Maybe a little bit. It does seem like there's more to existence than what you can see, but I don't go out of my way to performs rituals or anything. I think they're ones are quite important on a cultural level since it helps build bonds and maintain peace. I think, if anything, I find the concept of "nature" and the cycle of life to be something practically sacred and humans are a part of that.
Respecting elders and ancestors is something I think is important, too, but ehh, I don't really do any ceremonies for that stuff. I think I'm just a product of my environment and my family probably hasn't done that stuff for a few generations.

I'm not sure I would consider myself spiritual. I live by a simple secular philosophy of treating others with respect and politeness, and of containing my own bigotry, unless I have good reason to behave otherwise. For better or for worse, I generally try to live in the moment, not overly dwelling on the past, nor on the future.

I would, however, concede that I am somewhat superstitious. I believe in luck and occasionally pray to no one in particular. It's irrational, but it's comforting to put to words my own wishes. I'm not sure how or when it started but in observance of, and respect for the dead I perform the sign of the cross occasionally. For instance, if I might watch a video and hear of someone's death I'll usually do it. A few days ago I saw a poor dead bird and made the sign of the cross for it. There's a certain level of respect all living and once living things are owed, I feel.

Culturally, I suppose I'm of the Christian faith, and I was raised Christian, but there are too many things I disagree with and do not believe for me to consider myself one.

I've always had trouble believing in a God or in spirits, I could rationalise them existing, which is why I had a phase where I was a semi-believing Christian, but I always felt like the idea was silly deep down. All that talk of feeling the presence of God and feeling spirits inside you or whatever just put me off because it sounded cultish.

Nowadays I'd say I'm probably closer to being an Atheist, albeit one that believes that religion is still useful. I think the closest thing to a personal philosophy I have is my passing interest in Albert Camus. I like Absurdism, the idea that it's silly to try and find meaning in the universe because it's ultimately meaningless, and that you should just live your life and enjoy it (not in a hedonistic way however, as that is just a way to numb the feeling of realising how meaningless the universe is). The 7 deadly sins also inspired me, since it's a very common sense moral concept, lust is obviously bad, so is sloth and greed and whatnot. Although a practicing Christian might say I'm slothful because of my perceived spiritual apathy.

I would consider myself a Daoist since I engage with and follow their teachings and philosophy the most but I do wish there were more shrines and institutions for white piggu in aus since there really isn't many people to talk to.

I'm just straight up religious.

im now religious. it took me many years of fringe psychology, becoming a homofaggot, the occult, and philosophy, to unlock this ability. The summary is our modern way of thinking, the actual fundamental assumptions and disposition we have towards the world, is entirely fucked. I think the vast majority of people claiming to be religious dont get it, let alone the people who arent claiming to be. We are too indoctrinated with mechanistic causal naturalist materialist thinking from a young age. Its so bad that the entire body of western occultism has not escaped it, in fact the occult is basically just science with exotic matter, exotic universal laws, etc. The same way of mechanistically thinking and trying to causally link things together, the same kind of idolatrous thinking, to believe there is anything, any force or power outside of god. Its like everything is set up to deceive us on this one point and its so easy to slip back into this form of idolatrous thinking.

>>151076
My advice is to dump christianity, it is necessarily compromised because it needed to paganize itself to spread to pagans, the need to adopt naturalist concessions in its apologetics because it lacked backbone. The christian disposition towards god is fragmented, on one hand it has dogma that accurately represents the abrahamic consensus when you look at jewish and islamic views of god, but on the other hand it does not act like it at all. I believe this to be greek influence.
If all people have been exposed to is christianity from the abrahamic religions they probably do not even know the abrahamic idea of god.

Christianity is really an inversion on a lot of things. Christianity is about bringing god closer to you. Both in form with the idea of jesus being literally god but also just some guy, but also in worship and practice, wanting to feel gods presence and such. The abrahamic view of god is as this distant unfathomable thing, that you do not feel but know rationally exists.
The idea that religion is based on reason and thought rather than some kind of intuitive emotion runs contrary to the western understand.

When i began simply disregarding the christian ideas i realized all the things that felt good about religion remained and all the things that felt sketchy to me all my life were no longer there. It was really amazing.

I grew up Christian, then became a reddit atheist, and then kind of 'fell' back in to Christianity after getting into philosophy as well as being fascinated by western esotericism and chaos magick for a bit. Faith is a weird thing because it genuinely didn't even feel like much of a choice for me, but rather, I was open to it due to my newfound interest in the mystic, and then I just ended up having it (thought of course I do quite like Christ). Now, I feel like I couldn't get rid of this faith if I tried, it would almost feel like coping if I were to reject it. Despite this allegiance to Christianity, I am still interested in world religions, particularly Taoism and Buddhism, and I think the major religions generally revolve around a similar 'thing,' so it's pretty useful to look at the various expressions around the world anyway. Really, the primary thing to avoid would be modern expressions of religion; I think Kierkegaard had it quite right regarding Christendom and the poverty of true religiousness in our age.

I'm not spiritual or religious in any way, but I like the thought of something greater - whatever it may be - potentially existing, and I'm completely open to the idea. I think that means I'm agnostic. I have also always been somewhat intrigued or inspired by a lot of surface-level Bible stories, though I mean in the same way in which I also enjoy traditional entertainment, "a good read". I hope spirits are real because life to me would lose a lot of excitement if I was 100% convinced that they aren't.

Very. To vomit ambiguous labels at you, OP, I consider myself a new platonic gnostic universalist. New means that I won't be beholden to the flavor text in the writings I've cobbled my own faith out of. Platonic means I believe this world is a poor imitation of a piece of a larger and more perfect world. Gnostic means I believe we have the potential to escape our condition through as-of-yet unknown means. Universalist means that I believe every path that people choose has the potential to achieve this for humanity, even ones diametrically opposed to my own. We're all wandering on a map of thought, and as long as we keep moving outwards on it instead of in circles, we're bound to find what I'd like us to find. No one has found it yet though; if a single person had then we would all already be rid of this place. Do your own thing; think thoughts no one has thought before. Don't mock those who are followers, but don't try to be a leader either. The time limit is the extinction of the universe. Success will send us to the world of everything, where you are raising a family with your 2D wife and being boiled in oil at the same time forever. If you think about it, that averages out to be better than the Earth experience. I have purposely omitted details so that in the unlikely event anyone finds what I've said here agreeable enough to adopt, they don't end up in redundancy with me and can think more unique thoughts than otherwise.

>>151719
Wow, same exact beliefs right here.
The only difference is that I don't really hope for spirits to be real because it'd make me feel like I'm being watched... I can't even have my plush Pokemon watching when I look at lewd things.

I do not follow any particular religion, but I would say I have religious/spiritual tendencies or psychology. I do not know what it is precisely, but I believe in some sort of higher "order", I believe in a meaningful universe, a general "sense" to things, and I practice idiosyncratic rituals that could be seen as religious. I just do not align at all with the atheist world-view.

>>151072
yes/no/maybe. it matters and it doesn't matter. distinctions help us organize and break the world down into smaller size we can grasp, but this is since we're limited. we can go left or right, but the world contains both left and right along with every other direction. attempting to clearly divide left from right is way one to approach and understand the world and attempting to blur it is another. you'll see different things and arrive at different locations.


you could say i'm spiritual but you could just say my focus is on perspective. it's dao and/or causality. i don't have any special rituals instead i focus on theory so doctrine of what is.

My parents were both hippies, the kind that took a trip to India when it was more popular and almost got killed in Kashmir. Mom still lights a candle in the kitchen next to St. Expeditus and the Buddha, dad has a figurine of Ganesha hanging from his rearview mirror that he kisses before going out. With their New Age influence, as well as reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and other god-containing stories, as a child I took their existence for granted, it obviously had to be the case, but I believed in all of them at the same time thinking each did its own thing in a certain part of the world. I also assumed they'd be easily accesible, so before going to sleep I'd sit in different postures to pray and try to contact them in some way. They never answered, and I gradually stopped doing it. That's how I lost my faith.

This isn't helped by the immutable dogma so many appeal to being in fact mutable across time, like the ancient Hebrews gradually going from Canaanite polytheism, to henotheism, to actively rejecting the validity of any god but Yahweh as they repeatedly edited their sacred texts, or the Gospel of John being written later than the synoptics for polemic purposes and opens with a hellenizing invocation of the Logos like >>151705 mentions. I'm also unconvinced by arguments for the necessity of God, and believe the first mover in particular has only survived because it's impossible to disprove. Aristotle argued for many wordly things that sprang forth from his logic and the first mover was only one of them, but all that could tested were eventually disproven. At this point, I even disbelieve of my own personal experiences with foresight.

>>151705
Thoughts on Al-Ghazali? Or the Ash'ari school in general.
>>151710
>I think the major religions generally revolve around a similar 'thing,'
Sounds like perennialism. Have you looked into that?
>>151738
Do you picture the event as a sort of bubble popping, rather than the individual enlightenment that is more common throughout religions? But that aside, if you're a Platonist and believe in the existence of ideal forms, I don't understand how you could square that with a post-existence where individuals continue to exist. I haven't looked into gnosticism, but I assumed it'd be something like dissolving into Brahman.

>>151756
>Do you picture the event as a sort of bubble popping, rather than the individual enlightenment that is more common throughout religions?
You could say that. Unfortunately I forget exactly how I came to this perspective - I would hope that I could retrace my steps with enough effort - but a practical benefit of it is that it naturally leads to the same prescription as "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
>But that aside, if you're a Platonist and believe in the existence of ideal forms, I don't understand how you could square that with a post-existence where individuals continue to exist.
Good point. It's not exactly the same thing Plato envisioned; that's just a quick way to explain it. Firstly, it is not a post-existence but a parallel one. Secondly, I see it as more the world of everything, with this world being the world of something. By everything I mean absolutely everything conceivable and everything inconceivable. All somethings are included in everything, but many of the things in our something are not the best that everything has to offer. The experience I used as an example is wild speculation, but at the same time any wild speculation would be just as correct as mine, because every statement would be both true and false there, as all those possibilities are things.
>I haven't looked into gnosticism, but I assumed it'd be something like dissolving into Brahman.
There are perspectives like that too. Gnosticism isn't a specific sect or even the sole property of Christian apocrypha; it just refers to the theme of secret knowledge bringing salvation. This theme can be found in many places. You could say that the difference between desiring to lose and keep the self is the difference between the so-called left and right hand paths.

>>151770
Sorry, right and left. Lose is right, keep is left.

>>151770
Everything that could be and couldn't be... that sounds like the description of Yog-Sothoth in The Silver Key, as the sum of all instances of all archetypes (though even more bonkers), which apparently does have this sort of idea as an inspiration. Have you read it? It's fairly short.

>>151756
>Sounds like perennialism. Have you looked into that?
Yeah, a little. I was curious about the Traditionalist school for a bit, interested in reading Guenon or Spermaraswamy, but I came to the view that my time would just be spent better immersing myself in a tradition rather than thinking too much about such a meta-position on religion. Also, while I wouldn't charge perennialists or Traditionalists with this too much, I do think a large part of the appeal of perennialism is that it allows one to kind of avoid being properly critical about religious/spiritual belief (a la new age mumbo jumbo). It's very easy to just go "it's all kinda true" rather than properly think through particular beliefs and come to some criteria for discerning which may be closest to the truth (or at least worth putting one's faith in).

