Have you ever read a book that caused you to convert religions? This one did it for me. It's not apologetics in the sense of knockdown arguments, exactly, more like the presentation of an attractive worldview and attitude. Favorite passage is the end of the first chapter when he riffs on Plato's sun:All that concerns us here, however, is to note that this panegoistic extreme of thought exhibits the same paradox as the other extreme of materialism. It is equally complete in theory and equally crippling in practice. For the sake of simplicity, it is easier to state the notion by saying that a man can believe that he is always in a dream. Now, obviously there can be no positive proof given to him that he is not in a dream, for the simple reason that no proof can be offered that might not be offered in a dream. But if the man began to burn down London and say that his housekeeper would soon call him to breakfast, we should take him and put him with other logicians in a place which has often been alluded to in the course of this chapter. The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the earth. Their position is quite reasonable; nay, in a sense it is infinitely reasonable, just as a threepenny bit is infinitely circular. But there is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself. (1/2)
"Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name."Gives me goosebumps
No. I found Chesterton's apologetics unconvincing and frustrating to read.
>>23541552>unconvincingYeah, there is no logical argument you can make to prove that Christ rose from the dead. Ratzinger even said as much in Introduction to Christianity: "anyone who claims to lay it all on the table has laid something false on the table.">frustrating to readDon't understand, he's one of the greatest prose stylists of all time. Some other books he gets a bit flabby or bloated but he was on point in Orthodoxy.
>>23541524A Canticle for Leibowitz was the start of me becoming Catholic desu
>>23541569I have a friend who loves that one, I just don't like scifi. Still it was good, my favorite scene is the death of Brother Francis Gerard.
>>23541563He is a great stylist. I like his fiction. But often uses that style to dress up strawman arguments or gloss over leaps in logic. Or just seems to get lost in his own metaphors. Maybe if you already agree with him, it's all just beautiful poetic flourishes. But if he's making a serious argument, it's a distraction.>>23541569Loved this one, too. But I can't say it made me reconsider any religious views.
>>23541603>But often uses that style to dress up strawman arguments or gloss over leaps in logic. Agree, he doesn't have any demonstrative arguments for Catholicism. I don't think anyone does, the Catholics themselves don't claim anything but "motives of credibility" like saints and miracles. But what he did do (for me) is show how it could be reasonable to choose to believe in such things.
>>23541524yeah chesterton got into me really well honestly I would say I have some disagreements with him now I think he took a bit too much from the english worldview, but the basic kind of attitude is one I try to embody and has shaped me pretty closely. The sort of tender universal patriot sort of thing, and the sort of hidden glorious mystery of everything that is just hidden out of sightthere is something kind of cute about itthis essay shows it wellWould highly rec the collection alarms and discursions if you haven't read ithttps://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/alarms-and-discursions/34/https://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/alarms-and-discursions/1/these two kind of show it well the whole kind of>Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—>>23541603an aesthetic is a serious argument. People's issue today is one of perception, not of reason. They are unable to see themselves and get the sufficient context to understand their place in the world. In seeing things more clearly and accurately the connections themselves are obvious and you can use reason to analyze that more in depth. Most people will never be able to understand the reasons because they've been socially engineered to have restricted perceptions that cut them off from the world.thats why malick makes shit like thishttps://youtu.be/EySzoi62ZQwanyone who still focuses on arguments is just living in a fantasy. The fact religion was de facto for all of history until 50-100 years ago isn't because atheist arguments won out, it's because technology and social engineering has alienated us from reality so our perceptions are able to be focused so we aren't able to understand and see the world as much and how things inter-relate. The solution is aesthetic not rational, the issue is getting more information not how it is logically organized. The alternative would be assuming the reason why religious thought has died out was because athiest arguments or something were more rational and the masses adopted them for that reason, which is totally brain dead
