday and come home and smoke weed and drink beer and then sleep?
You have realize subliminally a hidden truth of all levels of reality, from the most mundane to the divine. All is “stuff” even these words I type, even if God engrained them with his stamp they would still be just stuff and pointlessly exist... not to say non existence is any different. Stuff exist and everyone makes a big deal about stuff, and when we realize it it becomes annoying, yet this realization is stuff and we can not escape it.

>>18716308

A student wanted to talk to Fr Rose about exactly this, as well as Kierkegaard, and it was recorded in Fr. Rose's biography. I've posted it in the image.

Fr Rose also gave the survival course linked in this post >>18716289, where he talks about Kant in depth on page 89.

>>18716393
stuff

>>18716404
Yeah, still not convinced by this. I think that Kant is right, but that just makes the fact of the revelation in Christ Jesus all the more glorious. The love of God reaches over and through the transcendental barrier of experience, touching the soul directly and uniting it once more to the actual world, which mere reason and sensation cannot by themselves attain.

We confess a belief in a Father who made all things, visible and invisible. What I don't understand is why the scope of that visibility matters as much as he seems to think.

>>18716366

I believe that The Truth is not an idea, or a concept, but a person - an eternal, divine person, who is the Order & Wisdom of the Cosmos we live in, and this person became human 2000 years ago to fulfill millenia old prophecies about the redemption of mankind from death - death, disease, and decay which the first humans introduced into the cosmos, by rejecting this personal Truth himself.

This means a lot of things - but most practically it means that the past 2000 years are full of the richest, most consistent, and most hopeful history I've ever seen, of people walking in the way that the Truth himself has laid forward, to become just like Him when he was on earth with us, to the point of working miracles just like him. Many of those existed in living memory, too, like St. John Maximovitch, who was one Fr. Seraphim Rose's bishops while he was alive.

The majority of the church hierarchy hated St. John Maximovitch. Why? According to the people who hated him, he was "irritable, crude, unthinking of others (for example, because he comes late to services), disrupts the usual order of things, is a poor administrator, can’t be understood, mumbles and falls asleep in the midst of the most important conversations".

When he arrived late for church services, he usually wouldn't be wearing any shoes, either. The man seriously gave no fucks at all, about anyone or their opinion of him. But the people who knew him closely, knew that he was the most loving man that was alive, and a miracle-worker, at that. The only people that hated him were stuck-up, organizational, red-tape assholes who were in the Church game to wear fancy robes, drink expensive champagne, and take money from the laity.

St. John Maximovitch would arrive late to services because he would be doing things like trading bottles of vodka to homeless people for their starving children, to give them to orphanages. He would walk through walls to give people holy communion. He never slept (only prayed at night time) and barely ate - and yet, he was accused (by those red-tape assholes) for embezzling funds from the parish treasury. They were accusing a man who didn't wear shoes of embezzling money.

So, I believe that Christ is risen from the dead, and that there have been hundreds of thousands of men who have truly walked the path that He has laid out for us, and have given some living, tangible, living-memory proof that the world is worth living in - because it isn't some materialistic clockwork prison, but a place where living souls come in contact with eternity, and our struggle to be good, and good to each other, in the highest, most miraculous ways possible.

Life has not become less of a struggle (in fact, Orthodoxy makes it even more of a struggle, and intentionally so), but learning the truth about what life is, has given me much more reason to struggle, and to strive for something higher every day.

>>18716444
>Christ has risen from the dead
>trampling down death by death
>and upon those in the tombs
>bestowing
>L
>I
>F
>E

>>18716434

My understanding of Kant is that he grounds all understanding in the created human mind, and how external reality transcendentally presupposes a certain structure, conforming to the human mind, in order to be comprehensible to the human mind.

Doesn't this mean that he doesn't fundamentally base his philosophy on the eternal, uncreated God?

>>18716459
He doesn't base it on God, no, but that's not really the scope of his project. It's really just about what it is possible to know by reason and by experience. External reality doesnt presuppose a certain structure, but rather that structure of experience is imposed by human nature on a reality that definitely exists in some way, but about which we cant say anything that is verifiably true or false by the senses. You really cant say anything about the Actual External World, the Thing in Itself, with just human faculties.

