Conversion

[Anonymous No.22246467]

Is anyone here who went from atheist to theist? What book, except the bible, was the most influential in your conversion? Was the change quick or gradual?

[Anonymous No.22246473]

No books, mostly drugs.

[Anonymous No.22246477]

>>22246467
Psychedelics did more to make me believe in God(s) than any book ever did

[Anonymous No.22246479]

>>22246467
It's literally called growing up. Atheism is for immature (man)children. All of the greatest philosopher had a reverence for Christianity.
/end

[Anonymous No.22246491]

>>22246467
Just rationality. Atheism is just irrational, illogical, etc. Also my interest in metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.22246500]

>>22246479
>All of the greatest philosopher had a reverence for Christianity.
I literally do not know philosophers who converted to Christianity, not even one. Can you give me some example on it

[Anonymous No.22246503]

I was already well on my way without reading anything. But I will say Mere Christianity was a nice read.

[Anonymous No.22246510]

>>22246477
Psychadelics certaily reveal an aspect of reality that is incompatible with materialism and atheism, and in that sense they do a great service, but the more I learn about them, the more I am set in my resolve never to take them and in my conviction that the wisdom they put you in contact with is a spiritually corrosive pseudo-enlightenment that tries to lead you astray.

[Anonymous No.22246545]

>>22246491
What's your take on how logical the Trinity is?

[Anonymous No.22246546]

>>22246467
not really from atheist to theist, but from a very confused understanding of what was meant by "God", to actually making good enough sense of it.

I guess I must have been an "atheist" at some point (like most teenagers; plus my parents are atheists, as is pretty much everyone in my country), but since the age of 18 or so, I've been broadly sympathetic to theism, pretty much for intuitive reasons.

although I had no clear idea what the object of belief was, just had some notion that it was "necessary to ground ethics" and whatnot. I guess I had some vaguely defined fideistic, personalist, divine command view of this thing.

Books that helped me truly understand what is meant by "God" were Edward Feser's "the Last Superstition" (which has become a bit of a meme but is still very good) and DB Hart's "The experience of God". Both are christian (catholic and orthodox, respectively). Completely different styles (Feser is an analytic, Hart is not).

(never joined an organized religion and have no particular intention of doing so, but I guess if it finds me it finds me)

[Anonymous No.22246601]

>>22246503
Not really directly about theism (and not really a book) but Lewis' "The Abolition of Man" is something I recommend to all normies so they can at least get a feel of what is wrong with modern thinking.

[Anonymous No.22246644]

>>22246500
You don't know St. Augustine? He wrote a book about it.

[Anonymous No.22246657]

>>22246644
"philosopher" on /lit/ means shitty post-enlightenment graphomaniacs with no substance or arguments
just a heads up

[Anonymous No.22246737]

I've never been an atheist but this is a nice thread

[Anonymous No.22246753]

>>22246737
just wait till it gets hijacked

[Anonymous No.22246797]

>>22246753
my post was gonna say something about how it hasn't been hijacked yet

[Anonymous No.22246845]

>>22246467
I was an atheist as a kid and my parents only started taking me to church when I was 13, where after I was an agnostic but closer to an atheist. What unironically started me on the path to true belief was listening to "Les Misérables: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall" while I drove around working this job where I cut into roadkill deer for the government. I cry everytime that Bishop shows Jean Valjean kindness. Then I got a chronic stomach infection from cutting into rotting deer, which caused me to become deliriously sick after drinking, more so than a normal hangover. One rough morning I had a vision where I saw a ball of light that explained the difference between time and eternity (I had just read St. Augustine's account of time in his Confession) to me and I've believed in God ever since then.

[Anonymous No.22246868]

>>22246477
>>22246473
same, I triggered schizophrenia with weed and shrooms

[Anonymous No.22246878]

Sadly I had to recognize the reality that there is an immaterial aspect to the cosmos through the sheer mass of empirical evidence by reading about UFOlogy/demonology; it would have been much nobler to simply adopt that view as the default, like all my forefathers did. From there I drifted through various occultist drivel, but Guenon and Evola helped me find firmer footing before Hermeticism and Meditations on the Tarot led me to traditional Christianity.

[Anonymous No.22246884]

This made me doubt my atheism, am I retarded?
https://www.unz.com/freed/stephen-c-meyer-douglas-axe-chuck-darwin-and-me/

[Anonymous No.22246886]

Study science and Platonism in tandem via Dillon and Gerson, then study the history of hermeticism.

Hint: Read the first part of Faust where he talks about studying sigils and having dizzying flights and seeing nature's soul and so on, and then read Glimpses of Truth by Gurdjieff in Views from the Real World. Then read the Timaeus.

Science is headless and can only reify its concepts. We still know nothing about the real world beyond our puny measurements of it. One of the most consistent and lucid thoughts/feelings I had on psychedelics was the absolute certainty that we are seeing 2% and using 2% of our total "being." That, and the fact that our ordinary experience is actually a "limiter" that prevents us from being overwhelmed by the ocean we're really floating atop of, by convincing us that it's firm ground and making us never look down, much less try to swim downward deliberately, much less realize that we can breathe underwater, much less realize that the air above the water was just more waters to begin with and we were always just breathing rarefied waters so that we wouldn't be overwhelmed, but we have never not been "in" the waters, in fact we partly are the waters.

Once you have had a few of the initial realizations you see modern observational science as a few forays of poking the ocean of the real with sticks and noticing they come back wet.

[Anonymous No.22246889]

>>22246886
Forgot to say: But from there, the journey is your own and can't be dogmatic.

Also read the first few essays of volume one of The UR Group's Introduction to Magic after reading the things I mentioned but before reading the Timaeus. Save the Timaeus for last because it's "boring" and won't make sense until you realize what it actually is.

[Anonymous No.22246897]

>>22246467

Nope, have always been in the truth and never fell for any of the belonging-to-a-community LARPing memes. Feels good man.

>>22246491

corrected your homework

>>22246479

This fallacy gets repeated frequently. The basic idea is that since atheists are unpleasant spergs, it's better to just fall in line with an established human lifeworld which reproduces society "normally". This is "maturity", and maturity is a word which is loaded with the concept of "automatically good" and thus supposed to be incapable of being criticized.

But the truth is exactly the other way round. Getting duped into a religion is only "maturity" in the neutral sense of the word (getting older, accomodating oneself to the world), what's absent in adhering to any religion is the aspect of "approaching closer to truth/wisdom". This latter component is missing from all religion, but the "maturity" word is loaded with both meanings, but properly they are separated, as here. Many people who take on external religion in adulthood with a kind of lazy "go along to get along" attitude aren't doing so out of concern for the "truth" or "wisdom", they're just going with the crowd (to raise a family/access a major community), that's all, which is quite the opposite, and only "maturity" in the neutral or even negative sense. The need for religion is a basic defect in the human condition itself, and taking up religion is thus only accomodating that defect, not actually "maturing" in the positive sense of the word.

Secondarily, large swathes of Europe's population are irreligious, and look quite normal/don't go around with neckbeards and fedoras. It's like me cherry-picking Marguerite Perrin. Muslims outbreeding atheists is a valid and separate observation, but I was delighted to see a recent graph showing the opposite, at least for now: people abandoning religion altogether is (per the graph) massively outstripping muslim replacement rates. Not a long ball thing, but still nice to see.

[Anonymous No.22246918]

>>22246884
No, just realizing how faulty the atheistic arguments are.
They're all the same style of strong facade backed by lacking evidence, being shown as ideology and truth.

you should look into the "fossilized trees". There's appearances of trees fossilized between layers that, according to evolutionists, appeared in different millenia.
What was posited in place of that by the person explaining was the Flood. It sorted layers by weight and density while it ran. Along with the divots and ravines that hint at a spot water found to drain through, eroding them in the process.

[Anonymous No.22246924]

>>22246467
Phenomenology of Spirit

There's a word for atheist; it's called sense-certainty.

[Anonymous No.22246933]

The Transcendental Argument for God pretty much convinced me clinging to atheism from the basis of a lack of scientific evidence was actually illogical and that made me realize there were no other bases from which I could deny God. So any book on proofs of God that includes the Transcendental Argument for God I suppose.