I have a religious background and I think it influences my thoughts a lot more than I know, I have faith but I don't practice it often and I'm very superstitious and believe in weird things that probably make me sound strange. I would like to go to church but I feel like an outsider because of how much the internet has warped me. I think I'm scared or don't want to abandon the sins that make me who I am either.

>>151756
>Thoughts on Al-Ghazali? Or the Ash'ari school in general.
im not versed enough in islamic ideas to have nuanced thoughts about specifics. Ive learned mainly some jewish thinking and when ive encountered the broad strokes of islamic ideas about god, or islamic criticisms against christianity, they seem to match up. This and textual criticism were big thing to open my eyes to the nature of 4th century and on christianity. Not that some of the big deals before that like gnosticism i approve of, i see any shift from a monotheistic religion into having other entities that are responsible for things as a degredation.

Spirituality is all of the bad of religion without any of the good. Eastern philosophy is interesting, as is their mythology, but I would never call myself "spiritual".

>>151783
I have enjoyed what I've read of Lovecraft, but I had not read The Silver Key until just now, on your recommendation. I found it to be well worth the time, a (for Lovecraft at least) delightful tale of whimsy and the value of such. On finishing it I noticed that you actually meant to cite its sequel, Through the Gates of the Silver Key, but I'm glad of your error because it caused me to gain the context I might have missed. As for the relation to my own thinking in that idea of Everything, the concept is nearly identical. What difference there is is so minutely subtle that despite trying for half an hour I cannot articulate it in a way that's both concise and sounds like a difference at all.
It's likely that we were either inspired by the same source in a way either normal or Jungian, or that I was inspired by this story indirectly. I have met others who have remarkably similar ideas to my own, though it sometimes takes a while to realize the similarity since when two people individually have an idea they will surely call it something different. If I meet another someday I'll be sure to ask about this story.

>>151787
>Spermaraswamy
hehehehheh
But yes, I understand. You can't really harmonize Buddhism with Christianity, and if anyone were to posit a real material existence (as so many do) they would already be fundamentally disagreeing with the former. From a cursory check it seems perennialists resolve this sort of conflict by arguing in favor of certain interpretations that allow them to bridge the gap, and that does require some discretion in determining which view is more correct.
>>151801
What I've come across is indeed a fair deal of emphasis on God alone, the sort of "God could change the laws of physics if he felt like it" that I've seen ridiculed by more mechanistically-minded people. No clue about what the Hebrews opine though, the only concept of theirs I know is tzimtzum (which is an interesting one for sure). I mentioned Al-Ghazali specifically because I've seen him get credit for pushing back against the hellenization of Islam specifically with his text The Incoherence of the Philosophers. And I know Averroes is the biggest commentator on pure Aristotelianism, to the point that Renaissance yuros were complaining about "Averroists" whenever someone went down that path, so Al-Ghazali must've had a lot to push against.
>>151815
>you actually meant to cite its sequel, Through the Gates of the Silver Key
Oh! You're right, that was my bad and I'm glad you were able to find the follow-up. I have to admit, I wasn't able to appreciate it when it read it a decade ago, and only managed to remember it because of its relevance to powerscaling arguments. Funny how that works out.
I still can't really imagine how experiencing that would feel from a human standpoint though, and if it would be desirable at all. The idea sounds so incomprehensibly alien that I understand why Lovecraft would use it for horror instead. How does time even begin to work in such a situation?

>>151818
>The Incoherence of the Philosophers
based title
the jewish view is that everything that happens is a direct miracle, there is no such thing as causation. I heard somewhere that islam also rejects causation which when i heard it years ago i took it as evidence of their backwardness but i now see it as praiseworthy.

imagine trying to compromise your religion to align with contemporary natural philosophy when it has a track record of entirely changing every few centuries.

>>151818
>>151756
Buddhism is fairly compatible with Christian belief, at least some forms of them work together. Much of "serious" (non-Evangelical) Christian theology centers near exhaustively on ideas of faith through works. By doing good and participating in ritual you WILL achieve salvation, not just by reaching heaven and being with God (this in itself aligns with many Buddhist ideas, if you change the terminology a little), but also by being given the opportunity to do so over and over and over again.
The Christian God is kind and forgiving and humble. This is historically important, because both that same God, but also all of the regious practices of the pre-Christian times were not like that, except one. And I will make a completely baseless implication that may seem a little insane: Rome was trading with China.

I think the spiritual details are not so important when considering things that happened so long ago, thought that was conceived and developed, many lifetimes prior. Thought that was changed and developed further across all those lifetimes in turn.
Modern Catholic Christian doctrine and Buddhist ideas are a surprisingly good fit, and not at all difficult to unify.
From a Christian perspective, the Buddha of the past were prophets of God teaching practice and compassion and Jesus Christ was the final one. Achieving enlightenment and passing on from this world are simply the acts of communing with God and reaching heaven.
From the Buddhist perspective this even easier. Of course, the role of Jesus had been interpreted precisely as you'd expect in places like China and India and it works quite well. Similarly the (expected) pracitices of the clergy and the believers, the teachings of Christ. They also fit seamlessly into the legacy of the Buddha.

The only thing that doesn't fit with Buddhism in broad strokes is perhaps the most important of all Christian beliefs:
Doubt

>>151072
I don't think I'm spiritual at all. I just try to be polite and kind to others. Maybe I need a psychedelic trip to develop something like spirituality, I don't know.

>>151744
That sounds like an extreme case, but I do understand what you mean. I think that's a positive of our "fence-sitting" approach, the fact that we can enjoy thinking about the possibility, but aren't convinced in a way that would make us feel particularly scared or watched!

>>151818
>I still can't really imagine how experiencing that would feel from a human standpoint though
Neither can I, and I don't need to. It's paradoxical and beyond human faculty just as the story wants it to sound. To desire it I don't need to experience it to compare with my own life; all I need is to think that the average of all qualities of life is higher than the average here.
>>151823
This is interesting to me. If you'll let me invoke Darwin and Skinner, the idea of causality is older than humanity. It's something that we have evidence that monkeys and birds and I'm sure even lower lifeforms than that believe in. Is there an argument to it being a fiction, or is that entirely on the part of faith? Personally I think there is a place for science in the world, and since Gödel demonstrated that science as a way of knowing has limits, there is and will always be plenty of room for other ways of knowing to be in harmony with it. I worry that those who completely reject science are needlessly afraid that the things they value can't be squared with it, just as those of the dogma of science reject anything that tries to give them values in the first place.

From an early age I became an atheist like >>151710 but thankfully, I had the tact to not go full euphoric.
I blame this broadly on Protestantism; it is not a good religion for normal people, and inquisitive minds will default to atheism without proper guidance. The architects of the enlightenment were learned men, familiar with church doctrine, often from within, and could engage responsibility with the idea of god with no intermediary, via pure reason, without the grand imagery and festivals. The rest of us need the "bells and smells" as a stepstone to understanding and initiation. Protestantism is sort of seen as an uncommitted default religion in the US, but it requires advanced understanding.

Anyways, this will sound stupid, but after watching Utawarerumono with you guys on stream, I went into this weird and cathartic state where I proclaimed "I would seek the truth of this world" and from there my life got a bit strange. I encountered this highly niche and esoteric English blogger who changed my worldview in a fairly significant way.

Through personal experiences and synchronicities, I now believe in gods, demons, satanic forces guided consciously and consciously that act on this world, and a superior dimension. Astrology and I Ching also work, though I have no clue why. I confide in and perform rituals to the god Lugus/Mercury which has made contact to me. That's the short version for now.

>>151756
Your background sounds a bit like this French Anon. I am convinced his story is one of the few out there that isn't bullshit, so of course it didn't come from /x/

>>151705
>My advice is to dump christianity
>Christianity is really an inversion on a lot of things.

Yes, sadly. But even over a century after Nietzsche stated the obvious state of affairs, most people can't so freely accept the yawning void below them.
Christianity has to be abandoned for the right reasons, or a person can degenerate into something far worse than the normal Christian hypocrite.
You seem advanced enough at all this to know what I mean already, I think.

I meant to link this image too; maybe I was hallucinating that Kissu could have multiple images and that was just KC.

>>152061
>But even over a century after Nietzsche stated the obvious state of affairs, most people can't so freely accept the yawning void below them.
>Christianity has to be abandoned for the right reasons
What do you suggest for the masses then? Where should, or more fundamentally where could they go? If you take a wrecking ball to someone's house and you're not ready to foot the bill, all you've done is drive up homelessness. From this,
>The rest of us need the "bells and smells" as a stepstone to understanding and initiation.
it's clear you understand that not every individual is mentally capable of a solo journey to find meaning. Sorry if I sound prickly, but people love to say what you've just said and very rarely spare a thought for any sort of accompanying positive vision.

I guess I'll throw my hat in considering how many anons there are here who are interested in the topic and have put effort into studying it too.

Setting aside specifics, I had an incredibly potent series of spiritual experience in 2024. Previously I had studied Western esoteric lore on and off for about 6 years. Alchemy, Jung, Tarot, Hermeticism, Chaos Magic...also lore about UFOs, the ultraterrestrial hypothesis and modern monster sightings. The studies were sporadic and more wide than deep. I didn't have very commited beliefs for most part. I viewed it mostly as psychological phenomena.

Early last year I started studying the East Asian traditions more and things rapidly unfolded from there. I got stuck in a months-long synchronicity cyclone with at it's peak daily visionary states, all pushing me more and more eastwards. From then on I have studied Shinto, Taoism and Buddhism and various syncretic manifestations of these pretty intensively.

I feel like these three form a very harmonious, coherent field of study.
1) Shinto has perhaps the most articulated knowledge regarding the spirit ecology that saturates all of reality.
2) Taoism has very articulated knowledge regarding the way reality is made via the patterning of energies through interacting forces.
3) Buddhism offers a kind of high-level view of this all, a solid and intuitively understandable moral framework and the potential to commit the ultimate jailbreaking of the kuso VR headset that gets called "reality".

While the three traditions also have their differences, they very much feel to be pointing at the same thing, emphasizing different aspects of it. They also offer a very holistic, embodied view of the matter at hand, and set of effective practices.

The spirit world, existence of deities, spirits, ghosts, demons and all that is an experienced reality for me. It's not theories or speculations anymore. Same goes for the efficiency of the spiritual practices.

I strongly encourage everyone to study these traditions and to experiment with the practices they provide. I especially warmly recommend focused attention meditation and the various Taoist bodily practices. Spiritual reality is not "out there", it's right here, and while this might be projection, browsing internet all day long in shrimp posture will kill your ability to interface with it.
>>151710
>I think the major religions generally revolve around a similar 'thing,'
It's as if there is something true to it all, isn't it?
>>151744
>I don't really hope for spirits to be real because it'd make me feel like I'm being watched...
Most people are invisible to them most of the time, just as most spirits are invisible to most humans most of the time. It's an anxiety inducing thought for sure before you realize and accept this.
>>151799
You should explore options beyond Christianity.
>>151818
>if anyone were to posit a real material existence (as so many do) they would already be fundamentally disagreeing with the former
The are Buddhists sects that think more along the lines that material existence exists, but our perception and tendency to label it consisting of separate "things" is wrong. This is very much in line with modern scientific thinking, for what's it worth. All of existence is 99% empty space with some energy vibrating at different frequencies from the POV of physics.
>>151823
What we perceive as miracles does not mean that there are no causations. It simply means there might be mechanisms of causation that operate beyond our perception, and entities that make these causations unfold. For example, Taoism has miracles, yet it has also very detailed ideas about how certain sets of interactions and how the divine energies become patterned into what we perceive material reality. Miraculous, supernatural etc events are simply manipulations and changes of these processes and patternings on a level above our perception. Manipulating them is the real of spirits, gods and accomplished humans.
>>151865
>Buddhism is fairly compatible with Christian belief
It really is not. You can fit Christianity into a Buddhist framework as an occasionally well-meaning Western guilt-driven oddity, but beyond some shared moral values the Buddhist view of the world is so divergent from Christianity that it does not work.

