I've been an atheist all my life but for some reason recently I started becoming interested in Christianity, and even started reading the New Testament, watching videos about theology, etc and sounds very convincing to me.
I'm planning to go to the church in my town and spend some time there just looking around. Idk I think there might actually be someone up there
>>812810
Matthew 18:6
>>812812Follow the Matthew 19:12
>>812815are you telling me to go celibate or to respect trans people? because this is the very same versicle trans people use
why do you immediately assume that i'm a right wing chud?
What "sounds very convincing" exactly?
>>812838No, it's more of a dogwhistle that decodes itself as "cut off your balls, christcuck."
>>812871>I think a part of why I'm so interested is because it's such an insane thing to believe in yet still holds such a strong hold over people.Apes strong together. Even if the thing that keeps them together is crazy glue.
>>812894Yes but we could just use non-crazy glue too.
>>812896Certainly. I was intending to be
descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, I am saying how things are, rather than how they should be. Now how do we get from Crazy Glue to Non-Crazy Glue? I think that process has been happening very slowly for a long time. There have been some revolutionary anti-religious campaigns, notably in the USSR and PRC, but I think that has backfired horribly in some ways, and so society has fallen back on the (admittedly) liberal model of secularization, which is freedom of religion, religious pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and mass education. Combining these over a long time weakens the dogmatic aspects of the major religions and strengthens their tendencies towards syncretism and secularization. That's the thing a lot of Atheists and Agnostics don't understand, there is secularization going on
inside of religion. Secularization is not merely fueled by Atheists and Agnostics being militant, but by also by religious people choosing to interpret their religions in a more secular manner, or choosing to become merely "spiritual" without subscribing to a particular religion (one of the advantages of liberal society, despite all its faults, is that it fosters a kind of cosmopolitan individualism where a person sees themselves as a customizable character rather than a prefabricated agent of a metaphysical civilization-state-religion complex)
The emergence of the monotheistic, apophatic God can be understood as the culmination of a long cultural process of abstraction: early animistic traditions attributed agency to spirits inhabiting particular places, animals, objects, and natural forces, while ancestor worship located sacred power in deceased kin and communal memory. Over time, these many localized and personified powers were increasingly organized into broader divine hierarchies, with particular gods becoming associated with wider domains and more universal functions. Philosophical reflection and theological synthesis then progressively stripped divinity of concrete attributes and local identities, moving toward a conception of one transcendent source of being whose nature could be defined increasingly through negation rather than through images, stories, or finite characteristics. Apophatic theology is more intersted in saying what God is NOT than what God IS. God doesn't have a body. God is beyond gender. God's mind is not limited by a physical construct like a brain. God is everywhere but he is not made of a base lowly ever-changing ever-decaying material like poop or fungus. By always focusing on what God is NOT apophatic theology can always keep the would-be Atheist on their toes. "No it's not that God isn't real, it's that you simply don't understand God's nature" yet they build a picture of God that is indistinguishable from either Pantheism, or Nothing At All, and in doing so, they pave the way for secularization in the long run. Unity of opposites. Dialectics.
Ancestor veneration is among the deepest layers of religious practice, visible in the deliberate treatment of human remains, secondary burials, ancestor shrines, offerings placed with the dead, and the repeated return to burial sites across generations. In many early settled communities, the dead remained socially present: their bones could be curated, moved, decorated, or incorporated into domestic spaces, suggesting that ancestors were understood as continuing members of the community with powers over fertility, protection, lineage, and territory.
Archeology shows that ancestor worship in some cases eventually evolved into God worship as class society crystallized. Ancestors could gradually acquire increasingly powerful, collective, and institutionalized roles: in Neolithic China, for example, ritual attention shifted from collective ancestors toward prominent individuals, and by the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1100 BCE), lineage ancestors had become state deities, receiving sacrifices and participating in the political-religious order.
As societies expanded and encountered neighboring peoples, these localized traditions became increasingly syncretic, with gods and spirits absorbing one another’s identities, attributes, myths, and functions. A conquered or assimilated deity might be equated with an existing god, while foreign gods could be adopted as manifestations or companions of native ones. Over generations, distinct divine personalities could therefore become merged, subordinated, or reinterpreted within larger pantheons. This process of divine absorption helped transform a fragmented landscape of local spirits and ancestors into increasingly unified systems of gods, creating one of the cultural pathways by which more abstract and universal conceptions of divinity could eventually emerge.