[Anonymous No.22246942]

>>22246467
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come

[Anonymous No.22246957]

>>22246467
No.
Only agnostic-theists find their way back to some form of spirituality, having never lost that schizophrenic bent, that thirst to be dominated by an extra terrestrial fascist father figure

[Anonymous No.22246972]

>>22246957
>pop psych
>missing the point
how old are you ?

[Anonymous No.22246975]

>>22246467
>What book
>was the most influential in your conversion?
Revolutionary Demonology
Spinal Catastrophism
Fanged Noumena
Ccru. Writings 1997-2003

and partially, the (now non-existent) xenosystems blog (the articles on Gnon-Theology)

[Anonymous No.22246985]

>>22246467
https://web.archive.org/web/20190704065822/http://www.xenosystems.net/gnon-theology-and-time/

"Glutted on forbidden fruit, Gnon-Theology strips God like an engine, down to the limit of abstraction, or eternity for-itself. Does any such perspective exist? We already know that this is not our question. All such ‘regional ontology’ has been suspended. We are nevertheless already entitled, through the grace of Gnon (which — remember — might (or might not) be God), to the assumption or acceptance of reality that: for any God to be God it cannot be less than eternity for-itself. Whatever eternity for-itself entails, any God will, too.

What it entails, unambiguously, is time-travel, in the strong sense of reverse causation, although not necessarily in the folk/Hollywood variant (which has also had serious defenders) based on the retro-transportation of physical objects into the past. Knowledge of the future is indistinguishable from counter-chronic transmission of information. This is perhaps the single most critical insight in realistic time-travel research — we’ll get back to it. (If anyone finds it less than logically irresistible, use the comments thread.)

To accelerate this discussion with bloggish crudity, on a heading out of Gnon-Theology into Occidental religious history (and to the possibility of sleep), we can jump to one simple, certain, and secure conclusion: No Christian can consistently deny the reality of time-travel. The objection ‘if (reverse) time-travel if possible, where are the time-travellers?’ is annulled by the Christian revelation itself. Messianic Incarnation (of God or eternity for-itself), along with all true prophecy, providential history, and answered prayer, instantiates time-travel with technical exactitude. There can be no truth whatsoever to the Christian religion unless time-travel has fundamentally structured human history. Whatever else Christianity might be, it is a time-travel story, and one that at times appears to be peculiarly lacking in clear self-understanding.

(Time-travel, it should perhaps be noted explicitly, has no obvious dependency on Christianity, or even upon the God of Gnon-Theology. That is a topic for other occasions.)"

[Anonymous No.22246990]

>>22246972
He has a fair point. I’ve never even heard of a convinced atheist returning to religion. Atheism is dogmatically flawed, but dogmatic nonetheless. And the great irony is that the conviction disallows for questioning in the one thing which would allow you to question your conviction. If someone isn’t at least a little bit agnostic or theistic, there’s probably not much hope for them.

[Anonymous No.22246994]

>>22246886
>>22246889

[Anonymous No.22247017]

>>22246545
Logic & reason can only take you so far. Once you've meditated and come to the consensus that there must be a God, then you must accept that there are things beyond your comprehension. If God is unlike anything in creation, then how could you expect to understand and grasp who he is? By this logic, it's logical how the Trinity is illogical.

[Anonymous No.22247019]

>>22246467
Wilson S. - Melancology. Black Metal Theory and Ecology (2014)

"Perhaps in the spirit of universalism, both monotheistic and mathematical, it is possible to unify the two myths. There is only one God, and His Eternal Omnipotence, absolutely appalled at the image that His creation offers to Him, and filled with loathing for it, annihilates Himself in a profound groan of agony and despair. Imagine the agonies of Christ on the Cross multiplied to infinite proportions, the maximum of tragic intensity giving rise to measureless expenditures of energy in the form of sonic vibrations. This is the sound of the universe, the melancholic sound that constitutes the universe, the cosmic noise from which all form and structure derives as oscillations coalesce into dark matter, atomic matter and light,[27] producing the stars from which life ultimately derives, a universe in which, with supreme irony, human forms of life will perceive divine harmony and mathematical consistency, the very image of creation that God sought to avoid, but through avoiding, in his tragic stupidity brings about.
No wonder Lucifer rebelled, becoming Satan, the great adversary, patron of black metal which if it cannot break the chain of eternal repetition, affirms the divine cacophony and pandemonium that results from the death of God, therein returning harmony to dissonance all the better to affirm the primordial impulse, the sovereign gesture, in which God negates himself in the slavish image of man, the divine hatred of the divine returning each time in an ecstasy filled with woe of a different force and quality."

"27. For astrophysicist Mark Whittle, this is indeed more or less how the universe began, describing the ‘big bang’ as a kind of ‘primal scream’, ‘a moment of silence followed by a rapidly descending scream which builds to a deep roar and ends in a deafening hiss’. See ‘Primal Scream: Sounds from the Big Bang’."

[Anonymous No.22247021]

>>22246467
Absolutely based pic

[Anonymous No.22247036]

>>22246957
I almost forgot this devil girl. She is 10/10

[Anonymous No.22247067]

>>22246467
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2012/10/darwinism-and-natures-undeadness.html

"Indeed, this philosophical implication of Darwinism, that the ordinary notions of life and nonlife no longer make sense and that they need to be replaced by something like the idea of a baffling state of living death, amounts to an ironic, postmodern kind of pantheism. Darwinism not only zombifies but deifies all of nature, since the evolutionary process encompasses the cosmic preconditions of the emergence of life so that the whole universe is required to create life in a mindless, natural fashion. There is no personal God, but the universe as a whole in all of its interconnectedness does yield organisms as byproducts, as though the universe were a creator god. Nature as a whole isn’t personal, but social creatures like us will inevitably anthropomorphize evolutionary patterns. The divinity of nature is no majestic thing, since the cosmos is best understood as an undead monstrosity. Whereas prior to Darwin, educated people could attribute intentional properties to the universe, with no hint of irony since they could assume that a personal God created the universe as a machine, bestowing it with artificial functions, in our postmodern time we can only look on in disgust as the universe abuses our social reflex, compelling us to be overly friendly with what we know scientifically to be inanimate matter. We know that we ourselves are spiritless entities; to be sure, we have a brain that has marvelous effects, but metaphysically we’re one with the natural cosmos, meaning that we’re thoroughly material and physical. But physically interacting material things aren’t inert or dead; they’re peerlessly creative and thus as divine as anything we can know. That divinity, however, is repulsive, blasphemous, and just as abominable as a zombie monster’s mockery of life."

"All are Undead
The answer, which isn’t widely appreciated, seems to be the following. Nothing in nature is living in the old, supernatural sense. But neither is anything natural dead in the corresponding sense, since the theistic intuition is that nonliving, dumb and blind matter can’t do the work of God, which is why God is needed to create everything--especially life on Earth. Natural forces are neither alive nor dead, in the senses given by the old intuition. Nevertheless, those forces do the work of God, but without being God and indeed without being alive even in the modern scientific respect. These forces, then, are undead, as are their products such as you and me, which is to say that the zombie stands as the best symbol for our intuitions to latch onto as we come to grips with the philosophical implications of Darwinism.
<...> Undeadness is like spacetime, in that an undead thing has some attributes of the living and of the nonliving, but isn’t the same as either, given the old, naive way of thinking about them."

[Anonymous No.22247069]

>>22246897
the atheist delusion illustrated

[Anonymous No.22247072]

>>22246990
on a proper understanding of it, there are no atheists, only people who don't understand what is meant by "God"

[Anonymous No.22247077]

>>22247072
Ignosticists?

[Anonymous No.22247102]

>>22246467
Numbers and false-gods.
I'm convinced evil is here so we know who they oppose.

[Anonymous No.22247141]

>>22246990
>I’ve never even heard of a convinced atheist returning to religion
It is undignifying to return to placating spirits, that are shown to be your delusions and superstitions

>the conviction disallows for questioning in the one thing which would allow you to question your conviction
No-no-no. At some point, the boundary between 'theism' and 'atheism' start blurring.
It is the return to the Jewish/Platonic God is impossible. But you can always just bite the bullet and embrace an abominable counterintuitive lovecraftian monstrosity, welcoming it inside your heart. Such a God, devoid of intentionality, morality, human-like goals and human-like cognition would be still plausible.