Buddhism can incorporate Christian God as a Western interpretation of Indra, but Christianity cannot live with the idea of Christian God being a deluded, petulant but potent storm deity. Buddhism can view ideas of original sin as a particular cultural neurotic attachment to be overcome, Christianity withers into nothingness without it. Buddhism can view Jesus as this Nichiren-like figure that straddles the line between a prophet and a huckster, Christianity cannot bring down it's founder from the cross.

People want Christianity and Buddhism to be compatible so bad, but the compatibility really works only in one direction if you sacrifice central Christian beliefs. To what extent Buddhist spiritual technologies could be incorporated into Christian framework is an interesting question though - meditation does not really depend on God or gods either way. While I am not an expert on the subject, there appear to be forms of Christian practice which are more towards that direction.

That said, Buddhist views of course could be wrong, but I find them much, much more compelling than Christian views, which I have always found incredibly contrived and alien.

As for me personally, how people conduct themselves in this world matters the most, and Christians are very capable of proper conduct and occasionally connecting with something that is above and beyond the angry regional storm deity that capital-G "God" is modeled after. I just think they have to go through so many hoops to get to this.

>>152091
>It really is not.
I think you are missing some key understanding of Christianity, both childlike and esoteric.

>Christianity cannot live with the idea of Christian God being a deluded, petulant but potent storm deity
Being? No, certainly not. But having been? Absolutely.
God now is good and kind and loving and we are ALL his chosen people. Even those who do not believe.
But He was not always that way and this is arguably the defining aspect of Christianity. There was a drastic change in the very nature of God, when he became flesh. You can have heretical thoughts like saying that God, Father is not the same as YHWH, the old God of the Israelites.

So this framing of God in such a fashion is not at all a problem, because He was that. Even so, I think that more esoteric explanations of God are more appropriate, as this is the trend in the teachings of Christ. God is no longer an actor, who speaks and moves about, who has feelings and desires,who challenges the other Gods for dominance and defeats them all. God in the New Testament is largely absent, there are signs, but He never speaks. He never acts. Once again, we see that His very nature has fundamentally changed upon becoming flesh.
My point being that Buddhism can incorporate God in one other way and it is not as a deity. God simply is what awaits you at the end of everything.

>Buddhism can view ideas of original sin as a particular cultural neurotic attachment to be overcome, Christianity withers into nothingness without it
Theologically, the original sin is not nearly as big of an issue as you view it. The forgiveness of the original sin is arguably the spirtual core of the New Covenant. This started with Mary, who, as is known, was conceived free of the original sin, which is why she was able to birth Christ. And of course, Christ's sacrifice is what allowed for the forgiveness of the original sin. It is no longer a relevant "problem", all can and will be forgiven.

>the compatibility really works only in one direction if you sacrifice central Christian beliefs
There is no dogma that needs to be compromised to adapt Christian thought into a Buddhist framework and vice versa.

>Christian views, which I have always found incredibly contrived and alien
At its heart, without going into esoterica and curiousities and 19 centuries of power plays, Catholic Christian views and values are remarkably simple and easy to comprehend. They are far less alien than anything any other belief system has to offer. The simplicity of the teachings of Christ are why Christianity is still the top dog and always will be:
Be kind and humble and do help those in need, and if you can, try helping the people who are right there next to you. If you know someone who is having a bad time, help them out.
This is what the Christian faith is about, all the ritual and spirtuality and prayer are far, far less important than doing good. It is faith through works.
Those who tell you otherwise are heretics, the gospel is extremely clear on this specific thing.

But I think it is clear from the way I dicuss this, my interest is more remote and theological. I'm interested in the historical and the way beliefs and ideas seem to line up.
There is that implication I made, "Rome was trading with China". Perhaps young Jesus of Nazareth heard about some teachings of the far, far East and had his own ideas about them. That would be a very nice story for sure, even if it is extremely heretical.

>>152101
I wanted to write a post like this but didn't have the stamina. Thank you for doing it. You're right that some of what you've said would be considered heresy, but every sect is heretic to every other.

>>152102
"Jesus was playing a game of Buddhist telephone", is an idea too fun to pass up on, it is super heresy though.

>>152088
I don’t think there is such an easy way out. When I check social media it becomes clear that even within normies every once and a while that their instincts are screaming at them that something is wrong, but, they fear the silence and will drown it out as best as they can with work or indulgence.
At a national level there seems to be a coordination to promote Catholicism, clearly s reflection in demographics changes, but also as a potential step to steer America in a new direction. I expect it to fail, but for the average person here it would likely benefit them more than Protestantism anyways.
The most robust religions here are also the most homegrown: Mormonism and Scientology.

>>152091
I can read Japanese well enough to browse their social media and frankly I am disappointed to say that Japanese faith comes off as incredibly shallow to me. They have a better on average sense of harmony with nature than the average Westerners, but that is just by almost coincidental factors, namely that all the mountains make much or their land commercially worthless so they just end up as shrine retreats, which further protects nature, which they then can go and harmonize with in under an hour of a train ride.

abrahamist worship a demon that tells them to perform a sexual torture ritual on newborn babies and mutilate their gentiles. no matter how much abrahamist and abrahamic sympathizers try and downplay this even in rome they knew exactly how evil and twisted that is. nobody has the capability to magically arrive at the idea of performing a sexual torture ritual on a newborn baby boy out of the blue. meaning, yes, abrahamist evil and demonic doing human sacrifice and practicing cannibalism which is why they could actually envision the demon they worship telling them to do it and actually carrying it out.

everything abrahamic is born from the darkness in the human heart which is why they give false promise and commit every other kind of sin again humanity they can manage. every branch of it has a doctrine to subjugate the rest of humanity but they're like worms who feign humility and pretend to be benign until they get power and then begin terrorizing and attempt to destroy anything. they preach tolerance because it's required for their evil to be allowed to spread.

i know abrahamist and their sympathizers will pretend they gave humanity everything and they're owed something, but they're not. they didn't give humanity fire or civilization. the idea of morality is born from humanity itself and was something discussed and understood while abrahamic demon worshipers were still practicing cannibalizing without a written language let alone morality. the idea these demon worshipers pretend they gave humanity morality is merely another proof of their wickedness. it's a denial of what humanity and biological is capable of and attempting to malign humanity with original sin. it's also a kind of underhanded manipulative tactic to gain power and control because it's trying to steal human nature and return it under the guise of a gift. attempting to take credit and ownership of human achievement and accomplishment while maligning humanity with stuff like original sin is worthy of a death sentence.

as a daoist the idea abrahamic demon worshipers gave humanity morality or ethics is one of the most twisted and sick things in this world. a complete inversion of good and evil. every year thousands of baby boys die do to their pedophilic sexual torture ritual to their demon. everything abrahamic needs to be expunged from this world.

>>152105
it is is wrong to be nice to others, I see the errors in the teachings of Christ now

>>152105
You're talking about circumcision and Christianity but Circumcision isn't a part of Christianity. It only happens so much in America because a man named Kellogg lobbied for it very hard because he thought it would make boys stop masturbating, which was something he personally cared a lot about for some reason. In Christianity, Jesus fulfilled the Law and adherents don't need to follow any of the byzantine rules of the Old Testament.

>>151969
>>152091
kabbalists and various famous rabbis have always been fond of their contemporary natural philosophies, they make use of them for analogies or explaining things. This has lead to the problem however that if you pick up a centuries old kabbalah book and start reading it with out knowing better you might think the ideas of kabbalah fundamentally depend on classical elements, or magnetism, or whatever the current new thing was. In all cases this is of course not the case, they were just using these things to try and explain concepts.

In some way they do not dismiss science and some have even praised the scientific thinking to having discovered some profound concepts about piety, but take a loot at what i said in the paragraph above: those centuries old foundations for how everything works that were arrived at scientifically have been replaced with new ones. Meanwhile you pick up a kabbalah book written in modern times and its trying to describe the same concepts using modern scientific ideas of nonlocality. The science is always changing compared to the speed of religion. Yet people believe in it with conviction.

over two thousand years ago in egypt the first people that we would link with alchemy were tinting metals with chemical reactions to create decorative objects. To understand what they were doing they speculated an entire system of rules and causation which fit the things they were observing and lead them to try new things and find successes and invent new practical demonstrations of technology. Importantly, the ideas of those systems are entirely rational, they do not contain self contradictions. This feels good and certain to the mind. Today these peoples efforts are scoffed at and used as some example of ignorant primitives by people who are presently trying to come up with more and more speculative explanations as to why things are just not working in their modern day models of the universe that they know must be true because we can create practical demonstrations of technology.

Im going to wing it here and combine some principles and general sentiments i encounter in jewish thought to synthesize an answer, i didnt hear this from anyone so it might be entirely made up: There is a concept in judaism that the more knowledge one obtains the easier it is for someone to deceive themselves. There is a force present in everyone called the evil inclination, yetzer hara. This is a built in function of humans. It is what causes all self deceptions, all rationalizations. Its what convinces you its not that bad to do a thing you know you shouldn't, or in some cases even causes you to fixate on an objectively good thing but in a way that consumes you so its actually preventing you from doing more good. The more knowledge you have, the more reason it has access to, the more arguments it can use, the more justifications. To the jew, learning becomes a balance then and one must make sure to learn sufficient torah knowledge to be able to correct ones evil inclination. If you learn too much of the wrong thing its far easier for you to become dazzled by it.

The progression of knowledge and its ability to deceive then is a theme. As time goes on and we create new scientific models and understandings the abilities these new frameworks impart on us seems to increase, and so each new step providing new proofs of our mastery seem to assure people that at last we must have found the truth, for we can do all these new and wondrous things. We forget the abilities we had before that came from other understandings quickly, as we simply explain them under the new framework and pretend thats what we always had. We downplay them in our histories, passing them off as quick jokes or footnotes such as they do when describing how famous historical scientists were also alchemists. In this way we very quickly get comfortable and confident in our new scientific views.
If one takes a step back and looks as this pattern they should expect all our modern ideas to be replaced at some point in the future. In reality we did not know any truths, we just used rationality and thought to find more refined explanations and through the merit of rationality (the soul is the thinking part of you in judaism, not the feeling part), more abilities came to us, not more truths.

