/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8625193]

I can't read a book where the main character is such a huge religious fuck tard. Is he seriously asking why god is laying all his negative feelings on him and not someone else? He's so fucking stupid, I don't see how I have anything to gain from a book where "probing the depths of the human condition" means digging into the mind of a moron. There's nothing to gain from reading books about religious morons.

[Anonymous No.8625196]

God dammit.
In my last meme purge I deleted all my fedora memes.

[Anonymous No.8625198]

>>8625196
Being a rational person isn't fedora.

[Anonymous No.8625204]

>>8625193
Read the book of Job. Job actually moves past that to openly accusing God of negligence.

[Anonymous No.8625208]

>>8625198
How is OP rational?

[Anonymous No.8625217]

>>8625193
>There's nothing to gain from reading books about religious morons.

Excepting that religiosity including atheistic sperging against it is a shared experience of mankind for at least the last 30,000 years, and definitely deserves to be examined, if only to be deconstructed, in literature.

[Anonymous No.8625221]

>>8625208
I'd rather read something which has something intelligent to say, reading this schlock just reminds me that I wish I was born a couple hundred years in the future, when belief in god finally dies out. Religion will finally die out, the more developed and educated a society the more belief in god dwindles, because the illumination of the mind disillusions irrational ways of thinking. You won't see this beautiful future, so you'll laugh and gloat in your ignorance about the stupidity unwittingly permeating yourself and the world around you, but you don't have the foresight to see. History will prove you wrong.

[Anonymous No.8625227]

>>8625221
>a couple hundred years in the future, when belief in god


Going to church in about 10 minutes, it will be stuffed to the gills. Also, if you think internet atheists are winning, you havent gone to hinterland Murrica, South America, or the Middle East. Anti-Clericalism was FAR more rabid 200 years ago than it is now.

[Anonymous No.8625231]

>>8625221
I like this pasta. I'm saving it.

[Anonymous No.8625240]

>>8625227
atheism is on the rise, and the sooner (and the better) the older generations die out, the stupid luddites die out, the sooner society can move on from it's intellectual infancy, But it doesn't matter, none of it matters; if it somehow manages to sink it's claws in the future, I will still be right; I will still be right in knowing that reason will always be true, and superstitious slugs will always be false.

[Anonymous No.8625244]

>I'd rather read something which has something intelligent to say, reading this schlock just reminds me that I wish I was born a couple hundred years in the future, when belief in god finally dies out. Religion will finally die out, the more developed and educated a society the more belief in god dwindles, because the illumination of the mind disillusions irrational ways of thinking. You won't see this beautiful future, so you'll laugh and gloat in your ignorance about the stupidity unwittingly permeating yourself and the world around you, but you don't have the foresight to see. History will prove you wrong.

[Anonymous No.8625259]

>>8625198
self-defining as rational is.

[Anonymous No.8625271]

>>8625217
>that pic
>expecting to live to old age

[Anonymous No.8625356]

>>8625221
I don't think you deserve the fedora memes without some decent explanation since that's just ego, not that I don't enjoy tipping a good fedora myself.

The Idea of the Holy by Otto would be a good place to start. Religion and religious experience cannot be spoken of in strict binary divisions of 'rational' and 'non-rational' and it is especially when there is a failure to understand the metanarrative assumptions of each that are rooted in the language that outbursts such as yours come to be. You need to understand that the finger points to the moon, and it's only the finger that you are barking at. We can only talk about God, and it is only within the language that we use and how we use it that any conceptualization or faith can come to be. As an analogy, do people actually have personalities? How is a 'personality' constructed in language? The challenge of speaking about something that isn't physically observable but only posited is similar to that of religion.

You can look up a decent argument between Flew, Hare, and Mitchell where they each propose different standpoints to the belief in God. By no means do these give you answers, just better questions.

But if you were looking for leisure reading, then I can't help you with that. Just know that without a doubt, you have an understanding of religion that you could quickly improve with a few readings.