[Anonymous No.22247149]

>>22247141
>t.midwit

[Anonymous No.22247161]

>>22247149
only on the internet can such weirdos as lovecraftian inspired foolish "theists" exist

[Anonymous No.22247178]

prison did it for me

[Anonymous No.22247181]

>>22247178
kashmir shaivanon?

[Anonymous No.22247207]

mix of a lot, but mostly a gradual drift away from atheism. Crime and punishment played a big role in it. RW/reactionary politics definitely played a part, but the more I got involved in faith the less I cared about all that. Above all, if you want to find Christ, just start praying and going to (an orthodox) church to talk to the priest. Books can only get you a comparatively small portion of the way, far more of it you'll only get from actually participating and practicing it.
It takes time, but, picrel, once you've experienced it once you will know it and you will know there is no turning back. And you'll continue to experience this, time and time again, such as after confession or communion, or at your lowest in moments of repentance, that Christ is there with you and loves you more than you could ever fathom.

[Anonymous No.22247210]

>>22247149
Behold:
1. Intentions are heuristics (i.e. quick-and-dirty shortcuts to decrease computational costs).
2a. Ascribing intentions to the allegedly perfect God, implies that he is subjected to thermodynamics and entropy. (i.e. not perfect, i.e. not god)
2b. Not ascribing intentions to the God, implies that he is no different from an atheistic Big Bang.
Pick your poison.


Now, I repeat. This does not NECESSARILY refute God per se. You can still claim that we deal with a complex paradoxical Azathoth here, that is just too deep to comprehend. Because the Complexity Theory itself is just too deep.
It is just that we definitely now know what this entity would be NOT. It is definitely NOT sentient in the human sense. The intentions-talk (your evolutionary toolkit to predict behavior from the frowning ape-faces) would not work here.

[Anonymous No.22247214]

>>22247069
"the atheist delusion illustrated"

[Anonymous No.22247245]

>>22246467
No one who actually understands the definition of the word "atheist", as far as I know, has ever gone from one side of the fence to another. Anecdotally, from personal exprience, absolutely every single case was the complete oposite in so-called converting (very catholic, orthodox etc. to atheist or apatheist). This usually comes with age a.k.a. independence. When you are no longer in the toxic influence of your parents or church-going buddies, and actually start reading and independently evaluating information, you begin to realize you've been fed a lie.

[Anonymous No.22247288]

>>22247214
it's over, i got called a tranny by a representive of one of the only ideologies that permits trooning out

[Anonymous No.22247291]

>>22247245
But I did though

[Anonymous No.22247417]

>>22247288
>"it's over, i got called a tranny by a representive of one of the only ideologies that permits trooning out"
>"got called a tranny by a representive of one of the only ideologies that permits trooning out"
>"the only ideologies that permits trooning out"

I didn't know you voted Democrat, anon.

[Anonymous No.22247430]

>>22246467
>went from atheist to theist?
Varro had 3 theologies:
-civic rituals
-poetry myths
-natural philosophy's god

So, translating that question into normal human language, I get that I am being asked 3 different questions here:
1) Do I perform some kind of bonding activities with frens once a week? (like playing tabletop DnD campaign)
2) Do I utilize the cognitive optimum strategy via polysemantic narratives, that condense important life-lessons info in a memorable fashion? (like re-reading Silmarillion or Zarathustra constantly)
3) Do I have an opinion on Big Bang and cosmology?

[Anonymous No.22247440]

>>22246479
Liking some things about Christianity and actually believing in it are two very different things. Implying that the only other option to being pointlessly mad about everything about it is taking it all as literally true is retarded.

[Anonymous No.22247446]

>>22246878
So, when are you giving away all your possessions, like the Bible says?

[Anonymous No.22247450]

>>22247417
why are you an ESL making a post that revolves around english

[Anonymous No.22247456]

>>22246546
I've come to accept that "God" can and is used interchangeably with "existence, and the story behind it." It can be a nice tool for talking about life and the universe from a meta perspective. You just have to remember that a lot of people are still literally talking about some personified thing that has feelings and you can make special requests of, don't confuse the two.

[Anonymous No.22247465]

>>22247181
no

[Anonymous No.22247487]

>>22246845
Damn.

[Anonymous No.22247490]

>>22247456
pantheists like you make me sick

[Anonymous No.22247503]

>>22246467
I went from atheist to theist once. I was not "convinced" by a book because as a second time theist I knew that good rational arguments for God and religion don't exist. But my life circumstances and mindsiet at the time pushed me to seek God.

But now I'm truly atheist so everything is alright again. Probably never going back because my mind ha opened up a lot about how this world works since then

[Anonymous No.22247524]

>>22247503
did you ever grab something like Aquinas' proofs or just coasted without study, though?

[Anonymous No.22247539]

>>22247450
Been far?

[Anonymous No.22247549]

>>22246467
No, but peer from university seems to have been the case.
They really liked romanticism, so there's your clue I guess.

[Anonymous No.22247560]

>>22247490
That's what you took from that? Holy shit you live in a meme.

[Anonymous No.22247561]

>>22246479
Doing what you're told without question, as well as believing in santa is literally what we associate with childish innocance.

[Anonymous No.22247562]

>>22246510
So you’ve never taken psychedelics yet proclaim they make materialism or atheism incompatible with reality?

>pseud

The truth is transcendental idealism and atheism.

[Anonymous No.22247573]

>>22246845
Pseud reasons to believe, literally listening to music and getting sick. These are completely irrational reasons that don’t lead you any closer to real truth. A Muslim or Hindu or Scientologist could have the same reasons as you and be incorrect.

[Anonymous No.22247584]

>>22246897
Real, theists are unable to ever give evidence or solid reasoning

[Anonymous No.22247586]

>>22247524
Not him but cosmological arguments only really began to fascinate me personally after I already had some belief. I think I was too bitter to sit still and really contemplate them. However I did accidentally brush against a more intuitive or affective version of them that did partly move me toward mystical religiosity in the long run, namely, the thoughts "something exists instead of nothing" and "the something is orderly, it's one way instead of another way or no ways at all." I still remember walking down the stairs of my parents' apartment building and really fully realizing how crazy it is that something exists. It's like a "free" conduit directly to the divine, one you don't need to be a mystic to tap into, it's just there free for the taking any time. In everything else, we have to defer judgement and we're always open to the accusation (usually from within ourselves) that we're "merely coping." For example we hear about theories of platonic noesis and gnosis and think yeah yeah that would be nice if I could do it, but I can't, so what if it's all just made up?

But this one is different, it's like a kernel of actual noetic knowledge you can activate any time, giving a small taste of what noesis is really like. You can tap directly all the way to the root of being itself by just imagining there not being a universe, and then juxtaposing the fact that there is one, and an orderly and evolving one at that. It's something about how all the cynicism of scientism and materialism forces you to default to the cynical, suspicious answer in a vicious form of Ockham's razor (as above when we doubted the true existence of noesis/gnosis because we haven't seen it for ourselves), and then that very same instinct which is normally tormenting you by shearing away everything magical and leaving only a prosaic meaningless universe tells you "Logically, using our usual cynical logic of cynicism, nothing should exist," and then the thought "But it does" hits that thought like a thunderbolt of positivity and light scattering negativity and darkness.

The feeling you have if you truly sit there and go "it makes MORE SENSE for there to be NOTHING, because nature is a meaningless entropic machine, but there's SOMETHING, and that is anti-entropic, creative, and positive by logical necessity - at least something defeats the cynicism of entropy, even if I have to identify that 'something' with EVERYTHING, of which I am a part."

[Anonymous No.22247591]

>>22247586
You can then extend this thought, as I said, to the fact that it's not just an empty something, but a differentiated, orderly something, a multiplicity in unity and unity in multiplicity, and there is clearly "consciousness" (conceptual structure) and "intent" (teleology) underlying that, even if we have no idea how to make sense of this. But now you have already noetically brushed up against the sheer metaphysical truth of the world's Being, its Unity in Multiplicity and Multiplicity in Unity (a living coincidentia oppositorum), YOUR contiguity with the world (another paradox or miracle). And you can add to that the fact that you perceive yourself as free, perceive yourself AS aware of your own perceptions. All of these are somethings, very orderly and intentional somethings, where many nothings could be but aren't, and all of these somethings are part of the big something where the big nothing could be but isn't.