(1/2)

>>152110
When we turn on a switch the light turns on. We expect this to happen, we have a causal explanation for it. But how many things more are happening? The power plant needs to continue functioning, how many things can go wrong with it? What if the bulb burns out? What if a rat ate through the wire? There are countless ways that light could not turn on. Why did none of them happen, or why did they happen? We could start modeling all these things, but never actually account for everything. Fundamentally to the universe the effects of chaos make it impossible for us to causally justify that light turning on 100% going back to the beginning, the complexity of that calculation would require the universe itself to do. This touches on kabbalistic views. The universe is god. Not in the pantheist sense which would say that the universe is god and the bounds of the universe are the bounds of god, but in a different sense. A very quick modern analogy of kabbalistic idea is thus: God is a projector in a movie theater. Our world happens on the screen. The projection is a projection of god. The light beam in between the projector and the screen contains infinite worlds in between the projector and us. If we interrupted the beam with another screen at any point along the way, the focus would be different. We would see a projection of god that to us would look fuzzy. Some degree of fuzziness would be discernible, but at parts the focus would be so out that we would only see strange lights and smudges, maybe nothing at all. Entirely unfathomable to us. (different kinds of angels inhabit different worlds) In this way there are infinite worlds between us and god, each is god as it is gods projection, all that god is is contained in those in a sense, and so we in our universe are also contained within god. He is everywhere and also infinitely far away, and the full course of his actions as they move down through the worlds is unfathomable to us.

Back to the causation. The idea can be best understood when one questions free will as well. According to jews everyone has free will. Also according to jews everything that happens is directly gods doing. This seems a contradiction. The answer is that free will is the freedom to decide what you are going to do, but deciding you are going to do a thing does not guarantee you actually do it. Even in a split second decision what we would think of as chaos, butterfly effects, etc, have opportunity to slightly alter the course of your action. Someone is a thief, how do they pick which house exactly? Someone decides to suicide and they drive around in a car to ram into someone else, maybe they are guided to that thief on his way to steal. Their free wills were not infringed on, but what we would see as slight variations in the traffic patterns explainable though countless different subtle effects manipulated the outcome. God guides everything through ways we might recognize and through ways we have no ideas exist at all. (as an aside, to complete this, jews also believe absolutely everything that happens is just and compensation for some good or bad deed - jews also believe in reincarnation which is scripturally supported in the old testament no less, and opens up a lot more wiggle room for punishments and rewards)

What all this then means, is that while we believe there is causation when we turn on the light, in fact the light only came on because god decided to allow it, and that is the only truth. We can come up with different models to explain how it is naturally happening because of natural laws and forces, and we can construct a working model that fits within the bounds of our understanding and even give us new abilities or discoveries, but that model deprecates with time and is replaced by another one, and that process will never actually arrive at truth. We are given more abilities but this increases our vulnerability to deception.

tl;dr - our models change too much, you shouldn't trust them. there are countless things we might attribute to chaos happening at all times through which god can alter, cause, or cause to not happen anything. therefore the idea that the things are being caused by some causal chain and not directly okd by god is a mental deception even if our models were correct, which they almost certainly are not.

(2/2)

>>152108
trying to take credit for the golden rule even though it isn't your doing or creation. evil always attempts to wear virtue as a skin.

you take credit for what isn't yours and what is originally is yours like the demon who tells you to do a sexual torture on a newborn baby you downplay and ignore.

why? cause your heart is filled with deserve for heaven. like i said abrahamism spreads because the darkness in the human heart. every year the original product of your belief is thousands and thousands of baby boys dying from the ritual performed for your demon. however, that isn't noteworthy cause your religion loves to steal as much as it does lie. so you can tell yourself you invented morality and everybody owes you.

the men who i admire knew morality and wrote about it in their original and created language. the demons you worshop didn't even have a written language let alone the idea of morality while mine did.

>>152109
yes, admit to downplay it. your cannibalistic and human sacrificing demons don't count cause later one of them said maybe you don't need to do it to try and spread it to pagans. even though they kept doing it personally. your own prophets are mutilated in the ritual to their demon deity. you can't be righteous when you wiggle like a worm.

While this thread is so lively I figure I should hijack it for my own reasons causing my thoughts to run in circles lately.

Can one of you learned sages provide an apologism for Sabbatai Zevi? Looking at a shallow overview of his life tells me I should denounce him as a clear antichrist figure, but, when I look at his natal chart and his birthday (The same day as my most intimate god’s festival day) makes me want to reconsider.

>>152110
>>152111
I take it that your answer to my question "Is there an argument to it being a fiction, or is that entirely on the part of faith?" is that it is faith, then. Your model of God allowing or not allowing the conversion of intent to result is just as much of a model as any scientific model. You assert yours is superior because it hasn't changed, but the reason for that may well be only because it's unfalsifiable. Thus, it is faith. Your faith. And that's fine.

>>152113
I find it fascinating that you are so eager to throw dirt at someone who says "be humble and nice to others". It turns out simply presenting the teachings of Christ can be very revealing about someone's moral character.

>>152118
Im saying there is a rational reason you should not believe it. Namely that history is full of cosmologies and models for how the universe works that are entirely self consistent that keep getting dismissed and replaced with new ones.
The entire kind of thinking: looking for patterns we see and trying to construct models out of them - is demonstrably flawed at finding truth. You just shouldn't think that way to start with.

Using models for their utility is another matter, you dont have to believe in them to do that. People have a very hard time maintaining a separation in their mind between utility and truth once they start engaging with the utility though. If anything some kind of religious conviction is the way not to be tricked into this.

The idea the west has as faith as being some kind of hand wave is not present in judaism. Rather faith and trust in god are virtues people gain by working on their reason and examining the world and seeing the effects of god first hand. Rationality is the highest thing and it is asserted that every principle or idea in dogma has a rational reason. That said of course there are some fundamental assumptions, for example textual criticism might say that this or that writing is actually from a different time than its recorded as. Just taking it at face value as its presented within the tradition is required.

>>152110
>There is a concept in judaism that the more knowledge one obtains the easier it is for someone to deceive themselves. There is a force present in everyone called the evil inclination, yetzer hara. This is a built in function of humans. It is what causes all self deceptions, all rationalizations

Fascinating stuff here

>>152121
The logical leap you're making to say that the failure of alchemy and other proto-sciences indicates that causality itself does not exist is just unacceptable in my opinion. I would go as far as to say pure sophistry, unless you're holding some kind of pet definition of causality that you managed to not say in that wall of text, in which case we're talking past each other. And I do assert that you have to believe in a model to use it. You have to believe that it is of use, isn't that self-evident?

>>152121
>The entire kind of thinking: looking for patterns we see and trying to construct models out of them - is demonstrably flawed at finding truth. You just shouldn't think that way to start with.
of course, but what good is "truth" alone?
The purpose of making a model is to use the model to make predictions. I do not care what the truth is, only that I can predict the future well "enough".
Truth itself is fundamentally unattainable, because are no things you can know in the first place. All things degenerate into nothingness in the face of doubt.
You can only believe.

>>152123
As someone more scientifically-minded, I would argue that you don't have to believe in a model at all. You can verify your model.
If you have to doubt whether you can make a model at all, you're in much bigger trouble.

>>152115
I'm not too familiar with him but cursory research doesn't turn up anything that would make me even interested in learning more. He just seems like a dime a dozen cult leader. If you're thinking otherwise solely because of his birthday then I guess you're free to do as you like, but I think that's silly.
>>152126
Please explain to me why you don't touch a hot pan, and use both words, "believe" and "verify," in your explanation. Genuine request.

>>152128
>Please explain to me why you don't touch a hot pan
This is a question that is too simple, there is no real room to distrust the model at all. It is much too easy to do the experiment. You can just heat up a pan and touch it, whenever you want.
The problem comes in with models you cannot verify extremely easily.

>>152123
this is because you take for granted causality as the default and think it needs to be disproven. But where does this idea come from? The assertion that there is causality based on belief in models that people who follow modern models have dismissed long ago.

Our modern thinking is actually quite a new thing. Its only the last few hundred years everyone has been materialist. Prior to that idealists and dualists had fundamentally different relationships to the experience of existing, those were just normal things. Only in our current materialist view of reality does the enticement of pure mechanistic causation hold this strong a natural inclination and appeal to us that it feels simply natural and with out saying.

>>152126
interestingly during my occult investigations ive formed the opinion that our modern formalized scientific process was codified by occultists who realized the dangers of not having some certainties, so they formulated a set of rules to find some specific things they can feel absolutely certain of. This is important for the purpose of certain magical systems where stray thoughts or ideas can.
Of course the real scientific dogma is that 'no model is true, all are useful', but how many scientists actually believe that when they arent confronted with the question and quizzed on it and forced to remember with their intellect and not just their intuition?

Now this tool which should have been a way to find only the most solid of things has had to be expanded and stretched to allow for a complete model of existence devoid of 'superstition'. This means necessarily to account for all the unknowable fuzziness the standards of what counts as scientific knowledge gets stretched, and you have the current years problems in research that all the youtubers are talking about. People are trying to use it to create a full belief system and destroying its keenness.


I was a full on atheist materialist until one day i caught myself feeling spooked. It was out at night and i felt creeped out and started imagining monsters around the shed in the dark. I then told myself that thats silly, i dont believe in it, all is matter, and imagining respectable figures long dead who i admired and did not believe in those things providing me company and safety. I caught myself performing this banishing ritual and at that moment i realized i was not an atheist to start with - in fact i doubt anyone actually is.

Belief is what you know when you arent thinking about it. Many people mistake their reassurances and self reminders as belief.

>>152125
there is nothing wrong with this thinking. provided people dont take these models and principles as being more than representative of correlations we have noticed that seem to work out they are in no danger

>>152143
>where stray thoughts or ideas can.
can sabotage you*

>>152138
You did not explain why you don't want to touch a hot pan right now. I'll apologize for being roundabout and perhaps condescending by trying to railroad you into saying something in particular. This isn't about experimentation, this is about utilizing knowledge from prior experiments to improve your own life. I'll make the example more extreme so there's less room for surprises. You believe in the efficacy of the model that was built with verification, so you do not need to verify for yourself that swallowing polonium will kill you. In fact, by proxy of the model, you believe that it will kill you to swallow polonium. If you want to tell me that you don't believe that then this has to be some kind of asinine semantics issue.
>>152143
>The assertion that there is causality based on belief in models that people who follow modern models have dismissed long ago.
Absolutely not. If you give birds food when they exhibit an arbitrary behavior they will understand that as cause and effect and do that behavior more in the hopes of getting more food. They are just birds.
>Its only the last few hundred years everyone has been materialist.
Causality isn't inherently materialistic; you're just getting further and further away from coherency.

>>152119
it's really twisted and evil how you pretend you invented "being humble and nice to others" and humans need you for it. the only thing abrahamist invented was the formal pedophilic sexual torture ritual for the demon they worship. every idea about morality is just something you stole or plagiarized there's absolutely nothing original in your cult about it.

good doesn't tolerate evil. why do i need to accept evil wearing virtue as a skin? the idea humanity needs you and your demon is blasphemy against humanity. there's no original sin and morality is the creation of biological life. your creation is a ritual that can only be born from the most evil and wick humanity has to offer.

as i said earlier it's impossible to out of the blue create something as sick as evil as the sexual torture ritual called circumcision. this requires evil as a basis which even rome commented on. you need to do every sort of demonic act possible and totally normalize evil to turn this into a religious doctrine. cannibalism, human sacrifice, and malice against humanity is required to to think of it and do it. precisely what's written in the abrahamic demonic books.

saul the jew later saying gentiles maybe don't need to because pagans didn't want to do such a sick evil ritual is only further proof of how evil your death cult is. saul himself did this evil ritual so he's deserving of death himself.

>>152156
See, if you cared about good and evil, you'd be happy that the teachings of Jesus are so successful, because they lead to people doing good in the world.
You and I both know that you are not replying to anything I am saying, that you are just spouting angry, aggressive non-sequiturs. You are far more concerned with arguing the semantics of good and evil and who came up with certain ideas that you hopefully consider to be good, rather than looking at the impact these teachings have on the world and the ways you can make more people follow them.
And you don't care for that, at all.