>>812893I consider myself a rational person, and what has gradually convinced me is precisely reading about theological arguments; I’ve always thought that faith is a matter of blind belief, but there is reason and logic behind it. Reading about miracles has also made me think, there are hundreds of recorded miracles that simply have no explanation, even though I’m a skeptical person.
>>812867There is literally an entire poem in the Bible that talks about love and enjoying sex, it was the Protestant Puritans who hated fun. Catholics are much less so.
>>812910>There is literally an entire poem in the Bible that talks about love and enjoying sex, it was the Protestant Puritans who hated fun. Catholics are much less so.There is a lot of hanky panky and murder and incest in the old testament but that has nothing to do with Christ.
>>812910> I’ve always thought that faith is a matter of blind belief, but there is reason and logic behind it.See, I've never thought that faith is a matter of blind belief. I knew even from a young age that there were people who specialized in making rational arguments for religions. Theology and Apologetics. It's just that I never found those arguments particularly compelling. They are usually very emotionally manipulative arguments, like Pascal's wager for an example is an argument for believing in God based on cost benefit analysis, but it smuggles in several assumptions like it has to be the Christian version of God and it has to be a God that punishes nonbelievers. It doesn't consider the possibility that God is indifferent to the beliefs of mortals. I think it is interesting that the vast majority of religious people just absorb their religion through cultural osmosis rather than arriving at it through theology. Wanting to have rational arguments for your belief seems like something only a small subset of the population ever bothers to do, usually nerds and clergy. Also I find miracles to not be particularly interesting. Even if they were real they could just be anomalies of physics rather than divine interventions. As for "eyewitness accounts," it's very courtroom logic because it doesn't really care about reproducing the miracle or providing evidence beyond people claiming to have seen something. Everyone agreeing together they saw something like a ghost or an apparition is partly peer pressure and partly domino effect. For example, if you and your friends are terribly bored camping in the woods and your crush said she saw a ghost, you're gonna say you also saw it, as a demonstration of affection. And then your best friend is gonna say he saw it too, so he fits in with you, and so on and so forth. Next thing you know, everyone "agrees" they all saw the ghost. Then you sit around the campfire and make up details together. Then you come back from the woods and tell the community what you saw, and they all want to believe because life is very boring and it's fun to believe in things together. Then the town historian rights down that in such and such year "eyewitnesses all saw this." and it becomes a local miracle. People want to see things, so they will say they saw things. Then people want to be included, so they will also agree. This is especially powerful for rallying people on the battlefield. I swear that cannon smoke looked like the virgin mary? What are you gonna disagree and demoralize everyone like a party pooper?
>>812918>There is a lot of hanky panky and murder and incest in the old testament but that has nothing to do with Christ.ah but you see there is a time honored christian tradition of reinterpreting the old testament to sound more christian even if it doesn't make sense to do so, rather than abandoning it entirely. why? because early christianity was simply one of many competing Jewish sects, and it only became a world religion because it was radical in its acceptance of gentiles and preaching to gentiles.
>>812910>I consider myself a rational personthat's your first mistake. humans aren't rational and the humans who are closest to being rational are the ones who admit that they are easily manipulated, subject to emotional disregulation, subject to fallacious arguments, subject to self-deception and hallucination, subject to making mistakes. Only when you realize you are imperfect and irrational can you even begin to approach the rational ideal.
>>812918Revelation
2:20 ἀλλὰ ἔχω κατὰ σοῦ ὅτι ἀφεῖς τὴν γυναῖκα Ἰεζάβελ ἡ λέγουσα ἑαυτὴν προφῆτιν καὶ διδάσκει καὶ πλανᾷ τοὺς ἐμοὺς δούλους πορνεῦσαι καὶ φαγεῖν εἰδωλόθυτα
2:21 καὶ ἔδωκα αὐτῇ χρόνον ἵνα μετανοήσῃ καὶ οὐ θέλει μετανοῆσαι ἐκ τῆς πορνείας αὐτῆς
2:22 ἰδοὺ βάλλω αὐτὴν εἰς κλίνην καὶ τοὺς μοιχεύοντας μετ᾽ αὐτῆς εἰς θλῖψιν μεγάλην ἐὰν μὴ μετανοήσωσιν ἐκ τῶν ἔργων αὐτῆς
2:23 καὶ τὰ τέκνα αὐτῆς ἀποκτενῶ ἐν θανάτῳ καὶ γνώσονται πᾶσαι αἱ ἐκκλησίαι ὅτι ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἐραυνῶν νεφροὺς καὶ καρδίας καὶ δώσω ὑμῖν ἑκάστῳ κατὰ τὰ ἔργα ὑμῶν
>>812918You’re referring to Song Of Songs, right?