To me this is the feeling Anselm and others felt when they formulated the ontological proofs, which we no longer find credible, but it's only because they were instinctive realists while we are instinctive conceptualists/coherentists. But even if we say that the logical entailments of our concept of being are merely "our" logical entailments, arbitrary and subjective, we still have to deal with the realist problem of how such concepts arose to begin with, so there is still an open door straight to the sense of raw wonder and majesty that Anselm felt when he thought his mind's concept of being was brushing against THE concept of Being, in God.

The fact that we are capable of this "free" noesis, any time we want, the fact that philosophy is inevitable as a result, despite all our attempts to articulate the paradoxicality and meaninglessness of philosophy and trick ourselves into not making "the flight of the one to the One" (phugi monou pros monon), is to me one of the great miracles of consciousness and life. You can activate it any time you want. It's like God perma-installed a seed of gnosis in your soul so even if you lose all your other gear and have to start from scratch you always have the un-droppable seed and can begin again.

[Anonymous No.22247592]

>>22247490
pantheists are just like radical centrists
>>22247560
It's okay anon, NTA, but after giving you a second read, think I understand what you're getting at.

[Anonymous No.22247614]

>>22247592
What I'm getting at is it's fundamentally just a word. I think it's used way more to express something like what I said than to refer to Yahweh or some other being that is literally listening to you having the conversation and preparing to judge you.

To be clear, I don't really even use the word "God", I'm just more open minded about other people throwing it around now that I understand this.

[Anonymous No.22247621]

>>22247573
>These are completely irrational reasons
Yes, they are. But why should I base my life on rational argument?

[Anonymous No.22247649]

>>22247592
they hijacked it

[Anonymous No.22247682]

>>22247210
um yeah
and this is supposed to prove you're not a midwit ?

[Anonymous No.22247696]

>>22247649
told you

[Anonymous No.22247708]

>>22247682
>and this is supposed to prove you're not a midwit ?
Less midwit than you, at least.

[Anonymous No.22247912]

>>22247072
Define god, then. In a way that its definition doesn't change to suit a particular argument.

[Anonymous No.22247916]

Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief
While reading it I felt that everything it said just made perfect sense, like I had reverted to the barest existence possible. Rather than convincing myself of the truthfulness of the teachings, I found myself failing to reconcile all the things I thought I knew with the plain truth in front of me. And it really feels like I knew all of it from the day I was born, but I was too
distracted or scared, willfully ignorant of the guilt in my soul.

[Anonymous No.22247932]

>>22246897

[Anonymous No.22248128]

>>22247932
>sees post not mentioning politics
>lacks any coherent criticism
>knee-jerks to posting a political meme
The intellectual capacity of an atheist.

[Anonymous No.22248210]

>>22248128

[Anonymous No.22248221]

>>22247586
>>22247591
Really, really enjoyed these posts and your writing style. Very inspiring and beautiful.

[Anonymous No.22248239]

>>22247591
>>22247586
It's what many theologians refer to as contemplating God through creation. I always feel better looking at some beautiful view, seeing the perfection of God's creation.
I wonder if the ascetics who went to the wilderness felt like that too.

Probably also the reason so many in the sciences come to belief once they're knowledgeable enough.

[Anonymous No.22248250]

>>22246975
I'm reading Fanged Noumena now. Can you explain how reading it influenced your conversion?

[Anonymous No.22248258]

>>22248239
Also, it's interesting to see the parallel to Scripture. As documented in its own books, and in history, Scripture, the Word of God, has several times regenerated the wholly corrupted belief and church.

Just as we, through the Word of God (Christ), can also find and come back to Him in complete truth.

[Anonymous No.22248268]

>>22246510
psychedelics flood your brain with serotonin and make false memories, theres nothing more to it.
THIS is why they are so effective against depression/serotonin imbalances, but on normal retards like you they do jack shit except kill your ego and make you go into a delirious state about how you met "le god" and "le jebus meet me" even though no such thing happened.

[Anonymous No.22248277]

>>22248258
also, Romans 2:15.
Our own sense of morality and good is already from God.

Interesting to realize most of philosophy trying to deviate from that, and especially political theory/ideology is always trying to fill the need for God through something else (and failing, if you do not fool yourself into it), and almost always criticizing God.
The latter is quite ironic, as they're idolizing their theory instead.
Like Fulton Sheen once said
>"If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself."

Also while trying to explain morality with some other faulty theory and making truth relative.

[Anonymous No.22248284]

>>22246467
manic episode. then i realized atheism and theism were about as likely to be true so i just kept going

[Anonymous No.22248285]

>>22248250
"Epistemologically speaking, qabbalistic programmes have a status strictly equivalent to that of experimental particle physics, or other natural-scientific research programmes, even if their guiding hypotheses might seem decidedly less plausible than those dominant within mainstream scientific institutions."
"Historically, qabbala arises through epic accident, as a side-product of the transition between distinct modes of decimal notation."
"Technically, qabbala is inextricable from digital processing. Emerging from calculative practicality within the context of blind mass-cultural metamorphosis, it antedates it own theoretical legitimation, making sense of itself only derivatively, sporadically and contentiously. Its situation is analogous – and perhaps more than analogous – to that of a spontaneous artificial intelligence, achieving partial lucidity only as a consequence of tidal pragmatic trends that ensure an integral default of self-mastery. Practical systematization of technique precedes any conceivable theoretical motivation. Dialectical interrogation of qabbalism at the level of explicit motivation thus proves superficial and inconsequential, essentially misrecognizing the nature of the beast. (It is equally misleading to ask: What is a computer really for?)"


"a generalized assumption that Qwerty was predominantly arbitrary (quasi-randomly allocated) functioned to pre-emptively dissipate pattern-hunting semiotic inquiry. Challenges from alternative ‘scientific’ keyboards were undermined by skepticism about the very idea of a rational arrangement of the keys. In this respect, Qwerty conformed to a typical trend among oecumenic sign systems, with the sheer inertia of mass-acceptance marginalizing analytical or reformist tendencies to a fringe of philosophical eccentricity or even psychotic delusion. Qwerty thus exploited the mask of accident to construct a positive unconscious tropism or uninvestigated massive transmutation – the subliminal instantiation of a new cultural system."

"Of course, there may be nothing behind the mask. Conventional wisdom would accept no other conclusion. Yet even in this case a large set of investigable Qwernomic ‘phenomena’ remain, consisting of Qwerty-induced coding patterns and potential surplus values, virtual sciences, subcultures, undercurrents, cryptographic methods and partially coherent deliria. Such Qwernomena may be nothing other than the qabbalistic materials of Azathoth, the blind idiot God, whose meaningless pipings lead all semiotic disciplines into the bubbling abyss of futile insanity. A true and dispassionate science, however, has no right or reason to be intimidated by such consequences. Only false – ideological – science, serving as the fawning guardian of securocratic humanism, can justify a prejudice in favour of anthropomorphically acceptable outcomes. Qwerty has in any case long been accepted. The rest is destiny."

[Anonymous No.22248304]

>>22248210
An enemy that numbers time in millennia with a cultural basis that goes back to preliterate man and symbolism rooted in primordial homonids appears!
>[(You)--Choose your fighter]!
a) Richard Dawkins: rat-faced evolutionary biologist who popularized the word meme (secret weapon: Scientism; weakness: Kafka)
b) Sam Harris: midwit who solved the problem of induction (secret weapon: meditiation; weakness: complex thought)
c) Christopher Hitchens: reformed commie/former fag with great talent for rhetoric (secret weapon: alcoholic snark (aka Hitchslap); weakness: Neoconservatism)
d) Daniel Dennett: Saturday morning philosopher (secret weapon: midwit empowerment (aka Reddit); weakness: phenomenology)
>(You): WEAPONIZED CONDESCENTION! ALL FOUR HORSEMEN, I CHOOSE (You)s!
*****[Fight!]*****
>(You) choose: YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS, DO YOU?!
[Counter attack: nuance. Enemy isn't 4 and is unimpressed you don't believe in Santa. Attack is ineffective.]
>(You) choose: WHY DON'T YOU WORSHIP ZEUS?!
[Counter attack: nuance. Even myth is meaningful in a way not reducible to materialism. Attack is ineffective.]
>(You) choose: SCIENCE THOUGH!
[Counter attack: nuance. Enemy brings up the history of science and its complex relationship and continuing interplay with religion. Attack is ineffective.]
>(You) choose: FEDORA TIP!
[Counter attack: enemy is laughing.]
>(You) choose: NO YOU!
[Counter attack: enemy is laughing.]
>REEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>[(You) have fainted.]