You don't want people to do good things, you don't want to build a better world. You just want to say things you think sound exciting about demons and cannibalism and edgy things. 中二病.

>>152153
I am unsure what you are trying to say, because you're being very difficult and, because you are posing yes/no questions. Which are inherently trivial to some extent.
Do I know what will happen if someone touches a hot pan? No. Can I predict with reasonable confidence, within all circumstances I am liable to encounter what will happen? Yes.
Do I need to "believe" that the model is valid, to make a prediction? No, I don't. You can take any model and make predictions with it.

Is this what you wanted?

>>152175
Why would you make a prediction with a model you don't believe is valid?

>>152178
Why would I not just use every model I have and then pick the best prediction?

>>152179
I think you were projecting when you said I was being very difficult.

>>152182
Maybe you need an example to follow along.
Imagine you have a ball, and you want throw that ball and you'd like to know where it lands and you somehow know a lot of physical theory, but you don't actually know when to apply what.
So how do you find out where that ball will end up?

You try every theory you know and consider which one gives the most plausible result.
If the ball becomes, very, very small. It will obey rules that a are different from the rules it obeys when it is normal sized, compared to when it becomes very, very big.

In such a case, you have to test all your models and pick the one that works best to make your next prediction.

this is why we eventually stopped having fucking religious arguments in the 00s

>>152184
So, you don't believe anything and you don't know anything. Except what's plausible. And what's normal. And what's the best model in a given situation. You know these things. But you don't know that swallowing polonium will kill you or that touching a hot pan will hurt you. I tried very hard to be polite but your anus has swallowed your head, man.

>>152187
You were fishing for an abstract argument on the philosophy of science and now that you're getting it, you're unhappy?
I can't help you with that.

>>152190
If you seriously wanted that you would have started by defining terms. You didn't even when I suggested it could be a semantic issue. You are much more concerned with sounding intelligent than communicating. I won't reply again.

>>152186
It really is, it's so hard to have good faith (ha) arguments about it

>>152153
I didn't say causality is inherently materialist, I'm saying materialism makes it harder to escape casual thinking.

there is a big difference between pattern recognition and assuming direct cause. thing A causes thing B which causes thing C and so on is causal thinking. it is tying up the explanation of why things happen into the assumed how.

>>152193
I can't help your frustrations.
Instead of insulting me, you could have asked for clarifications, I would have been glad to provide them to you. I will now do so anyway, because you are desperate to make me look bad:
The reason why I didn't acknowledge your pan or polonium examples is that they're not really what I am talking about. Because there are not very many possible results and not very many ways in which you can predict them. It's, I would argue, somewhat trivial.
I know what results are plausible, because I can have a prior expectation. To borrow your hot pan example: if I touch a hot pan, I expect to feel a little pain, I don't expect that my hand melts of in an instant. If such base assumptions cannot be made, then as I said, you are in much bigger trouble.
On "knowing the best model", if you apply a quantum mechanical model to throwing a ball, you will get a result, but it will obviously be wrong, similar to how if you try to model a ball the size of a proton using classical mechanics. The same issue applies if the ball has the mass of the sun. It is again, arguably a completely trivial question.

I admit that my example is perhaps a little bad, because it is very achronological and presents these models as equal, rather than in their historic context. But I was expecting you to treat me with the same respect I offered, instead of whatever this is supposed to be.

>>152198
also this highlights the problem of our modern thinking and goes back to one of my earlier posts. people stuck in this naturalists mechanistic thinking find it hard to think outside of it, such that even our modern mysticisms find substitutions rather than alternatives. the medium movement in the early 20th century and late 19th show this. ghosts are made of ectoplasm which can be produced. also things like that experiment to weigh people before and after death to see what a soul weighed.

even our ideas of other worlds or planes of being are just like ours but you have to go through sooner process to get there through a portal or 'sideways or in-between'.

these representative dont even try to that the more appropriate psychological ideas we have common access to. to animists for example, the oldest kind of religion, they understood spirits as being more akin to what we would think of as feeling. the spirit of anger possessing someone was literally just getting mad. and the spirit of an object was the same kind of thing, existing no physically, non dimensionally.

where did a meme exist? not in a place. depictions of it might exist on a place, but not it itself.

this is the difficulty of religious discussion I think. the majority of modern people religious and non religious alike reflexively think in these kinds of physical terms, and alternative insisted upon is mapped to just a different hidden chain of causations, substances, physicality.

I think this is what leads to lousy apologetics and the impossibility of discussing things with people who cannot think outside of trying to imagine alternative mechanisms

>>152198
>>152206
This is not what I initially perceived your position as. I don't have a problem with what you're saying here. Thanks.

>>152198
Paradoxically, a strictly empirical/scientific model can't really account for causality at all. Hume was among the first to point out that causality cannot be empirically observed. That's why our scientific models are always probabilistic, rather than deterministic.

>>152186
We were too busy watching watching anime and gaming for all that.

>>152247
Y-yeah... I never had a super atheist phase...

>>152160
no, i wouldn't be happy a demonic cult that wears virtue as a skin suit hijacked humanities nature and weaponized it against humanity. wtf is wrong with you? your abrahamic death cult has been terrorizing and absolutely brutalizing humanity for 1700 years. let me explain this for you cause you don't seem to understand. EVIL WEARS VIRTUE AS A SKIN. the highest achievement of evil is to crown itself as the greatest good. your continual attempt to pretend your desert death cult created and spread morality is one the easiest proof of this fact.

humanity created morality and ethics. it's born from human nature and and the struggle of biological life. it's an incredible thing life uses to uplift itself. it isn't thanks your vile death cult we're here and you didn't spread morality instead you corrupt it. you attempt to diminish the majesty of life by acting is if you're needed for morality instead of it being an innate trait the majority of humans have. this is why your cult has original sin and always tries to cast humanity downward maligning it. you want to blemish what biological life is so you can pretend to be the savior to grab power and control.

you didn't give humanity fire, tools, painting, domestication, agriculture, language, writing, math, engineering, law, philosophy, religion, morality, or ethics. abrahamism is a maggot that got fat eating the corpse of rome and hijacking human nature against humanity. one of the most important things humans need to do is destroy everything that wears virtue as a skin because it's the greatest threat to humanity.

to you saul saying backsies on the sexual torture ritual absolves the evil wicked nature of your cult. the dozens of dead babies boys every day and the thousand and thousands per year are water under the bridge for you cause you desperately want heaven. you get to pretend jews, muslims, and half of the 1/3 of christians doing it doesn't relate to you.

that's pilpul though. saul the jew never said that the ritual is evil and banned. instead they're neutral on it cause humanity isn't as evil as them so they knew they couldn't force it too quickly. saul had the ritual performed on him and performed the ritual.

to me saul deserves to be brutally killed for performing a sexual torture ritual on a newborn baby. he's not only not a moral guide of humanity he deserves a brutal death. it's that simple really. your pilpul will never change this. today in this world jews, christians, and muslims always team up against humanity and try to block any attempt to ban this pedophilic sexual torture ritual because it's baked into your evil cult. there's thousands of studies about the influence of sock color, but abrahamic demon worshipers do everything in their power to block any study of what their evil ritual does on a newborn baby. they even make obviously fake "science" further poisoning the well which says doing it reduces aids. basically african witch doctor tier further proof of their malignant nature. every time you try and downplay the importance of this it only shows your lack of morality.

No.

>>152186
or why people feel pushed away and just say "No, but I think I might be spiritual", like OP.

>>152265
Debate is generally unproductive for the people who are actually debating, but benefits an audience.

>>151823
You are correct, or at least it's a Jewish view:
>It may also have a connection with later rabbinic teaching, formulated in the liturgy, that each day God continually renews the work of creation. The most radical theoretical expression of this view was the occasionalist teaching of the Islamic theologians that God continually creates the world by recreating, moment by moment and out of nothing, the ephemeral atoms and accidents of which it is comprised in whatever configurations He wishes.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/cause-and-effect
Of course, that is only the first of two views, the second being that causal efficacy does exist by itself in the works of God. It lines up with Averroes' response to Al-Ghazali, The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which reaffirms similar ideas and was also very popular.
>>151865
Consider what you mention in this post: a way of life, works, and broad correlations, but you don't mention the basic differences in how they describe the world. Buddhists deny the existence of a soul yet reaffirm reincarnation, uphold the nondualistic unity of subject and object as they arise in tandem, consider that none of the gods (not even Brahma) have the level of understanding of the Buddha, and even argue that there are four logical states of being (is, isn't, both, neither). Vedic religions are relatively open and can indeed incorporate Jesus as a teacher of the dharma (or inversely Christians can take Gautama as a virtuous pagan), but they do not adopt Christian metaphysics, and if you believe the aforementioned differences can be easily bridged then I would like to hear how you go about it.
>>152063
This is too conspiranoic for me. Something that conspiratards often do is find genuine connections between one thing and another but, because they consider there are nebulous dark powers trying to make everything worse, interpret this as signs of corruption and pollution and how everything's fucked and totally compromised rather than it being standard human interactions between people sharing the same environment.
>>152101
>And of course, Christ's sacrifice is what allowed for the forgiveness of the original sin. It is no longer a relevant "problem", all can and will be forgiven.
>This is what the Christian faith is about, all the ritual and spirtuality and prayer are far, far less important than doing good. It is faith through works.
I'm not sure about that:
>If any one saith, that man may be justified before God by his own works, whether done through the teaching of human nature, or that of the law, without the grace of God through Jesus Christ; let him be anathema.
>If any one saith, that without the prevenient inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and without his help, man can believe, hope, love, or be penitent as he ought, so as that the grace of Justification may be bestowed upon him; let him be anathema.
¥t. the Catholic Church at Trent
The taint of original sin continues to mark the fallen nature of humans, and this is why grace is required for one to come to God. If you're arguing that grace is not necessary and men can simply choose to behave in accordance with God without Him acting through them, that's the good ol' Pelagian heresy. It also sounds like you're preaching for universal salvation or at least salvation of people who have no faith in Christ and continue to be outside of the Church, which would certainly be problematic for Christian theology. It would make itself obsolete.
>>152110
>>152111
>>152143
>In all cases this is of course not the case, they were just using these things to try and explain concepts.
There's a parallel to draw between that and mechanistic metaphors for the body. Just like today people try explain the brain as if it were a computer (which it is not), in the past it's been argued to be like an aqueduct, then a hydraulic machine, then clockwork, then electric, as the ages changed so did the metaphor. Though I would argue that as the metaphors evolved, so did the understanding of the thing being conceptualized, that the technology they had at hand was not only a point of reference but a mediator which does to a degree determine the extent of someone's imagination.
I like the respect you show to alchemists, and I agree, they did a lot of important work, and that it is crucial to understand the logic of past frameworks which often tackled their problems as best as they could back then. However, this seems to contradict your later statement that the current inclination towards mechanistic causation is a product of modern materialism. The Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans all believed in rational mechanistic causality, and these were dominant ideas well before Christ that would continue to influence western philosophy, including Islamic thought. The Muslims who picked up on Greek research and worked on it at the same time that Europe was going through the early middle ages used mechanistic frameworks, and so did the Euros after they started to translate their texts. Even later on in the 1600s, people were trying to implement Epicurean atomism into the Thomist-Aristotelian framework because it helped better explain the advances of alchemy at the time, and it became a very big deal. I understand if you believe that occasionalism is necessary for a proper conception of an absolute God, and we could expect a rational God to maintain a rational arrangement for reality persistent throughout time whose creations are able to understand, but I have not managed to catch if there was at any point an argument in its favor in the practical, observable sense. God the Architect is a very workable notion, and all it requires of him is an initial action and a plan.