[Anonymous No.8625382]

>>8625356
That's pretty funny. In all that bungled wording, you've basically just said that we can't actually know anything about god, we can just talk about him. I don't see how you don't get that that's the problem. I've always been intelligent, I've always seen through the lie of religion from the time I was very young. So it's not easy for me to feel like everyone around me is an idiot, I don't bask in the glory of feeling smarter than people around me at all. In fact, I get the opposite feeling. I feel dead inside and I wish that I was born in the future, I often feel totally despondent to the world around me. It's so depressing that the world around me runs on such a low amount of intelligence, I feel like I can't even realize my own potential of intelligence. Because if I were surrounded by others more intelligent than myself, the standard around me would be higher and elevate and inspire me to be more intelligent and wise than I already am. I am smart enough to know the very simple - hardly even worth debating - fact, that believing in god is irrational, and as long as you try to argue for morality on the basis of religion or argue for the existence of god (hint: people can be moral without god, atheists are demonstrable proof of this); then you are an irrational person for doing so. Yes, it can be divided into rational and irrational.

[Anonymous No.8625402]

>>8625382
That's pretty funny. In all that bungled wording, you've basically just said that we can't actually know anything about god, we can just talk about him. I don't see how you don't get that that's the problem. I've always been intelligent, I've always seen through the lie of religion from the time I was very young. So it's not easy for me to feel like everyone around me is an idiot, I don't bask in the glory of feeling smarter than people around me at all. In fact, I get the opposite feeling. I feel dead inside and I wish that I was born in the future, I often feel totally despondent to the world around me. It's so depressing that the world around me runs on such a low amount of intelligence, I feel like I can't even realize my own potential of intelligence. Because if I were surrounded by others more intelligent than myself, the standard around me would be higher and elevate and inspire me to be more intelligent and wise than I already am. I am smart enough to know the very simple - hardly even worth debating - fact, that believing in god is irrational, and as long as you try to argue for morality on the basis of religion or argue for the existence of god (hint: people can be moral without god, atheists are demonstrable proof of this); then you are an irrational person for doing so. Yes, it can be divided into rational and irrational.

[Anonymous No.8625435]

>>8625217
Yes, but you can do that in a day with a single large dose of LSD. No need to read books about it.

[Anonymous No.8625442]

>>8625217
If you want to examine irrational thinking, just look around you in your every day world, or just fuck up any of your irrational thoughts with thoughts that make no sense. You'll observe this in your every day life anyways. It won't necessarily tell you why people think this irrational bullshit either.

[Anonymous No.8625447]

>>8625240
Muslims are flooding in and replacing that older generation because athiests murdered all their children.

[Anonymous No.8625454]

Pretending to be retarded isn't funny. Stop replying to this person's thread, because we're encouraging other bait to be as weak.

[Anonymous No.8625461]

>>8625454
I'm being quite serious.

[Anonymous No.8625489]

>>8625193
I agree with you op.

Any time someone talks about God they could be saying something useful instead.

[Anonymous No.8625494]

>>8625221
If only everyone could be as euphoric as you

[Anonymous No.8625503]

>>8625494
Read this post and you'll see why you're wrong. >>8625382

[Anonymous No.8625531]

>>8625382
I hope I didn't waste that time writing to a troll. I did bother to think out some of it and even check the thread again. Oh well. Every once in a while, it's nice to get somewhere with it.

Is there anything you can talk about other than yourself? Is this whole thread just to reinforce tired board culture and normative reactions?

[Anonymous No.8625534]

>>8625503
I did it's a pretty sweet pasta, it made me chuckle and i've already saved it.

The rationality and superior intelligence it radiates truly have the potential to shake the world of religion to its core and usher in a new existence of total and utter euphoria.

[Anonymous No.8625550]

>>8625382
Not him, but I still find it interesting to try to understand how a group of people can believe something that seems completely silly to me. Apparently it isn't irrational to them, so I want to understand how their view of the world could possibly fit together in a way that leads to this conclusion. Often this reveals the prejudices and assumptions that I take for granted when interpreting my experience and forces me to justify them or view them as arbitrary choices.

Also, I find the idea of religious experience compelling to study as an aspect of human psychology. Because religion is so widespread, it seems like there's something about us as a species that drives us towards it even if that's only an accident of evolution. Because religious experience is described as sublime and a peak of aesthetic feeling, I want to better understand what that feeling is and how to achieve it without fairy tales, and hearing from believers helps me do that.