[Anonymous No.22248306]

>>22248239
>"Probably also the reason so many in the sciences come to belief once they're knowledgeable enough."

Ultra-Mega-Giga COPIUM: the post.

The overwhelmingly vast majority of scientists are either atheist, apatheist, or even anti-theists. Regardless of the field they specilize in, no more than 6% (12% if you count deism) consider themselves theists.

I've always been curious why theists peddle this shit, as if it has any bearing on reality. Even if they were split 50-50, smack down the middle, what difference does it make?
And wouldn't it become an argument from authority? Come on bros, stop the cope.

[Anonymous No.22248310]

>>22246897
>atheists are titans of intellect
>[but expect you to be impressed they don't believe in Santa]
>atheists stand for free-thinking
>[but demand you adhere to Scientism]
>atheists are champions of reason
>[but have strong opinions about things of which they're uneducated]
>atheists are anti-dogmatic
>[but insist you interpret scripture only according to their ideas of it]
Atheism is an intelligence LARP that retards indoctrinate themselves into. Being an atheist is ridiculously easy; their main weakpoint is their unearned pride and if you poke at their (entirely self-perceived) intelligence they become reactive and break down. Reminder that the legacy of New Atheism is pic-related: homosexual rape/cuck furry fetish cartoons.

[Anonymous No.22248312]

>>22248304
Jesus Christ...

[Anonymous No.22248316]

>>22248310
>"Scientism"

At least make it less obvious...

[Anonymous No.22248319]

>>22248312
Seethe.

[Anonymous No.22248322]

>>22246479
> All of the greatest philosopher had a reverence for Christianity.
Hume, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Quine, Hobbes, Foucault, Carnap, Schopenhauer...

[Anonymous No.22248323]

the atheist ITT is the same one who got btfo on like 5 different threads these past 3 days. I know it's him because of the way he writes (like a woman). consistently makes brainlet tier attacks on strawmen and then retreats once he gets btfo.

[Anonymous No.22248327]

>>22248319
Ah, let me meet you halfway, 2006-anon:

[Anonymous No.22248335]

>>22248316
>calls everything bait
>still responds to it
>"dumbasses"

[Anonymous No.22248337]

>>22248323
Could you quote the replies you think are this same anon? Just curious you mentioned strawmen.

[Anonymous No.22248340]

>>22248327
>biggest eceleb produced by New Atheism
>D-DON'T CALL US FEDORA TIPPERS!
Kek.

[Anonymous No.22248344]

also where do atheists get this notion that there is some sort of debate over the existence of scientism ? is this new ? I'm not aware of this, fill me in.

[Anonymous No.22248349]

>>22248335
Anon, you should of just said you were farming le funny ">you"s. I don't mind. Whatever makes you feel better.

[Anonymous No.22248356]

>>22248340
What?...
What the fuck, are these like chatGPT replies?
Holy shit, am I being punk'd?

[Anonymous No.22248362]

>>22248344
Come on, anon...

[Anonymous No.22248364]

>>22248344
Atheism is an intelligence LARP. The majority of internet atheists are scientifically illiterate and regurgitate popsci nonsense. When you bring up Scientism it makes them seethe (poking at their intellectual pride triggers them). First they'll try to argue semantics (standard retard move) over the word and claim it doesn't exist. Second they'll confuse it with an attack on science itself because one of the hallmarks of being ideologically possessed is being blind to the fact you're ideologically possessed (i.e. they can't criticize the ideology and have to reframe everything according to its terms in order to deflect).

[Anonymous No.22248371]

>>22248356
>>22248362
>Come on, anon...

[Anonymous No.22248372]

>>22248349
Atheist suddenly love Leviticus when it's about immigrants and not homos or throwing rocks at your whore wife

[Anonymous No.22248377]

>>22248349
>atheists are anti-dogmatic
>[but insist you interpret scripture only according to their ideas of it] (>>22248310)
The pastas trigger atheists because they're retards who regurgitate the same arguments over and over. Thanks for exemplifying that.

[Anonymous No.22248383]

>>22248364
but I mean it's not like it lacks a clear definition or that nobody claims to adhere to what this definition consists of.

they concede to believing that the awesome predictive and technical power of the "hard sciences" is reason enough to assert that said hard sciences are all that is needed to make sense of things (this, of course, is an evidently self refuting belief). but for some reason they just won't accept the word "scientism", which is just this. I don't understand what their hangup is. plus I mean "scientism" should sound pretty cool to them.

[Anonymous No.22248385]

>>22248372
Always the same shit.

[Anonymous No.22248410]

>>22248383
They don't like it because labels their ideology and provides a means to critique their beliefs. New Atheism teaches them only to attack and not defend--their main defense is condescension and bringing attention to Scientism proves it's unearned and therefore impotent. It undermines the idea that they've figured it all out and draws attention to the fact they're just LARPing their intelligence (atheism attracts via offering a false sense of superiority).

Studying just a little history/philosophy of science is enough to put forward damning criticism of their worldview. It takes away their false sense of superiority and exposes them as ignorant. That's why it bringing up Scientism makes them mad--they're certain to derail the conversation as soon as it comes up.

[Anonymous No.22248435]

>>22248410
I mean man forget studying.
How can you say shit like Hume's fork or assert empiricism and not figure out that it's self refuting is beyond me. It's literally just one sentence lmao.

[Anonymous No.22248446]

>>22246473
>No books, mostly drugs.
>>22246477
>Psychedelics did more to make me believe in God(s) than any book ever did
>>22246503
>I was already well on my way without reading anything.
>>22246845
>One rough morning I had a vision
>>22247503
>I knew that good rational arguments for God and religion don't exist. But my life circumstances and mindsiet at the time pushed me to seek God.
>>22247549
>They really liked romanticism
>>22247916
>Rather than convincing myself of the truthfulness of the teachings
>>22248284
>manic episode

kek
"Feels before reals"

[Anonymous No.22248466]

>>22248385
yeah asking to be held to your own doctrines is so totally cringe, bro.

[Anonymous No.22248490]

>>22248466
>he doesn't know that the Bible is written in different voices (e.g. the clear distinction between the voice of the 10 commandments in the Old Testament and the histories/parables/poetics that reflect them)
>he doesn't know about archetypes and antitypes and thinks humanity is supposed to be frozen
You don't know what you're talking about and exemplify the meme. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.22248577]

>>22248410
Same with all ideologies.
Start pressing an extremist on either side of the political spectrum, and they'll break down into seething. Especially commies.

[Anonymous No.22248612]

I'll bite any argument on primer mover or whatever some philosophical abstraction on how we came about, it's very subjective and so on. But I can't for the life of me understand how grown men in this century keep acting like children believing in some old books as if they there were true, listen to some bullshit priest, subscribe to these absurd morals, waste their lives discussing these futile interpretations and translations. Take it as a philosophy book, take it as a metaphor, take the wisdom you get with it and move on. Besides that, it's ludicrous, people walking over water, snakes offering apples, it's so ridiculous I can't even argue about it, it's like trying to convince people Santa does not exist, and yet I know some people out there who actually think the earth is 6 thousand years old or that people actually go to heaven and hell after they die. My first impulse is to tell people them they have been fooled their whole life, it's all a ruse, but I understand how that's hard to admit, so I just play along, "God bless you, sir".

[Anonymous No.22248633]

>>22248612
Weak bait.