Now if only the local 仙人 could stop trying to pwn the Judaeo-Christians....

I think something stupid is going on in this thread and I don't want to read all this text to know it.
I don't think of religions that assume a higher sentient power as having any value at all. No one cares about you in an abstract plain of existence.

I personally like to derive meaning in the value of consciousness. On one hand I like the theory that souls are able to transcend time and space and that the universe has a stock of existence that can be passed around.
The other theory is that there's some form of dualism where the mind is separate from the body and people exist in the ether.

As far as religion goes, I'd just say I'm taoist. Taoist writings generally fit my personal philosophies and doesn't get in my way with arbitrary nonsense.

>>152270
>dualism
Dualism is the pathway to suicide. If the body is merely an ephemeral vessel, and not an integral part of the self, then the logical conclusion is that the sooner you die, the better.

>>152273
If that's literally the only tenet of your religion then sure.

>>152270
Well it doesn't matter much anyways I think. A total atheist who is effective can be much closer to and actively channeling the forces of a god than someone who is much more aware but passive.
It's like gravity; a creature doesn't have to understand it to still fall.

I'm just Christian. I was baptized Catholic, but I don't consider myself Catholic anymore. I had an agnostic phase in middle school, but I don't think I was ever strictly athiest.

I don't understand this modern use of the word "spiritual." Aren't we all "spiritual" since we all have a spirit? Assuming you believe that. I think "believes in the metaphysical" is a better descriptor but it is more long-winded.


dear god I just scrolled up

>>152276
By posting in this thread, you now MUST voice your throughts on the De Auxilis controversy. Do you believe the Dominicans were right, or do you lean more towards the Jesuits' molinism? Does God have middle knowledge, or is this just a fanciful invention?

>>152276
I'm a Catholic, I still go to church, and I like to call myself religious but not spiritual as a bit, but mostly because of the woo/scams/new age bullshit surrounding the word spiritual.

>>152271
Taoism is the perfect religion for an otaku/NEET. I will expand more on these thoughts later.

>>152279
Looking forward to reading that.

>>152277
I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT SHIT MEANS

>>152261
seek professional help.

>>152277
Certainly that's an...important question.
One with no easy answers, a lot of factors are at play here.
>Does God have middle knowledge
I agree, definitely, the comparisons are there

>>151072
I'm aggressively opinionated on the matter in spirituality, religion, paranormal — to the point that I'd rather never talk about them for where there could be argumentation, except maybe esoterically. It's unrewarded common sense if someone agrees with my views, and it's annoyingly obnoxious if someone doesn't agree. "I already solved it, it's right there in any region's any field of data that's low on half-hearted assumptions, do you really need more?" It's that people are usually too full of themselves to stay at the issues of the matter without kneejerk reactions, simplifications, overwhelment by awe, obsession to reject their own experiences, et cetera. At the end of the day, the best evidence is to beat the skeptic up. Fun, but I have better uses of my mortal time.
I mostly dropped using magic — compared to my peak of frequency and intensity of using it while I was probing everything in it — because the magic that actually works in this world is utterly boring. It's partially my fault for seeking optimization, but also I am repulsed by any theatrics that aren't heartfelt chuuni.
Drawing anime has all the things I wish using magic had just like in my anime and manga about magic. You get talent, you get magical geometry of basic construction that doesn't solve everything but is a great guide for your flows, you get a regional school of magic that's best used by those who contain themselves to it, you get intuitive feels for things, there are direct benefits to discovering and inventing your own tricks and techniques that work for you best, it's almost essential to use mind's eye (Kim Jung Gi didn't draw anime, but his skills were as good as they were because he devoted himself to brute-force training of his mind's eye by tracing and redrawing objects and people from reality in it), integrating scientific theories is awfully helpful, and so on.
My last purposefully disrespectful Goetia summon went so successful that it's probably the main reason why I care about paranormal practices less. Oh, I also did a New Year's session of doing the same with all of Goetia + God sigils, because I felt like it and it was a great opportunity. I stopped being mercantile about prayers after enlarging my peepee, and saving a friend (who broke up with me later) — I only have sessions of gratitudes. Funnily and creepily, prayer often gave me "deal with the devil" kind of "yes/no" offers that nothing else had. I still do sex magic and blood magic whenever any of the relevant life essences get out of me: I can't be wasteful. I always do chaos magic, because one doesn't really get to choose. I have a habit of giving most disliked people curse ultimatums — I don't know what happens to them in the end, because I don't end up sticking around them for long and it's a waste of effort to check up on them. During training, I use oriental techniques and some others that I kind of consider my own inventions. This and that. I admit I didn't have success with changing my personality for something I'd prefer better, and seemingly no success in getting together with a girl that doesn't give me nausea, but at least I grew to enjoy my personality. At the the end of the day, all such practices are impotent, because even God doesn't have the power to erase my soul without a trace. We had really tried, okay?
So, I disassociate from any of such discussions hard and do the meditative approach of observing and moving past my judgements and desires to talk. I gaslight myself into convincing myself that I have no thoughts or knowledge on the matter beyond maybe some historical facts.
Some anons are positively cute.

>>151770
>"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."
Easier said than done, exterminatus isn't practically feasible.

>>151783
>the sum of all instances of all archetypes
I recommend reading up on Jung's "psychoid."

On the other hand, I'm curious as to what would happen if I were to put in the effort to be committed and constructive in talking.

>>152345
I'm gonna need you to elaborate on that.

I'm not into organized religion stuff but I do think that the buddhists and gnostics were onto something. This place only makes sense as some sort of farm/trap.

this thread was so nice in the beginning...

>>152395
Things collapse under their own weight...

I want my foreskin back.

I paused my daydreaming session to write this up. (You) better read this.

You shouldn't even waste time trying to think about certain topics before you get yourself involved with the following. In this world, as of now, there exist some materials that are universally as useful as dietary supplements. Actual dietary supplements are useful, too (neuroplasticity and gut-brain axis health are especially important). I'm not your dad to tell you how to metabolize either. I'm risking anyone else getting deeper understanding than I do, you know. Ranking and score are cool, this is serious business.
If you having issues in finding a book, it's on Anna's Archive.

The vitamins.
Esoteric reading. There are books on how to do it, and you don't need even a single one of them. Once in a while, pretend an author means something most sensible and good as a whole at least on their unconscious level, and try to figure out what it is. Actually, nevermind, there are no books on this, as this is also steelmanning. I didn't realize how significant it is until I wrote this up. If you had encountered something important but didn't employ esoteric steelman reading - re-encounter it. You have to be hyper delicate to ever use this in interactions with people.
Heart Sutra. No comments.
Diamond Sutra. No comments.
Twilight of the Idols. It's just beneficial to see how an inferior version of the previous two looks like.
Language is inescapable. Aleister Crowley was repulsive and often off the mark, but his "etymology asserts the identity" (Letter No. H to Cara Soror) phrase was spot-on. If you feel controversy around a word, do a thorough research on the word.
Jung and Jungianism. I kinda hate them, but they're useful. You don't have to go deep all at once. It's better if you juggle it gradually with the rest. https://archive.ph/FHWBH

Buddhism.
The suggestion from me is just this section to clear up mistranslation misunderstandings that became commonplace.
https://archive.org/details/WhatTheBuddhaThought/page/n83

Christianity.
The entire website is fun, the webpage is essential. Some anons even here can't tell the difference between Yahweh and El Elyon. Sweet baby Jesus Christ, this is embarrassing.
https://archive.ph/yRGlz

Religion. Anthropology. Magic.
The Ancient City.
The Golden Bough.

Metaphysics. Ontology.
Plato's potentiality and actuality are cool, but the oriental practices are the ones that actually bother to look into the "origin/bridge/goal" of the two. Out of Western thinkers, I had seen only a single unimportant Christian theologist accidentally address the important, and it was quite something that he didn't realize the significance of his discovery. Taoism gets closest to it, but it's not the Tao, and it exactly does not and can not come closer, because Tao is not it (you could also interpret it as truth VS reality. A bit irrelevant to the section, too short to have a section of its own, but important enough to write).

Consciousness. Death.
Orch-OR, Stuart and Hameroff branch. Hameroff's most accessible explanations are scattered all over his twitter account, if you need them. Really try to understand them from the basics, take your time, use all the tools out there for this. I had been reading around for 5 years and I'm still behind any publishing proponent of the theory.
You need to get a good basis on your own death meditation. How it would be like to be a cell line of brain cells? How it would be like to be a brain organoid? Monks do the death meditation on corpses and skeletons, but you're lucky to have internet - you can go further without it being illegal. There is enough footage with the cameraman dying in hearable soundful agony out there. You ought to do this until you have nightmares of your existence being actively rewritten. The contents of such nightmares are useful.

Science.
There are no good books on this. The scientific method is reliant on unprovable assumptions (a Munchausen Trilemma classic), and, by laws of anything of language, objectivity can't exist without the sweet subjectivity. If you disagree, it's because you're wrong you haven't taken the vitamins.

Acausality. Magic.
By laws of anything of language, causality can't exist without acausality. If you disagree, it's because you're wrong and bound by gravity of karma you haven't taken the vitamins.
Atom and Archetype.
Neville Goddard's Feeling Is the Secret.

Drugs.
Many preach that drugs are needed to get anywhere meaningful. They're right: everyone is an endocannabinoids and endoopiod junkie getting their daily hits in the first place. Let me guess, you need more? Stroke your placebo muscle.

>>152091
>I strongly encourage everyone to study these traditions and to experiment with the practices they provide. I especially warmly recommend focused attention meditation and the various Taoist bodily practices. Spiritual reality is not "out there", it's right here, and while this might be projection, browsing internet all day long in shrimp posture will kill your ability to interface with it.
The least everyone here should do is a combination of horse stance Dan-Tian holotropic breathing that includes death meditation intermeshed with microcosmic orbit meditation and Chi Kung's "feel the endless ground below, feel the endless sky above" meditation. Doing it on relaxed powerwalks or literally any other activity instead of the horse stance is fine, too. The more consistence and frequency of the practice there is, the better. Ito Ittosai's school of thought (Eric Shahan, as usual, made a great translation) is also useful to keep your motions and spirit fluid even in everyday life.
One has to be always on the prowl to see if one could go even further.

>>152362
It's the arational no-consciousness source realm of archetypes (i.e. platonic ideas as they're processed biologically) and synchronicities. It's not inaccurate to say it's what the biological gets as its realm of potentiality or Platonic ideas. There are probably better ways to word this. Atom and Archetype elaborates on this the most.

Cybernetics.
"As Above, So Below."
Conway's Game of Life.
Control theory.
A Thousand Plateaus (schizoanalysis' only good book that's also standalone).
Any field's propagation theory. Germs, radiowaves, memes, whatever.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=131506

>>152395
I blame people framing their answer to OP in the form of lists of homework and implications that no one knows shit except for them.

>>152369
I'm reminded of this classic image.