That was written by King Solomon
>>812921This.
Humans are emotional creatures that use rationality.
Computers are rational because they only understand ones and zeroes
>>812910I don't think you are that skeptical or rational if you believe in miracles.
i get someone changing religions throughout their lifetime but how do you even go from being an atheist to being religious? that doesnt make any sense. if i tried really really hard i still wouldnt be able to believe in god
Great, a krautchan crossposter
>>813115You can draw porn with your OC?
>>813116weirdo
>>813124creep
>>813115>nta but not really? the ancients had plenty of arguments based upon natural philosophy and metaphysics for the existence of god. one of the arguments i personally subscribe to is the transcendental argument which when combined with transcendental empiricism implies that the unity of apperception is an objective principle of nature. a dialectical understanding of the unity of apperception immediately yields a trinitarian structure as well. this doesnt prove that the historical man jesus is the embodiment of the logos in some special way though. cosmomythologically i believe mainly in the triune godhead which is the unity of apperception, a blind god who's reflexology are physical law, and a maternal goddess of the overarching resonant field of morphological blueprints (inspired by schelling, bergson, and michael levin). the goddess hidweh is the syllogism between these godheads and is embodied in fleshcraft .. she is like a living symbol embedded in the implicate order. as for why i call these principles gods, i guess it is because you can be attuned to them, and there is a degree to which they are a macrocosm of different parts of sentient beings. here is some of the reasoning that motivated my thinking abt the other gods than the triune oneI don't really understand the stuff you're saying. Maybe I'm too dumb. I was more referring to the common apologetics like Pascal's wager.
>ne of the arguments i personally subscribe to is the transcendental argument which when combined with transcendental empiricism implies that the unity of apperception is an objective principle of nature. break this down for me as if i were a total idiot.
>a dialectical understanding of the unity of apperception immediately yields a trinitarian structure as well.this too
>this doesnt prove that the historical man jesus is the embodiment of the logos in some special way though. cosmomythologically i believe mainly in the triune godhead which is the unity of apperception, a blind god who's reflexology are physical law, and a maternal goddess of the overarching resonant field of morphological blueprints (inspired by schelling, bergson, and michael levin). the goddess hidweh is the syllogism between these godheads and is embodied in fleshcraft .. she is like a living symbol embedded in the implicate order. yep i'm still confused
>she is like a living symbol embedded in the implicate order. as for why i call these principles gods, i guess it is because you can be attuned to them, and there is a degree to which they are a macrocosm of different parts of sentient beings. here is some of the reasoning that motivated my thinking abt the other gods than the triune oneI will read that once I understand the prerequisites
>>813082fucking magnets how do they work?
>>813115Could you elaborate more on what exactly constitutes "the Unity of Apperception" as an objective principle? What are its defining characteristics beyond just being an instance of consciousness? You say these principles exist
objectively *in nature*. Does this mean they apply universally, or only within certain contexts (perhaps human thought)? How do you envision the Father/Son/Law aspects interacting with each other and with Hidweh? Is there a specific
dynamic or purpose to their dialectical relationship? When you say the Blind God's reflexology is physical law, are you proposing that abstract principles *determine* physical laws (like Bergson's élan vital perhaps), even if they aren't conscious? Or does it mean something else, like natural processes acting without purpose? What specific examples or evidence support the idea of Hidweh being "embodied in fleshcraft"? Is this a conceptual framework or do you have concrete ideas about what that embodiment looks like (e.g., specific art forms, biological structures)? When you say these principles are a macrocosm/mirror of human consciousness, can you explain how and why we see ourselves reflected in them? Are they fundamentally aspects *of* us, or separate entities interacting with us? You differentiate between the "transcendental argument" proving God exists generally (the triune structure) and not necessarily proving Jesus is its unique historical embodiment. How do you reconcile this distinction? Do these principles inherently point to a male figure (Son), or are they gender-neutral? The aside about other gods, could we explore that reasoning further in another context, as it seems distinct from the main points but still part of your framework?
not sure if this is better or worse than the atheist to alan watts guy pipeline
>>813163> the atheist to alan watts guy pipelinethat type of guy went extinct in 2012
I understand people who were brainwashed as children to be religious but adult converts are genuinely mentally retarded. (excluding marriage and forced conversion of course)
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