What are some books that will help me have faith and return to God? Please don’t say the Bible, I already know that one.
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What are some books that will help me have faith and return to God?
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
St. Augustine's Confessions.
Spirituality is bigger than God, and there are parts of it that don't run on faith, so why fight your nature? Maybe get into Advaita Vedanta (the Ashtavakra Gita is great), Buddhism, or Taoism (everyone should read the Tao Te Ching).
Faith is a very weak thing to build one's spirituality on, it is knowledge that is truly secure, and through the eye of the heart, it is possible to see for oneself the truth of the Bible, but I have to admit I'm not sure how to get someone to open the eye of their heart. Maybe read the scriptures of various religions, expose yourself to the suffering of the world through volunteer work, study enough philosophy that you can poke holes in materialism.
The holy Quran.
Weirdly, Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West helped me move a sort of delusional atheism to a more sincere Christian religiosity. He had this idea about the various pictures of the world and argued that the closest one to “fact” was this idea of “the world-as-history”. That was really instrumental for me in getting away from the scientific worldview, and realizing that scientific claims about the origin of man, the cosmos, and the universe were basically just untestable and thus unfalsifiable theories, and yet in history, we see God sweep through on horseback like a great flood all the time and we recognize it as a matter of fact and not theory. That really opened me up to ideas about divinity and such again. From there, writers like Virgil, Dante had a big influence as well as Leon Bloy and this guy Rushdoony who wrote a book called The One and the Many. I still struggle with what exactly I believe sometimes but I basically believe there is a God, and he’s more or less the Christian triune God, and I understand Him most easily as a God for which the evidence is most easily identifiable not so much in nature but in history. So Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.
I keep looking for a book that will explain spirituality to me in a way I can understand and provide a more convincing world view than dead materialism. So far no luck.
The Ashtavakra Gita. Also, the hard problem of consciousness already falsified materialism, read The World Behind the World for more on that (not spiritual, but if materialism were true, neuroscience wouldn't be in shambles).
> Ashtavakra Gita
I will try, but ancient people are weird. I've never been able to really understand ancient literature.
>the hard problem of consciousness already falsified materialism
I disagree.
> I disagree
Yeah, you should really read The World Behind the World. There's also this utilitarian blog called Bentham's Bulldog where the author had this strange conversion to theism: he says atheism ultimately leaves you with more incoherences than theism. And it's a very strange journey too: he says Christianity doesn't make much sense as a revelation of God, so he's definitely gonna end up concocting a God of the philosophers, but it's very interesting the arguments he brings to bear for theism.
Ashtavakra Gita is about the nature of consciousness, I don't think it's weird, but then, I didn't find Plato weird either.
why ask here? Christianity isn't comapatible with being a chantard, thus, every "chrisitan" here is a LARPer
Why you do morons say stupid shit like this? It’s just a website where people talk to each other, social media. Nothing more. Nothing less.
no book will restore your faith in god. you need direct experience.
consider regular meditation. if you are a drug user, consider psychedelics or DMT with the intention of ego-death.
100ug of LSD restored my faith in god.
Do you mean actual God or some kind of meme God 'we are all one' thing?
>nonono you can’t possibly try and access the wellspring from which everything flows, you must subscribe to my particular definition of God as described by some late Bronze Age semites
Sad. Why are you like this?
Because I have noticed that when people talk about psychedelics showing them God they never actually mean God, they mean some variant of monism where 'we are like all God bro'. I really don't see the point in using the same word for those two concepts when they mean very different things.
God is itself an intensely ambiguous, unfathomable concept, essentially inexpressible by our bleatings. Why is monism inferior to a guy with a beard calling the shots anyway? Serious question
>God is itself an intensely ambiguous, unfathomable concept, essentially inexpressible by our bleatings
Sure but we aren't God. In that framework mystic experiences are an experience of something exterior to us, not something within us.
Our existence is a manifestation of his universal will (possibly). Language can’t possibly hope to convey the nature of god, so maybe weird hallucinations are a more direct route. Idk, do you? I guess what I’m saying is that it’s just, like, your opinion man
>a manifestation of his universal will
The key here is whether we are part of God or not. Praying to God and 'receiving' his light is a categorically different type of experience than discovering within yourself a mystic stream of whatever.
You can prefer the latter, I'm just saying we should distinguish between the two things.
>Praying to God and 'receiving' his light is a categorically different type of experience than discovering within yourself a mystic stream of whatever.
How could you tell the diffence?
They don't feel the same. The first one is like feeling the warmth of the sun on your face, you are aware of a presence which is absolutely unambiguously 'other'. The second is like a drug coursing through your veins, there is no sense of an other presence, just you.
I appreciate the distinction but once again it seems to come down to semantics and an inadequacy of language in attempting to address transcendentals. People who experience religious/spiritual awakenings as a result of hallucinogens (or even meditation or mental illness induced hallucinations) seem much more moved by them than your average Sunday morning Christian doing their rosaries and eating their wafers. Just sayin’
Because at least the late bronze age semites did exist, unlike your spring from which everthing flows or whatever. That thing is a cope for people who can't face proper atheism yet don't want to commit to actual spirituality. Stop taking the easy way out.
Listen bub, I can be an agnostic deist any way I please. Why should I subscribe to some creepy pseudo-cannibalistic tradition rife with corruption and hypocrisy?
>Why should I subscribe to some creepy pseudo-cannibalistic tradition rife with corruption and hypocrisy?
I already answered this question: because a weird cult at least is real. Your personal delusions aren't above collective delusions.
Ah yes, the appeal to the majority/tradition. Are there any cognitive biases you don’t fall for? My relationship with god is a personal one, I’m sorry yours isn’t
> actual spirituality
Buddhism and Taoism are legitimate spiritual traditions and they don't have God. "Spirituality is bigger than God" is something anyone lucid is forced to admit.
The bible but in pidgin