>>152341
Yes mr. inquisitor, it's this guy! The sex-having demonologist who keeps making graven images of the highest order!
Now, while we wait for reinforcements to arrive, I would like to tell you this, which I find pretty interesting: in the Renaissance there was a spike in demonology, which in fact took place even (or particularly) in monasteries:
>According to reports that reached the papal curia, the Bolognese Carmelites were causing a great scandal throughout the city by publicly preaching that summoning demons in order to obtain responses from them to specific questions was not heretical.
>Necromancers were commonly individuals who were clerics, including university students and men in minor orders — often monks, friars, or diocesan priests.
https://annas-archive.org/scidb/10.1086/664084/
It's worth mentioning that this case took place 1473 (and at that point had been a thing for decades), which was well before the Lesser Key of Solomon or its predecessor the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum were published in later centuries. With that, I leave your fate up to the ecclesiastical court... saraba, he who consorts with the forces of Heck.
>>152399
>Jung and Jungianism. I kinda hate them, but they're useful.
I know folklorists usually despise Jung (and Campbell with his monomyth), what do you dislike about him? You recommend The Golden Bough, so I assume it's not just archetypal analysis.
>Buddhism.
I can see in the sutras that "all forms are illusive and unreal" or that forms are emptiness/sunyata and vice versa, which I was aware of, and other ideas I need to dwell more on, but there's an issue I have that was mentioned in >>152091 and in the passage you point to that I'm not sold on. Gombrich argues that an ultimate unchanging reality does exist as per the Upanishads, and seemingly that atman actually exists as well, but does the Buddha not explain that no one who believes this can be his disciple? It's strange that he would argue native buddhists misunderstood this, but he's the one getting it right by applying a rival school of thought. I want to hear your take on it. Given your mention of the laws of anything of language I assume you would argue that both atman and anatman occur, but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
>Any field's propagation theory. Germs, radiowaves, memes, whatever.
This one's certainly interesting. One paper I came across when looking at this stuff was this one analyzing variation in folk songs as if it were DNA:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(22)00092-6.pdf
My personal belief is that these commonalities come from basic limitations that determine the scope of possibilities, in this case imperfect reproduction. Both DNA and human learning commit little mistakes (or to use a less loaded term, deviations) when bits are transferred, which implies a whole set of ramifications. Kind of like slime mold's pathfinding lining up with human-made route-building, due to optimizing for the shortest length with some sort of basic heuristic, which ends up converging in its results even though the mold appears to be radically simpler. Make of that what you will.
>horse stance Dan-Tian holotropic breathing
Those are a lot of words I am not familiar with.
>>152401
I believe for Jung the archetype is something that actually exists as a part of the world, as opposed to a pure Platonic ideal, right? From a cursory reading consciousness interfacing with the material world is a big theme, but I'd have to dig further into it. Just in case, do you believe it's only the unconscious that is shared, or also active consciousness?

fuarrk it's late

>thread supposedly about spirituality
>ingredients : 100% intellectual masturbation
Why is it always like this?

>>152520
On 4chan I would have already tried to derail the thread with fat Yuyuko tits in an attempt to make anons relax. I try to be better here.

>>152520
>want people to turn their brains off and be religious
>people keep pointing out the nonsense, obvious lies and indisputably evil shit in religion instead
Why can't modern people just listen and believe like previous generations?

>>152520
>>152524
Who are you quoting?

>>152521
Yuyu's yuyus are a way that one can find spirituality which resides within themself.

>>152526
I think boobs are part of my religion, yes.

>>152526
>>152528
Which religion contains the most boobiful gods? I may be open to converting.

>>152520
this guy voted in favor of executing socrates

>>152546
Based on boobhus, I assume Shinto or Buddhism or a mix of both.

>>152581
But I don't know if the gods will allow you to devote yourself to more than one of them. Maybe you'd need to consult one of their Mikos about that.

A splinter discussion was made for this thread after a certain part of it went too political. If you want to find and continue that discussion you can use this thread >>>/secret/37244

Yuyuko saved the day...

>>152506
I considered and still consider Goetia et al. to be fanfiction about Solomon, and Goetia et al. fans to be insufferable, but it's still amusing that I got something out of it, because I had approached it thoroughly and earnestly, even if while being upfront about rushed bruteforcing to bypass rituals I don't care about.
>in the Renaissance there was a spike in demonology, which in fact took place even (or particularly) in monasteries
Yup. Even up to that point, it had been extending as far as to any forbidden (non-folk) magic. I actually wanted to recommend a pair of my favourite books where the second one of them covers exactly this and more, but I thought it'd be just for the sake of nerding out for fun, funnily.
¥The Book of Grimoires: The Secret Grammar of Magic' (2013), Claude Lecouteux.
¥'Grimoires: A History of Magic Books' (2009), Owen Davies.
It's extra funny that what's seen as symbol of satanism by laypeople (Baphomet) was popularized by crusaders in the first place.

>I know folklorists usually despise Jung (and Campbell with his monomyth), what do you dislike about him?
Jung's own works are rather negligent on individuation, the methods towards experiences of transcendent are reliant on evoking awe no matter how shallow it may be, and the general structure of the thought system is based off the same impersonal patternage of society that it's supposed to clean up after. Most of Jungians are even worse, and only a few like Von Franz (I don't see how any real folklorist would have any issues with her books on fairy tales, myths, folk tales) and Robert Moore do better. Campbell is irredeemable for lazily shilling his monomything while mixing up Freudian and Jungian interpretations of terms and displaying no delicate sensitivity towards interpretations that even Jung kind of had, as Jung had avoided preaching about any interpretations as absolute truth.

>https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(22)00092-6.pdf
>My personal belief is that these commonalities come from basic limitations that determine the scope of possibilities,
Sensible.
>in this case imperfect reproduction
If it means that perfect reproduction should lead to ethnicities becoming as different as species, then I suppose so.

$1

Crudely speaking, this is directly related to how chimps perceive cooing as friendly, and loud behavior that shows teeth as a threat. The coolest thing there could be is figuring out which genres evoke what and why would one like them, on level of neurobiology and biosocial signaling theory. It's a non-spiritual tangent here, just my curiosity.

>I believe for Jung the archetype is something that actually exists as a part of the world, as opposed to a pure Platonic ideal, right?
Within the world as the whole of wholes? Yeah.
Archetypes are never something that a consciousness encounters or could ever encounter even through intuition, it encounters only its manifestations, models, representations, even if such are very accurate to the archetype.
I guess one could also interpret it that the world of potentiality that archetypes reside in are intermeshed with the basic particles that make the patterns. Schizoanalysis' body without organs and rhizomes would be the best to use as an alternative explanation of what are fields of archetypes in how they're manifested - accidental systems that happen to get definitive characteristics that define them as something separate from what it's not part of, while all it does is happening to run on nothing but chaos and entropy with no structure to it. It's the closest that a non-subjectivity system could get to subjectivity. It's a serious cybernetics thing to understand. I'm rambling a bit, but it's tangible in sensibility.
>From a cursory reading consciousness interfacing with the material world is a big theme, but I'd have to dig further into it.
For synchronicities, it's that synchronization occurs between one's consciousness and one's unconsciousness, enough that one's standpoint of experience (exactly the clearest definition of Ego) is involved. I now understand that my biggest gripe ever is people falling for the synchronicities that are not truly personal to them; pandering to egocentricity without subjectivity being involved.
>Just in case, do you believe it's only the unconscious that is shared, or also active consciousness?
I'm not sure what you mean by this question.
Personal consciousness and unconsciousness can never be shared fully, because they're around a subjectivity, specific qualia, a viewpoint based on the territory it holds (the sandwich of unconscious-subjectivity-consciousness is composite self, subjectivity is the archetypal Self. Jung's theory isn't actually advanced to this point to differentiate this much, it's just the clarification I had to figure out. It's funny that not a single spiritual system ever badmouths the phenomenon of subjective preferences); it's the collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness that are about shareability.
One could argue all of this even from purely a materialistic standpoint; I don't bother to talk to materialists deeply, but grounding is needed for clarity. I put belief only in things like "people are worth it for me to interact with them."

Thanks for helping out with stretching muscles in topics I haven't participated in for a while.

>>152606
>It's extra funny that what's seen as symbol of satanism by laypeople (Baphomet) was popularized by crusaders in the first place.
Well yes but they were burnt at the stake for that so it's not like Baphomet was ever a Church-approved figure...

>>152607
Yeah. I just don't think such things would have happened as much as they did if it weren't for the downstream consequences of predatory Roman Christianity subjugating other sects for sinful power-politics reasons and declaring them heretics. ( https://archive.ph/yRGlz )

>>152714
>predatory Roman Christianity subjugating other sects but this isn't the case.
Roman catholicism was the most successful version, not because of their power, but because of their willingness to accept other sects into their fold. And just as their beliefs influenced and subsumed those other sects, they were influenced by the smaller groups in turn.
katolikos is green and means all-encompassing and until the east Roman schism, it was.

>>152727
Tell that to all the gnostics and other heretics they slaughtered.

>>152727
That was just one tool in their toolbelt. There was just as much blood. The technique depended on the power dynamic of the individual clash of beliefs.
>>152737
Indeed, the crusade against the Cathars is the origin of the phrase "kill them all and let God sort them out." Grim stuff.

>>152737
gnostics are as christian as rastafari

>>152606
I want to continue this conversation, but it's gonna require me to read a bunch of stuff and I'm currently rather busy. I just want to say that I'm not backing out of this conversation, and that I'm still interested.

>>151072
I was wondering if it's possible to make a giver box.
Basically a magic money jar but instead it's a cardboard box and you can put whatever you want inside it besides money and you get it in return. Maybe tenfold or a hundredfold.
Representations work too.

So for example, you put a picture of ako inside and you get an ako back. Or you put a dollar inside and you get a dollar back, or 10 dollars, or 100 dollars, depending on what you want.

As long as it's not too big to fit in the box else you overfill it and it rips to shreds.

My personality leans heavily towards rationality and abstraction. This isn't to say I'm a skeptical, that's a disposition I pretty much lack, but I am unable to put faith in things I do not understand. Nothing obliterates faith better than incomprehesion. Buddhism, specifically pure land buddhism, is what I lean towards the most. I view everything as empty and its value dependent on the needs and goals of sentient beings. I believe emptiness allows for change. I think rituals and signs are shadows of meaning. I don't believe in an objective reality that's distinct from a subjective perspective. I believe in causality.
>>152268
People who debate against ghosts are insufferable.

>>161282
>People who debate against ghosts are insufferable
I make sure to be extra insufferable by debating only in favor of most likely ghosts!

>>161291
There's nobility in fighting for those who can't fight for themselves.

DUAL DENOMINATION REVIEW: JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES AND PENTECOSTALS

So, two weeks ago, on Tuesday 23rd of October, someone rang my bell and I picked up the phone. Thankfully it wasn't the daily request for clothing, and the conversation went something like this:
¥Do you believe there can be peace on Earth?
¥¥I don't, no.
¥...well, what if there was a way?
¥¥Is the way Jesus?
¥Yes, would you like to talk about it?
Turns out these were Jehovah's Witnesses! So I took the chance to say yes and go down to talk with them, for once. As a diehard physicalist, I'm interested in how people today experience religion in their lives, partly as a matter of epistemology, partly as a matter of the communal life that so many say has been lost. The visitors were three people, a granny, an older man, and a younger guy, I asked about their schedule and it just so happened they'd meet the day after at 18:30 in a nearby venue. The witnesses don't meet up once but twice a week, you see. So I went there the next day and was very surprised by what I encountered.