[Anonymous No.8625576]

>>8625550
>I want to better understand what that feeling is and how to achieve it without fairy tales
Just take psychedelics. There's nothing magical about it. It's a very common brain malfunction and if it doesn't happen naturally you can force it with drugs.

[Anonymous No.8625597]

>>8625193
so, you got tipped off he was retarded when he was talking about god but not during the rant about buttons to himself he ran through just in case anyone asked? interesting.

[Anonymous No.8625608]

>>8625550
If you want to achieve quote aesthetic experience quote then you should just read great literature, or listen to Exquisite music, or appreciate art. Because those are the things that reflect the mind of the human being, but those things which may not be in and of themselves expressing any particular thing, they express that inexpressible part of a human being which I suppose is what people who try to believe in irrational nonsensical things would call their religion. I believe that religion is on the opposite end of the spectrum of beauty because it bastardized that's Indescribable part of a human being that is responsible for what we call Art.

[Anonymous No.8625625]

>>8625608
Sorry, I tried writing that with my microphone by speaking into my phone an it was being retarded.

[Anonymous No.8625647]

>>8625608
I agree; achieving aesthetic experience through great works is ultimately preferable. I guess maybe what I find compelling about religious experience despite not believing is precisely that it is another creation of the human mind? It's another expression that gives me brief glimpses of that indescribable part even if it is through a warped lens.

[Anonymous No.8625659]

>>8625576
Sure, I think psychedelics are a completely valid way to investigate; I'm just interested in other methods too. By analogy, alcohol can make me feel immediately close to a group of people, but because of muh autismo I want to understand the natural steps that create lasting intimacy too. I know it's not magical. For example, you can create similar spiritual experiences using transcranial magnetic stimulation to the parietal lobe.

[Anonymous No.8625671]

>>8625550
It's 'silly' because those are the only words you can use to describe an experience you have not felt for yourself. You might never experience it, and because of that, never have access to that same vocabulary that to you can only seem confused and misled. Certainly, there are the aspects of membership that are a part of religion, but they do not form the core of the experience.

It would probably be better for you to just take drugs though. The aesthetic feeling is not constitutive of religious experience. You can get that from good music, or art. Neither is the sublimity or degree of pleasure. What makes religious experience 'religious' is in that experience of something uncanny, or 'other'. This is why religion has its beginnings in the primitive worship of daemons. It is in feeling the presence of something else. What makes something supernatural isn't a greater degree of 'naturalness' but that it is non-natural. It can only be conceptualized via negativa. There are no words to fit its essence in concept proper, to the use of rational logic. You can see how Anselm and Thomas use ontological arguments for the existence of God. Payley uses a teleological argument through design. But these logical arguments do not account for the presence of a single God, or even a good one, or even how to proceed in having faith in one. Logic is by no means a complete way to speak of the Holy which is tackled by Otto.

In no way is this a defense of religion, but it is an attack on any conclusion that can be made by a one-dimensional use of language, in this case, rationalism. You change the words, and the whole thing changes. Is believing in God a falsifiable assertion?

>>8625382
>We can't actually know anything about god

Define know. Phenomenologically, people with faith proceed from the world-as-felt, rather than a world-out-there. When you say 'to know' there are criteria that suffice or falsify that knowledge. But experientially, God is something known by feeling. The dualism between knowing and feeling is very rooted in Western thinking, but it's a contested categorization (which someone else can talk about better).

Try to understand, there is too much that language predefines in how it is used. If you can only frame things as true or false then that will also be the only way you can understand things, which is not necessarily bad, just problematic in this case.

[Anonymous No.8625682]

Fedora memes aside, religious people do tend to have smaller IQs than atheists.

It takes a big mental leap to go from uncritically accepting what authority has told you to independently analyzing those claims.

[Anonymous No.8625688]

>>8625647
Suspending your rational beliefs to look into yourself is a crutch. If you want to find out more about yourself, just do some mindfulness training. Look into yourself and reflect on your feelings and thoughts. Sam Harris talks about achieving higher states of consciousness through mindfulness meditation. I don't have the patience for that sort of thing, and I'm not sure where the sources of information on doing it correctly come from, but there's ways to do what you're describing that don't involve religion.