[Anonymous No.22248690]

>>22246467
I was raised secular liberal and converted to catholicism last year
Arguments and so on made me realize the likely truth and superiority of Christianity and when I was baptized it all came together and I realized I could only get about a third of the way there on my own but that was enough to get me to where God could take the rest of the way

[Anonymous No.22248959]

>>22248277
One thing I never understood when sitting jurisprudence classes was the complete obliviousness to the need to axiomatically grand any political or jurisprudential theory. Every single system was fundamentally circular while proceeding on the basis that there is no circularity. They’d just pull axioms out of their asses and then proceed from that basis. The need for these deeper questions was both lost on the lecturers taking the classes and the people we looked at (Hart, Dworkin, Rousseau, Hobbes, Proudhon etc). They just took everything for granted. Therefore, it became quite obvious, as you observe, it was just them trying to replace God.

[Anonymous No.22248968]

>>22248372
>hurr durr mixed fabric and shellfish

[Anonymous No.22248973]

>>22248959
Ground not grand

[Anonymous No.22248975]

There are multiple religions and none of their rites involve gods showing up. They would all look the same if they were make-believe. And at least all but one are make-believe. One or zero true religions are the only options, and they all give the same appearance of make-believe. Lads I'm taking the under.

[Anonymous No.22248997]

>>22248975
Your inability to choose between faiths doesn't necessitate all are false and, if anything, the fact religious understanding is a universal aspect of humanity lends credence to the idea of its importance.

[Anonymous No.22249025]

>>22248975
Imagine justifying your intellectual laziness in this way

[Anonymous No.22249029]

>>22246467
>what book, except this specific book which is the only one that matters, was the most influential in your conversion
Pass on this stupid rule. I was a pretty hardcore atheist until around two years ago. I decided I was going to read the Bible from front to back so I could be the atheist that actually read the Bible unlike the retarded Christians I always came across, but instead, somehow, everything just clicked after reading it for sometime. I think I was around Nehemiah or Job. I was sitting outside, and it was a windy day, and suddenly I "figured out", or just came to the realization that the wind was blowing for me. That was God directing the winds to blow on me. Not like I was special, but I just had a realization that God has absolute control of everything down to the finest particle, and I was absolutely overwhelmed with a feeling of pure love and calm, and I was warmed despite the cold wind, and I felt like I was submerged and floating in warm honey. That's how I went from atheist to theist. Now, unfortunately, the retarded Christians haven't gone away. They've only started to irritate me more and more because their ignorance. They'll do absolutely anything but read the Bible. Oh, they'll go through a "Bible Study" program, sure. And of course, they'll read some autobiography of a wealthy man who "gave up everything to be with God", yet miraculously remains wealthy, but no, they will never engage with the Bible.

[Anonymous No.22249036]

I just sort of saw the beauty in everything one day, and decided I did believe. The best way to convert someone is make them really look at a sunset, or in a walk through a forest.

[Anonymous No.22249048]

>>22249029
> Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven

[Anonymous No.22249071]

>>22247614
Totally understand you, anon. That's how I understand God, too.

[Anonymous No.22249117]

>>22248975
>involve gods showing up
You forget the next step that God should be your personal wish granter.

[Anonymous No.22249207]

>>22248633
It's probably the most direct and difficult to argue against thing in the thread. You can come up with abstract arguments for an ideal conception of God all you want, but these never amount to a justification of a specific tradition that hard contradicts other specific traditions that also claim to express exclusive truth, and I know you cannot give me a non absurd argument not based on personal revelation or tradition that Jesus is the true savior and son of God, of whom the Hebrews were his chosen people, but that the claims of all religious traditions that are not Christian and would be counter to this are false.

If more Christians were more honest about this I would respect them more.

[Anonymous No.22249216]

I was in my literature class in college. I wasn't high or drunk. I was sober as the dead. There was a very old woman there - commuter campus, etc. - who kept getting talked over and ignored by everyone, even the professor. Just one of those people that others in a group instinctively reduce to wallpaper. I look over at her while someone else was just prattling on about something and I see such a look of sadness and desolation on her face. Maybe it was my own sadness and fear of invisibility mirrored in it. My heart swelled with so much love for her in that moment that I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was what God was. I knew this was what Christ was, an unending sourceless abyssal Love for all things. I suddenly remembered Augustine saying, and I'm paraphrasing: you were always there and waiting for me, O my God. Had to duck into a bathroom after to keep myself from bawling my eyes out in public. Probably the only real spiritual experience of my life. It's like someone opened a skylight in my head I didn't even know was there and flash-boiled all my impurities away

"All beings are precious."

[Anonymous No.22249251]

>>22246467
i’ve never been an atheist but plato’s dialogues really changed me

[Anonymous No.22249319]

>>22249251
How so?

[Anonymous No.22249594]

>>22249216
Noice.
God bless you and that wallpaper woman.

[Anonymous No.22249638]

>>22246545
I don't believe in 'the trinity'. I believe in God the Most-High. (The highest metaphysical conception.)

[Anonymous No.22249730]

>>22246467
>Is anyone here who went from atheist to theist? What book, except the bible, was the most influential in your conversion? Was the change quick or gradual?
Yes. The Holy Bible. Gradual over time but the Book of Job convinced me God could be real.

[Anonymous No.22249776]

>>22246467
I did. The Gospel of Matthew was the most influential, then the extra info on the NT found in various study bibles, but that's probably cheating. Trouble is, by the time I started reading secondary sources I was already converted. It was an instant change once I started reading into the historiography of the NT and quantum physics and Aquinas.

[Anonymous No.22250654]

>>22249730
Yes, the story about identifying with chaos monsters and attempting to undo the creation is cool.

[Anonymous No.22250665]

>>22249730
>>22250654
Though that raises questions about the ex-nihilo part, since Yahweh apparently fought with (uncreated) creatures before the creation.

[Anonymous No.22250667]

>>22246467
lmaoing at all the retards in this thread who immediately flee to christianity as soon as they decide naive materialism is wrong. It’s amazing that people can’t comprehend a world where they have open minded beliefs while still not accepting that an arbitrary canon of books from the middle east is divinely inspired in every mundane word despite its obvious historical development.

[Anonymous No.22250675]

>>22249207
If they were honest about it they wouldn’t be christians.

[Anonymous No.22250687]

>>22250667
>who immediately flee to

revolutionary demonology >>22246975
time-travel >>22246985
Big Bang as God's suicide >>22247019
undead pantheism >>22247067
lovecraftian Old Ones >>22247141
Varro's 3 theologies >>22247430
Qwerty-keyboard Qabbala as a spontaneous AI >>22248285

[Anonymous No.22250718]

And as relygyon was found to mean separatyon many sydes of the matter cleared. The dark matter neared. As the wyndow to opened doors. When the sun retreats. Re-
legyons of decoherence
corpses flowtyng the ryver
led wyth the ryver's spyryt
home forward the souurce of memory
of how yt beggyns
Orphyyc ayrs devydyng the compressed nothyngness.

[Anonymous No.22250735]

>>22246479
Most of the greatest philosophers in the world pre-exist Christ, and easily half of them aren't even Western and couldn't give a shit about a Western religion. But I guess having a hyper-Eurocentric view of the world is considered "mature" by some people.

>>22246491
>Atheism is just...illogical
That's because atheism rejects axiomatic claims about the universe. It doesn't purport any sort of logical frame work of anything. Like most people, you don't understand what logic even is, so you don't understand that something being logical only means it has a set of axioms that it follows and says nothing about its truthfulness or ability to produce truth.
>atheism is just irrational
You don't even understand what rationality is. You have to think to even consider an atheism vs. theism debate in the first place. You're just using words you don't understand and defining however they make sense to you.

[Anonymous No.22250743]

>>22250735
Atheism is an intelligence LARP. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.22250854]

>>22248349
Do Christians really follow the Old Testament? Im confused what did Jesus die for?

[Anonymous No.22250938]

>>22247586
>>22247591
I expected this thread to be a wasteland of fedoras and tradcath zoomers/orthoLARPers screeching at each other and was very pleasantly surprised by these posts.

[Anonymous No.22250962]

>>22250735
>caring about nonwhites
>ever
damn this board is retarded

[Anonymous No.22250991]

>>22246467
reddit made me realize atheism and religion bashing was cringe
then jewish orgs and thinktanks made me realise they hate western countries because the bible is the true foundational document of this countries.

[Anonymous No.22251040]

>>22250735
You really thought this post made you sound intelligent, didn't you?