Faith and revelation can leap over this barrier with no problem. In fact the scope of faith is increased: I believe other people, the people I know and love, really exist as a matter of faith supported by the love we share. I may not be able to say anything positive about the rest of the Thing in Itself but I know they are in there. I also know God is in there, and the whole process of scriptural revelation and Holy Tradition fill back in the detailed reality of the world that reason was forced to leave behind.

>>18716057
Read kant

>>18716511
idk man metaphysics seem like a waste of time to me and his head scares me, why is it so big

>>18716582
Because architectonic autism

>>18716137
Dangerously based
>>18716148
I am as well

I will never be Orthodox Christian.
Tomorrow I will wake up. I will do work. And then ill smoke weed and drink beer and then sleep. But most importantly there will still be no truth.
And who knows, maybe ill wake up and ill be 30? 50? 80? And there will still be no truth.

>>18716607
Christ awaits us. Let us ascend eagerly to the mountain of the Lord.

>>18716611
The only thing that awaits us is death. That is the ultimate truth we know. What happens after that we are uncertain of.

Picture this:
We're in a casino. We're at the roulette table. You choose to place a bet. I choose to walk away. I choose to go to the bar. I choose to leave the casino and go outside. I choose life. You choose to stand there and watch the wheel spin. Spending your time waiting to see if you've won your bet.

Come outside.

>>18716481

Then, if Kant's whole project isn't based on God, then there are some fundamental problems:

1. How is it that human nature, coming into being in time, is the cause of the structure of the outside world, when pre-human reality needs to have structure in it to compose parts of human nature? If part of human nature is composed of pre-existing structure in the outside world(ie, matter at least), and if time is structured (with beginning, middle, and end), then the mind that imposes structure on the outside world prior to human existence cannot be a mind that is limited in time or bound by matter.

We know who this eternal mind belongs to, the Holy Trinity, since the past prior to the existence of human nature was revealed to Moses, and one of the Holy Trinity became incarnate 2000 years ago to re-confirm everything and redeem fallen human nature by his resurrection, but this means that the Kantian project can't be a reasonable foundation for rational belief - however, it can provide to a degree, some more insights to features of the image of God we are created in, since the world was created by the God we are made in the image of, and our minds can interpret the reality that God made correctly, or incorrectly, based on the level of spiritual deception, or conversely holiness & deification that one's mind is in.

2. If the prior point is rejected in a way that supposes that the human mind is what causes structure in the outside world, then the human mind must be eternal, and this is not reconcilable with Orthodox Christianity, being a re-invention of Hermiticism or Hinduism, where the human mind is secretly God.

Ergo, the Orthodox revalation doesn't "fill in the gaps" - rather, it provides the foundation for the legitimate insights Kant has into the nature and structure of the human mind - provided that the insights that Kant has don't over-reach their natural, created bounds, and presume to be a foundation for something it is metaphysically incapable of being a foundation of.

Kant's transcendental method of argumentation is a particularly strong method, and I believe that shades of it have been seen in the Church Fathers, but it was less explicit in them, and they often used more plain and straightforward proofs.

>>18716607

Is it true that there will still be no truth?

>>18716630
Nope. Because here is the thing about Orthodoxy. It is not just obsession, its not legalism, its not counting down the seconds. It is a desperate running to Christ. And during that run, you gain in love, and patience, and humility, and peace of mind, and respect for God and man, and many other good fruits of which you are not worthy. It is life itself. It is freedom from the bondage of the passions.

Now granted, I have made basically no progress. I have not been baptized in the Orthodox Church yet, there just isn't one near me and so I am moving. I cannot control my lust as God demands of me. But I have faith that in time, and with much prayer, and labors on my part, that God will protect me from these things, and that I will grow into the man that he created me to be. Until then, I must continue to run the race.

>>18715958
>howdoes reading philosophy equate to an altered state of mind brought on by a consumable substance?
why are you trying to equate these things. they are different.

>>18715944
the point of philosophy is asking questions and developing the knowledge and techniques to answer them, and to make new questions. think of philosophy like science. they both benefit you or mankind in general. if you don't know how it benefits you, maybe philosophy is not for you.

>>18716646
In the present it is
>>18716660
I hope you win your race.
>>18716669
It was mostly a an existential shitpost. I benefit from philosophy.