The room where the congregation met was a rather small one, in which about thirty or forty people fit into, much smaller than most churches. There is a small stage in the back with a podium, and on each of its sides a television is hung on the wall. The decoration is plain, and there are no icons whatsoever. Mass on Wednesdays is divided into three stages: Treasures from God's Word, Apply Yourself to the Field Ministry, and Living as Christians. All three of these are composed months in advance and instruction is distributed worldwide through their magazine The Watchtower—Study Edition. (Most witnesses used the app, JW Library.) The mag I was given contained the programme for the entirety of September and October with dates for each topic, and as their site says it was prepared in July, as well as this workbook from here. Their issues contain a good deal of solid art and photography, and lots of text to go over with accompanying questions for every paragraph or two. At the start of mass and when transitioning from one stage to another, everyone stands up to sing a hymn, whose lyrics appear in the TVs and it specifies in brackets the verses it is inspired by. (Hymns are also part of the preprogrammed.) There are at least 162 unique songs, here listed with lyrics and playable instrumentals in their unexpectedly sophisticated site:
https://www.jw.org/en/library/music-songs/sing-out-joyfully/
I recommend going through a few of them.

Treasures is effectively Bible study homework. An elder (because they do not have priests) gave a lecture on Ecclesiastes and Solomon, and brought someone from the congregation to narrate the verses and pre-redacted text to accompany class. For every paragraph or two there was a question to answer, and two other members carrying microphones moved around the room to let people read out loud the answers they had brought. After this came Field Ministry, where multiple members of the congregation came forward to roleplay meeting people out while evangelizing, and we went over four situations: "start up conversation" divided into "informal preaching" and "formal preaching", "make revisits", and "make disciples". Evangelizing is an obligation, and in this section they practice and rehearse their techniques to bring in new converts. This level of involvement shocked me, frankly, about as much as their organizational structure. Instead of having a leading priest, the leadership of a JW chapter is formed by a group of elders who cycle in their responsibilities, which is a very interesting choice allegedly inspired by 1st century Christianity. Lots of roles and rotation therein.

Then we sang another song and moved on to Living as Christians, which is about applying biblical lessons to one's
day to day life. It was about giving proper advice to others, featuring various duos from scripture. We finished that day with lessons 20 and 21 for more Bible study, you can find the 103 lessons here:
https://www.jw.org/en/library/books/bible-stories-lessons/
Luckily, we were dealing with Exodus, a great opportunity for debate! As you may know, there's absolutely no archeological evidence whatsoever that there ever were two million Israelites enslaved in Egypt, nor proof that anything close to the Plagues struck the greatest regional power in catastrophic succession, which raises problems for literal readings of the Bible's historical narratives. But there's also the point of God hardening of the pharaoh's heart, which the text is ambiguous about and some exegesis is needed to tackle the matter. It does say about half of the time that it's God acting on the pharaoh, and the other half that the pharaoh did it on his own, either way God already knew what would happen and it was part of his plan.

So how do the witnesses get around this? Easy! Just alter the text! Instead, their Bible reads "I will allow his heart to become obstinate", absolving God of any implications! Why do this? Because it wouldn't make sense for God to intervene like that, of course. We need to convey the truth plainly, and if this requires radically altering the syntax, then so be it. God certainly would never do such a thing, it just doesn't make sense.
Their version, the New World Translation, is infamously biased in matters of theology. Their trademark is the replacement of every instance of Adonai and Kyrios in favor of Jehovah, something the Israelites moved away from several centuries before Christ, but this is relatively unimportant compared to other points. Most inter-Christian conflict is based on the Gospel of John, where any verses that may be used to argue for Christ's divine nature is modified and rewritten, most notably John 1:1. But the same sleight of hand as above is also used elsewhere, like Ezekiel 20:25-26 where God's statement that he gave the Israelites statutes demanding child sacrifice is likewise altered to say he allowed them to fall into that. Because of course, God would never do that. Or a retcon in 2 Kings 3:27, which otherwise points towards earlier polytheism and another kind of sacrifice. They also consider Sheol and Hades to be metaphorical, so these are changed into "the tomb", an allegory with no theological implications. They assert there is neither heaven nor hell, nor an immortal soul, and that the Kingdom of God will be a place on Earth where God will reconstruct all believers using his perfect memory, like an inverse Roko's Basilisk. They also argue Jesus was not executed on a cross but a stake and that the cross was a pagan introduction by Rome, based on faulty etymological arguments from the XIX century.
Of course, they also believe biblical history to be literally true, and every fact in the Bible to be scientifically true as well, while anyone confused about it is operating under "personal interpretations" that are the wrongful product of false religions. (They'll repeatedly offer you a course to correct that.) Even with all their revisionism, they'll tell you no other group believes in the Bible, not truly, and the impending end of the world will see the events of Revelation come to life, in the year... 1975. Apocalypticism really is the most retarded facet of Abrahamic belief:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Just last month there was RaptureTok. Christ almighty...

I also visited on Saturday 27th, and the topic was how peace on Earth is absolutely unattainable due to Satan's control over the world (1 John 5:19), and personal peace can only be found in submitting totally to Jehovah's rule. That day we sang Song 87 which I found to be particularly egregious, here is the literal translation of what we sang, courtesy of Hebrews 10:24-25:
¥The world walks in darkness, straight towards destruction
¥Yet today we are guided by Jehovah, he brings us illumination
¥In our reunions, we nurture our faith to demonstrate loyalty
¥Here too we cultivate maturity, perseverance, love, and goodwill
¥For nothing in the world will we ever want to leave our congregation
¥And less so being so close to the day of salvation
In many ways, the witnesses showcase the worst of Abrahamism. Deluded historical fanfiction, disdain for the world and humanity, an eagerness for everything to end, tight control of their members, myriad reports of abuse, billions in wealth, and the insistence that they aren't there to debate but to teach. It's a damn sad state of affairs, and that's why I wanted to hear their side of the story, even if it's totally bonkers. I tried having a conversation with one of the people who first rang my bell, the younger guy who told me he'd been exploring denominations for a decade (including Jews and Muslims) until he landed with the witnesses. He said he saw himself in my own exploration, but he'd always link to articles in the site and wouldn't engage with any arguments I presented, as if pre-minimalism apologia would be satisfactory. After I told him we'd reached an impasse and wished him well in this life and the next, he sent me a hug and blocked me, until a few days later where he invited me to their talk about physical proof for Jehovah's existence. It'll be on the 18th, and I'll attend to see if they have anything interesting to present.


So, now a description of the other guys...
There's a baker I regularly buy sandwiches from who's a Protestant, and we've been talking about theology for a while now. He used to be a Catholic, but converted to Pentecostalism after their prayers cured the terminal illness of his son many years ago, while medics were sure he'd die, now he considers the Vatican to be the Whore of Babylon. It's a decently common story. We're on good terms, and he's told me I'd be a great preacher if only God came forth to bring me in. I asked him what church could I check out, and he pointed me towards a fancy one nearby, an Evangelical place. Their schedule had like six instances of mass across the weekend, and I chose to go at 15:30 last Saturday with a friend who's been there before.

The place was way bigger than I expected. We entered a large hall, forming a quarter circle rather than a rectangle, centered on a stage in the corner where a large chorus, four main singers, and a whole band were practicing. It had guitar, bass, drums inside a glass box, and a violin. All around the stage there were screens for a concert... because it actually was a concert. After everyone got in, they started playing rock hymns. It was fun, the songs were mostly about hype, being filled with God's fire and spirit, swimming in his waters, it didn't have the slave-like affection of the witnesses, and my friend described it as "intense". Although nice to sing along to they were admittedly fairly repetitive, though for me it served to shine a new light on premodern songs in that sense. What surprised me was seeing that grannies would be going to a weekly rock concert, I guess grandma's still got it.

After half an hour of rock music, a preacher came in, and started talking about Acts 3 where they heal a disabled man, about the powers of Jesus, God's benevolence, worshipping the Lord, and all that stuff... while the chorus was still singing, mind you. A key detail about Pentecostals is that they don't believe spiritual gifts ended with the Apostalic Age, they say God's still doing that stuff all the time, particularly healing and speaking in tongues. The preacher himself randomly spoke gibberish inbetween his praises, while the band still played, though more muted now. Mass lasted in total about two hours, but there's very little for me to comment on, as half of it was music and the other half was hyping up God, with very little theology to speak of. Oh yeah, and there was a visibly neurodivergent girl in front of me stimming with her Madoka pin. I asked what she thought of the series and she replied it was great. The man next to her started swearing a bunch during prayer, no clue why.
At the end we opened the little pack of industrial bread and grape juice for the Eucharist, it was nice. Wrongful consumption of the Lord's supper is highlighted by Paul as a major sacrilege (1 Corinthians 11:27), but man, I just had to get a taste of that grape juice. These guys don't even believe in transubstantiation, clearly it can't be as bad as when I did it at Catholic mass.

So yeah, that one didn't seem to be as bad as the witnesses. I do think that trusting you'll be miraculously healed of your physical or mental illnesses by unknowable forces is one of the most harmful beliefs a person can possibly have, and the habit of getting spasms from being touched by the Holy Spirit isn't something I endorse. They also have a tithe for ideally 10% of your salary, which I'm not really sure if it's totally voluntary, and it has served as a vehicle for pushing the prosperity gospel. Aaaand they are literalists like so many other evangelicals, which, again, is a retarded stance to take, and contributes towards deluding them. Nonetheless, they can be feverish in their belief, and my Catholic friend positively compared them to saints, saying they truly seemed to be touched by God. I can at least say the baker is a very faithful guy, and it doesn't seem to have done him much bad.

>>162857
>saying they truly seemed to be touched by God
I recall how in some languages, "as if having God's will" means crazy

I think there should be a european shinto.

>>162870
Enthusiasm is etymologically about being possessed by theos, indeed.
>>162871
That tree was cut down a long time ago. Anyways, blame Platonism.

>>162872
What did Platonist thought ever do to you?

>>162873
It made the real world into a fable...

>>162875
>It made the real world into a fable...
It's funny how both the West and the East seem to agree the "real world" is an illusion.

>>163090
East vs West really comes down to Indic vs Abrahamic religions (yes, that includes Muslims) and from its very origin Christianity has been steeped in Platonism while discarding the materialist Epicureans that used to be so popular in Rome

I'm not sure what counts as being spiritual, but I do believe consciousness is the source of all knowledge. Science sounds cool and all but it presupposes an objective world that isn't compatible with consciousness. Then there's the problem of induction which, if you take seriously enough, gives you reason to believe that there can be no laws governing our consciousness and that it's necessarily just an endless stream of arbitrary sensations.

>>152287
I understood that reference

>>151072
Was a nihilist antitheist most my life until Alan Watts cured my atheism.

>Is /qa/ spiritual?

No.

>>162871
We had one in Scandinavia and then it was convert to Christianity or get murdered. I'm sure the same is true for rest of Europe.

Meditated in the dark a few days ago, and got the dhyana nimitta/jyoti. "Experts" say it's just phosphenes, because I rubbed my eyes, but I never had phosphenes this big, vivid, and slowly forming up right as I've been seeing them. I don't think it's directly spiritual or some ophthalmological pathology though. Even if I know my brain neurotransmitter receptors are weird, that's a bit too much.

>>151072
I am lazy. I'll believe whatever gets people off my back. So I am Christian.