[Anonymous No.22251117]

>>22250854
>1 Peter 3:18-20 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

>Isaiah 53:5 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

>John 3:16-19 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

>Daniel 9:24-27 (Character limit prevents me from quoting this here)

>Nicene Creed: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father; God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten not made, one in being with the Father. Through Him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven. By the power of the Holy Spirit He was born of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day He rose again, in fulfillment of the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. With the Father and the Son He is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the prophets. We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

[Anonymous No.22251363]

>>22246467
Don't know if this counts but here is my story anon.
I was raised in a really retarded, violent branch of fundamentalist Christianity. Never really believed in it but had to attend and participate or else get a beating from my arsehole father.
Soon as i was old enough and out of the house i ditched it. I was a militant angry atheist for many years. At some point in my late 20's i started reading and enjoying the great Catholic novelists, Graham Greene, Evelen Waugh, etc. Start thinking about this stuff, start to wonder if maybe i've thrown the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
I read "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis and it seemed sort of reasonable at the time. Started attending church, tried out a couple different denominations, read the bible and various Christian lit. This goes on for a couple years but i keep being haunted by the nagging feeling that it's all a bit silly. I have doubts and when i talk to Christian leaders about doubts just get told "have faith" or something equally moronic.
Eventually i wake up and decide it was all a silly, cringey phase. Actually took all my Christian books and threw them in the bin. Have been a happy atheist ever since.

[Anonymous No.22251373]

>>22246500
Alasdair MacIntyre

[Anonymous No.22251388]

>>22246500
Peter Geach

[Anonymous No.22251415]

>>22246467
I'm an atheist who was raised irreligious by secular humanists (bordering sometimes on angry Madalyn Murray O'Hair-tier anti-theism, probably on account of their own highly religious family backgrounds) but a vulgar anti-theism can sometimes sound like "I'm not afraid of the bogeyman" rather than having much understanding of the origin of religion in the first place. I've also come around to respect the value that's in Christianity. Jesus did die on the cross after all and when he cried out to Heaven there was no answer. So you could put me in the church of atheism:
https://youtu.be/BzDJBqOmzTY

[Anonymous No.22251439]

>>22246868
The weed did it. I've read a shitload of ncbi articles on weed and shrooms and contrary to popular belief you're massively more likely to become a schizo with weed (especially high THC weed, since it's seemingly the THC what makes you psychotic)

[Anonymous No.22251444]

>>22246479
Take the animism pill

[Anonymous No.22251545]

>>22246479

[Anonymous No.22252010]

>>22251117
And which part says "jesus died to abolish gentiles of the OT but live by it anyway because fuck you"?

[Anonymous No.22252054]

>>22252010
Well, it certainly doesn't say that.

>Matthew 5:17-20 Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For amen I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled. He therefore that shall break one of these least commandments, and shall so teach men, shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, that unless your justice abound more than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.


>James 2:17-26 So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself. But some man will say: Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without works; and I will shew thee, by works, my faith. Thou believest that there is one God. Thou dost well: the devils also believe and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works, offering up Isaac his son upon the altar? Seest thou, that faith did co-operate with his works; and by works faith was made perfect? And the scripture was fulfilled, saying: Abraham believed God, and it was reputed to him to justice, and he was called the friend of God. Do you see that by works a man is justified; and not by faith only? And in like manner also Rahab the harlot, was not she justified by works, receiving the messengers, and sending them out another way? For even as the body without the spirit is dead; so also faith without works is dead.

[Anonymous No.22252064]

>>22246467
>Is anyone here who went from atheist to theist?
Like 1 in 5 people here and on /pol/.
>What book, except the bible, was the most influential in your conversion
Memes mostly.

[Anonymous No.22252082]

>>22252064
>Memes mostly.
What memes and why?

[Anonymous No.22252927]

>>22246500
C. S. Lewis

[Anonymous No.22252934]

>>22246467
Iam Stephenson's reasearch on reincarnation.

[Anonymous No.22253034]

>>22246500
>Mortimer J. Adler
>G. E. M. Anscombe

[Anonymous No.22253046]

>>22246473
>>22246477
This is a failure of the individual not atheism. They hallucinate from certain drugs and they take this as divine intervention rather than attribute it to a material cause. The second class of drug users that turn religious are fried alcoholics and other drug addicts that burned out their brain and use religion as a cope thinking all of this was somehow part of God's plan.

[Anonymous No.22253060]

>>22246500
>I literally do not know philosophers who converted to Christianity, not even one
Me

[Anonymous No.22253088]

>>22248268
>psychedelics flood your brain with serotonin
no they dont
>THIS is why they are so effective against depression/serotonin imbalances
thats not the reason, even if they were serotonin releasers, the anti-depressant effect would wear off quickly. Nobody knows why they have anti-depressant effects but BDNF and related neuroplasticity-inducing growth factors are probably the best bet

[Anonymous No.22253093]

>>22253046
>They hallucinate from certain drugs and they take this as divine intervention rather than attribute it to a material cause
Ego death doesn't fit comfortably into the standard "drug enduced hallucination" box. You can even fairly describe it as the opposite of hallucinating.

[Anonymous No.22253099]

>>22248268
>t. has never experience ego death

[Anonymous No.22253103]

>>22249319
they’re charmingly short and deceptively simple but the socratic dialogues on the virtues mostly (laches, charmides, et al). I don't like platonic ontology / metaphysics because of it’s insistence on the imperfection of particulars and the perfect nature of universals but plato’s virtue ethics within the socratic dialogues are, for me, very moving. For a while i considered the inconclusiveness of the socratic virtue dialogues and the circularity of the concepts contained within huge weaknesses but recently i’ve began to approach the circularity of the concepts contained within the socratic dialogues not so much as a circularity per se but rather a sort of hermeneutic spiral towards a (timeless) end through a movement embodied as a golden mean, dialectic. All embodied in a tiny dialogue explicating the very thing that it embodies, exceptionally charming, exceptionally moving.

[Anonymous No.22253110]

>>22253093
>>hypo-arousal is different from hyper-arousal!11
Tell us something we don't know.

[Anonymous No.22253119]

>>22250735
Kill yourself chink, I piss on Confucius, Lao tzu and Mencius Moldbug

[Anonymous No.22253131]

>>22253093
>the opposite of hallucinating
Shamans do hallucinate, because the ASC-effect is achieved through sensory overload.
Meditators achieve the effect through sensory deprivation. (Because you could not drum and shriek around a bonfire in a crowded urban city)

[Anonymous No.22253135]

>>22253103
i should add to this that all of this, as well as the famous allegory of the cave within Plato’s Republic, moved me to a better understanding(?) of that thing called the Light. It blinds if you look directly at it but it is within or somehow present to each of us. We cant possess it, we cant manipulate it, we just sort of gesture at it with words and actions, the gold of sunshine ya know.

[Anonymous No.22253148]

>>22253135
>the famous allegory of the cave within Plato’s Republic, moved me to a better understanding(?) of that thing called the Light

Metzinger Th. - Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003)

"We must imagine Plato’s cave differently if we are to understand the neurophenomenological caveman’s true situation. There are low-dimensional phenomenal shadows of external perceptual objects dancing on the neural user surface of the caveman’s brain. So much is true. There certainly is a phenomenal self-shadow as well. But what is this shadow the low-dimensional projection *of*? I claim that it is a shadow not of a captive person, but of the cave as a whole. It is the physical organism as a whole, including all of its brain, its cognitive activity, and its social relationships, that is projecting inward, from all directions at the same time, as it were. There is no true subject and no homunculus in the cave that could confuse itself with anything. It is the cave as a whole, which episodically, during phases of waking and dreaming, projects a shadow of itself onto one of its many internal walls. The cave shadow is there. The cave itself is empty."

"A third aspect, in which both Plato and Samkara were certainly right, is the normative ideal of expanding self-knowledge. The neurophenomenological caveman’s situation is deplorable. It must be changed. However, it *cannot* be changed by freeing ourselves and leaving the cave altogether, searching for the true light of the sun. We have never been in the cave. The cave is empty."