>>18716682

If it's presently true that there is no truth, then it is not presently true that there is no truth. Truth would have to exist for that statement to be true.

>>18716692
Ok Bertrand. I was trying to have fun with words. You got me. Im sorry.

>>18716694

It's all good, but that's one of the points of philosophy - making sure that what we're saying makes sense, so that we can know what is actually true. In this case, with just applying basic logic, it turns out that something must be true, since it's impossible to deny the idea of truth without using the idea of truth. Logic is a branch of philosophy - Aristotle recorded his knowledge of it over 2000 years ago, and we still use the exact same ideas to build logic gates in computers today. Logic is just something fundamental to how the world works, and it's a non-material part of how the world works - that's where even deeper philosophy, like metaphysics and theology comes in.

>>18716393
Pretty straight forward way of putting it,

In OP's case even if God himself came down and said working a 9 to 5 and smoking weed after wards is the actual non-ironic highest state of divinity available to man...he'd probably write it off anyway.

>>18716642
Ok I read a bunch of the Orthodox survival guide, and honestly I just don't agree. I understand the point about the Mystery of Iniquity, but there is so much in there that makes Fr Seraphim come off totally wrong. The bizarre veneration of the Romanovs, the insistence on a mass Jacobin conspiracy behind the French Revolution and a body count that no historian I heard of has ever attested to, the condemnation of literally anything remotely new even if it has nothing to do with salvation in even the remotest way, and just the fetishization of all these secondary traditions unrelated to the faith. I know that he read some Guenon before finding Christianity and Im trying really hard to be intellectually charitable to him, but it really seems he has kind of confused the forest for the trees here.

>thread about philosophy
>zealots just HAVE to jump in and sperg about muh jesus
everytime

>>18715944
What's the point of washing your ass if you are just gonna shit again?

>>18717053
>atheist
>contributes absolutely nothing to the thread
every time.

>>18716660
beautiful post anon

>>18717013

In all fairness, it is a completely different world that you're looking into, and the "survival guide" is something that was aimed towards an audience who are already believing Orthodox Christians, so a lot of things are being taken for granted here.

The veneration of the Romanovs isn't bizarre at all in the context of the Orthodox tradition - they were martyrs for the faith, and so are worthy of veneration.

I'm not sure what you're reading as controversial regarding the Jacobins, as far as I know, everything Fr. Rose has talked about is repeated in extremely normie sources like wikipedia.

The condemnation of anything that has nothing to do with salvation is intentionally extreme, and it's understandably so when you keep in mind that Fr. Seraphim Rose is a monk. His entire life has literally been dedicated to his own salvation, and preaching salvation, after being eyeballs deep in scientism and perennialism the rest of his life before. He would be a pretty shitty monk if he didn't try to put literally everything in the context of salvation, if he has given everything else in his life up for it.

He does have a deep appreciation for everything that got him to where he was. Listening to Bach brought him closer to Christianity, and he recommends Bach to people new to the faith in order to refine their souls to accept higher Orthodox truths - but he sees even high expressions of music like Bach
in a fuller context, as a stepping stone towards the eternal life in Christ.

What are the "secondary traditions unrelated to the faith"? I'm not sure what he's fetishising, if anything here - the Orthodox tradition has kept the fullness of the Christian faith for the 2000 years . Whatever might seem secondary on the outside, like icons and the veneration of them, is something that entire ecumenical councils (particularly, the seventh covered this and the topic of iconoclasm) have been convened over, and these seemingly "extra" parts from an outside perspective, are another dimension of fullness to the entire liturgical life of worship and veneration. It's worth nothing that there are miracle-working icons that stream holy oil, so I don't think we're going to consider icons as secondary to the faith any time soon.

I went on a tangent about icons since I don't particularly know exactly what you're referring to about "secondary traditions", but it is one example that I know that Protestants might consider a secondary issue, but has not been considered secondary in the historic faith.

Even if you don't agree with him, it's worth understanding his perspective, and seeing the full picture that he's painting. It's rare to find anyone who is willing to go through literally 1000 years of history and paint a coherent evaluation of it, its development, and causes for development.

>>18717081

*It's worth noting that there are miracle-working icons

>>18717079
im not an atheist but im not a fanatic like you either, and my contribution to the thread is hopefully stopping you from posting

>>18717075
Yes