That part of "creating another world", is what I see as the world that already exists inside of yourself. I have been trying, through my own force of will, to eliminate the feeling of pointlessness, and trying to figure out a way to configure my own brain wiring to see the very notion of the word pointless as being pointless, but somehow negating meaningless to give meaning in a way that some people feel, through trying to access those parts of my brain responsible for that without needing to have religion, or something fake to give my life meaning. It is a lot of mental gymnastics, if you want my honest opinion, but it's only mental gymnastics if you're not doing it for the purpose of simply being happier.

I strive all the time to become happier, in the face of challenge, in the face of hopelessness, and I think finding beauty in the face of hopelessness is ultimately one of the ultimate aesthetic achievements. The man struggling against all odds, the abstract man you see on the cover of the leonard bernstein cover of le sacre du printemps, or on the cover of that faulkner novel the sound and the fury. That to me is man striving against absurdity to combat it, and overcome it. That to me is beautiful, that to me touches down to the root of every microscopic world, present in worlds within worlds, the special fabric that weaves everything together. It's beautiful.

[Anonymous No.8625745]

>>8625198
This is one of the more fedora comments I've read in a while

[Anonymous No.8625810]

>>8625682
>*snurfle snurfle IQ snurfle snurfle*

[Anonymous No.8625834]

>>8625193
>god isn't alive anymore
>this means there never was a god
Stupid thread, OP.

[Anonymous No.8625836]

>>8625682
>It takes a big mental leap to go from uncritically accepting what authority has told you to independently analyzing those claims.
That presupposes that you have access to a system of analysis that is completely independent and objective. Which you don't.

Humans are social animals and almost any kind of belief can be traced back to social circumstances and learned behaviour. High IQ people in Western societies are atheists because that's what the in-group standard is supposed to be. High IQ individuals tend also to be progressives for precisely that reason.

[Anonymous No.8625892]

>>8625836
Not him, but I argue that you overemphasize a socially constructed human that has no sense of agency. Social circumstances and learned behavior account for everything other than choice or even a mental space where discourse can be negotiated in. I'm saying, there has to be some mental aspect to belief and that belief cannot solely be traced to these social circumstances.

I also have to point out the contradiction in your use of language. To say that 'any kind of belief can be traced back' and to use the softer 'tend also to be' is an artefact of positivism and your more recent adoption of post-positivism. You need to be consistent when you talk about something that is intended to be an assertion. To say 'for precisely that reason' but also use words like 'tend' is to keep one foot out the door. Are you making a probabilistic statement or a true or false? You can't argue while using inconsistent language, otherwise, it makes the process of falsifiability, which would lead to validity, more difficult.

I agree with your understanding of IQ as a more arbitrary measure that only functions in place of an observation of intelligence. There is no reason to laud it as a perfect measure, or worse, to use it as part of a value-laden judgment. This is because IQ is only a 'metaphor' for intelligence. It's a venn diagram that only accounts for some intersection between construct and phenomenon, rather than the full circle of the phenomenon in question.

[Anonymous No.8625919]

>>8625892
>a 'metaphor'

what, is it a metaphor now or is it not? Or are you using the word metaphor metaphorically?

[Anonymous No.8625934]

>>8625196
>meme purge
iktf

[Anonymous No.8625953]

>>8625193
He rejects religion you fucking idiot. Did you not pay attention to when he meets the priest? Holy fuck you're dumb.

[Anonymous No.8626039]

>>8625919
I placed emphasis because I used the word differently. I refer to Gareth Morgan in his definition of theories as metaphors of understanding reality. The usual example is, a man is a lion. The lion functions as an object that is different from man, but used in its similarity to provide insight on the man. So you can say he is fierce, brave, and strong. But obviously, he is not a lion at all, in that he does not have sharp teeth or fur. There is both insight, and distortion. You see more about the man (intelligence) through the metaphor of him being like a lion (intelligence quotient). The man is brave (intelligence can be inferred in the number of correct answers). But obviously, the man does not have fur (intelligence is not your test score).

To clarify, I'm responding to >>8625836 and not >>8625682 because only one of these actually bothers to put out a decent assertion. The other makes a statement with little value because the assumptions are too easily uprooted.

[Anonymous No.8626380]

This book is really hard to read.

[Anonymous No.8626395]

>complaining about books when you're just too stupid to understand them

move on op you won't make it.