[Anonymous No.22253149]

>>22253110
I never said ego death can't be described via an appeal to descriptive language concerned with material changes within the CNS--although such language is necessarily restrictive. I highlighted the fact there's a phenomenological aspect to the experience that the idea of "hallucination" fails to convey. It's in the same boat as using scientific jargon to explain why a painting it beautiful--you can do it but you're not actually describing the experience of beauty let alone beauty itself.

[Anonymous No.22253150]

>>22253131
See >>22253149. All you can do is assert the experience is untrue with no actual appeal to the phenomenological aspects of the experience itself. All you can do is beg the question that we should dismiss it.

[Anonymous No.22253164]

>>22253148
>I claim that it is a shadow not of a captive person, but of the cave as a whole.

pic rel mfw i read this

[Anonymous No.22253211]

>>22248322
>Foucault
>great
lol no

[Anonymous No.22253223]

>>22253211
Hume, Wittgenstein, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Quine, Hobbes, Carnap, Schopenhauer...

[Anonymous No.22253224]

>>22246467
The illiad

[Anonymous No.22253235]

Never been a full on hard atheist but every time I found myself in a moment of loss of faith I read Nietzsche's Anti-Christ and convinced myself to try to become the second Christian right after the Son of the Lord

[Anonymous No.22253252]

>>22253211
Most influential philosopher of the past several generations

[Anonymous No.22253303]

>>22246897
>belonging-to-a-community LARPing memes
Plato disagrees with you on both fronts. The irony that basically all these "rationalists" would be rejected by every ancient non-Freemasonic non-Western philosopher is really just enjoyable to watch.

[Anonymous No.22253308]

>>22253252
>influential philosopher
Who did he influence? Why is that group valuable to influence? What is "influence"?

[Anonymous No.22253368]

>>22253308
>Who did he influence? Why is that group valuable to influence? What is "influence"?
Go to bed grandpa

[Anonymous No.22253676]

>>22246479
>All of the greatest philosopher had a reverence for Christianity.
Ancient Greece had a concept were the poor, uneducated, the dumb and the unsophisticated had a literal belief in the God's, others like the rulers, the aristocratics, the important and sophisticated has an abstract belief system one that was based on the values the creed represented. Literal belief in the Bible is utterly idiotic.

[Anonymous No.22253721]

Trying to actively involve a higher power in your life is the stupidest move you can do, have you ever watched a horror movie? Anything more powerful than a machine created by man may as well be a demon regardless of it's nature, seeking a relationship with it is a sign of illness.

[Anonymous No.22253738]

>>22246897
>Getting duped into a religion
I'm sorry but religion is telling me not to do drugs, have careless sex with strangers, be modest and considerate, be humble. None of these things have made my life worse. How am I duped into being healthy and happy? The atheists all hit up the weed, anti anxiety meds, and anti depression meds. How is that a healthy ideology? Religion empowers you to avoid enslavement by pharma corps. By consumerism and materialism. I'm the freest I've ever been as a religious person.

[Anonymous No.22253836]

>>22253738
>I'm sorry but religion is telling me not to do drugs
Because those are to be provisioned to you by priests (pic related)

>None of these things have made my life worse.
Imagine a religion telling you to wash your hands. Not because of the bacteria/etc., but because god decreed so.
Normally, a skeptic would only risk getting a dysenteria.
But one day, your water source gets poisoned with some radioactive shit, yet the zealous fags tell you that god is testing you. "Wash your hands, twerp! Just do it!"

>How am I duped into being healthy and happy?
You take the pre-given stability of the environment for granted.
And you forget that neural networks learn by mistakes. Negative feedback loop (stability) vs Positive feedback loop (growth).

> Religion empowers you to avoid enslavement by pharma corps.
>I'm the freest I've ever been as a religious person.
Some savanna savages in loincloths were too. Until white men with tech suddenly came.

[Anonymous No.22254067]

>>22253721
Instead of basing your views off of horror movies, you should read the Bible.

[Anonymous No.22254117]

I don't want to be disrespectful, but I am literally incapable of believing in the judeo christian god (which is obviously the only one that matters in this thread) any more than I can believe in Santa Claus.
I am open minded enough to accept that there's more to existence than the physical world. I could believe in a creator and an afterlife and all that shit (mostly out of a thirst for copes and not actual intelectual sincerity) but I just can't actually believe in the bible at all.
I get the impression that if I take psychedelics I'm just gonna turn into a schizo because I'll see some unamable, inhuman, indescribable god that will just Fuck with my head.

Anyway, books for this feeling?

[Anonymous No.22254147]

>>22253836
>At dusk, the somatically deprived and intoxicated initiates were led by torchlight past a cave that was presented to them as the dreaded entrance to the underworld and, beyond, to the dark interior of the Telesterion, the chamber of initiation, where, according to iconographic representations, their vision was further masked by blindfolds. The now disoriented and frightened initiates were then startled by the acoustic anomaly of a gong, sounded from the midst of the darkness, as the Eleusinian hierophant summoned the goddess Kore from the underworld. Fasting, ingesting psychotropics, being presented with frightening visages, the disorienting effects of darkness, startling sounds, are all sensory techniques that would have contributed to the cognitive confusion and vulnerabilities of the initiates. According to Plutarch, this Eleusinian "night of the mysteries" culminated with an abrupt burst of brilliant light accompanying the sudden emergence of the hierophant from the darkness which further astonished the cognitively receptive initiates.
What I wouldn't give to have been born in this time. Life truly used to be like an RPG, and RPGs are just imitating the actual lives of the ancients. Where are my necromancer buddies who will nerd out over the occult with me? Where are my great battles, spells of healing, lightning bolts, fireballs, golden calves and robes? But still, above all, my fellow necromancers. Actual, unabashed, intellectual discussion with men who share a common interest with me and would go back and forth with me until our eyes started drooping and we needed to go to sleep, or else, help out some other necromancer with a ritual of his.

[Anonymous No.22254149]

>>22254067
The book of job is a horror story, every prayer is witchcraft and messing with forces you shouldn't.

[Anonymous No.22254166]

>>22246500
augsutine

[Anonymous No.22254170]

>>22246500
Chesterton

[Anonymous No.22254190]

>>22246897
>dude muslims are genetically replacing whites in europe, and atheists are massively pro immigrant, gay and left on average and don’t breed, but i’d rather they be atheist and die out than heckin religious
atheism is a death cult

[Anonymous No.22254367]

>>22254117
>Anyway, books for this feeling?
The literature on NDEs in general, and pic related especially, as NDEs are more real than this world, in every way. For instance, NDErs report expanded intelligence. One NDEr said that the greatest supergenius who ever lived, with the help of the greatest supercomputer of all time, would be immeasurably dwarfed by the intelligence she had access to while in the light, so much so that it would be closer and fairer to compare the intelligence of Einstein to that of an ant. Literally and seriously. And as another NDEr described their cognition during their life review:

>"I looked up, and saw four translucent screens begin to appear - and form a kind of gigantic, cubed box all around me. It was through this method that I was shown my life review. Without ever having to turn my head, I panoramically saw my past, present, future - and there was even a screen behind me that displayed a tremendous amount of scientific data, numbers, symbols and universal codes. I was in complete amazement because (as all of this was occurring) I realized I understood absolutely everything I was seeing - even in the most microscopic detail! There seemed to be no limit to the thoughts I was able to think or the ideas I was able to absorb. In this space, what we tend to think of as a limited comprehension or single-mindedness here on Earth, becomes truly infinite and limitless here! I kept thinking over and over how true it is what they say: that when we go back home - we all really are of one mind!"

From here: https://youtu.be/U00ibBGZp7o

Another way NDEs are more real is how one NDEr said that he saw more than 80 new primary colors in the NDE world, compared to the 3 primary colors we have here.

From here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/202204/does-afterlife-obviously-exist

So heaven is undeniably real.

[Anonymous No.22255439]

>>22246467
Fear and Trembling

[Anonymous No.22255512]

>>22246467
I went from atheist to misticism and new age, to christianity, I think the change came quick but maybe it was not so, besides the Bible the most influencial things were other peoples testimonies.

[Anonymous No.22255517]

>>22246500
soren kierkegaard
And many other universalists

[Anonymous No.22255838]

>>22248304
>>>/r/eddit

[Anonymous No.22255867]

>>22248446
Thats almost as if the human condition is more defined by feels than by reals