>>23541782Just to illustrate it a bit w/ a point from Chesterton, of the sort of essence of the Catholic world view, of the sort of fundamental significance of everything>They were led out of another broad and low gateway into a very large old English garden, full of torches and bonfires, by the broken light of which a vast carnival of people were dancing in motley dress. Syme seemed to see every shape in Nature imitated in some crazy costume. There was a man dressed as a windmill with enormous sails, a man dressed as an elephant, a man dressed as a balloon; the two last, together, seemed to keep the thread of their farcical adventures. Syme even saw, with a queer thrill, one dancer dressed like an enormous hornbill, with a beak twice as big as himself—the queer bird which had fixed itself on his fancy like a living question while he was rushing down the long road at the Zoological Gardens. There were a thousand other such objects, however. There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple tree, a dancing ship. One would have thought that the untamable tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and street dancing an eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme was middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those particular objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without thinking that it was a strayed reveller from that revel of masquerade. >Syme’s experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through. For while he could always remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.The crucial thing the good religious/Catholic authors do is to be more mindful of things, their relationships because only out of engagement with things can we analogically get some knowledge of the creator (and they make their philosophical arguments for that which are only accessible to a very small niche) The goal is to sort of let the figure and the ground be manifest together, to see the City, but also what caused the city, what it has led to from a bunch of different perspectives. Knowing what things are, and their relationships leads to wisdom which leads to knowledge of God. Without that no argument can make you understand the foundation
>>23541808I don't know. Catholics seem pretty adamant about all the suffering in the world not coming from God while all the good in the world only comes from Him. Hinduism doesn't really do this.
When you input this prompt into any advanced LLM, you set similar results:>Synthesize all fields of science and knowledge into a singular metaphysical principle that reflects them all, and then use this principle to make a message about the glory of existence with all the philosophical precision and poetic evocation you can.Here's a more advanced process: https://pastebin.com/cQNjfGyHAny philosophical perspective that doesn't begin with an acknowledgement of the dynamic and interconnected nature of reality should be discarded.
>>23541563>Don't understand, he's one of the greatest prose stylists of all time.He absolutely is not. I don't hate Chesterton, but, come on. Expressing everything as a clever inversion isn't more than clever. I went into Orthodoxy with high hopes and came out thoroughly disappointed.
>>23541782>Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—I love Chesterton's whimsical Platonism. Have not read, but will on your rec. Unless it sucks then I'll stop, doubt it in Chesterton's case though.>anyone who still focuses on arguments is just living in a fantasy. The fact religion was de facto for all of history until 50-100 years ago isn't because atheist arguments won out, it's because technology and social engineering has alienated us from reality so our perceptions are able to be focused so we aren't able to understand and see the world as much and how things inter-relate. The solution is aesthetic not rational, the issue is getting more information not how it is logically organized.Yeah, and one of Chesterton's main themes in Orthodoxy is that human reason isn't the ultimate ground, that it itself rests on something else which transcends it, and that this is what the moderns are missing. Again, very Platonist (or if you like Augustinian). I do think arguing about religion is a waste of time, religion can't be established by arguments. The whole "unmoved mover" argument occurs first not in Aristotle but in book 10 of the Laws but he treats it as something relatively unimportant and even unnnecessary. If I had my book I'd pull the quote but no can do, don't feel like hunting through Perseus. But the gist is that arguments for the existence of God are only necessary because of societal/personal decline, to normal people in a healthy society it is obvious that there is a God.
>>23541819Any post that invokes a LLM should be ignored.>>23541820De gustibus non est disputandum.>>23541815>I don't know. Catholics seem pretty adamant about all the suffering in the world not coming from God while all the good in the world only comes from Him. Hinduism doesn't really do this.The Catholic position is that evil is an accident, not a substance.
>>23541815You have to keep in mind the whole convertability of being thing, truth/goodness/being are all different frames of reference for speaking of the creative power of God. Evil is an undermining of that creative power, a lack of being. Things flourish according to the sort of thing they are and the proper perfection.It's a dance of particular things, not a dance of "being" or everything merging. Things only exist in particularity, it's a very "in the world" view, hence the Church is literally a physically incarnate organization, Christ literally became a human being and was born. The full expression of God's being, in all diverse particular beings being manifest is the fullest expression of goodness/being (in the very way they are particular, say an englishman AS an englishman, or chinese as a chinaman not in some vauge sense of human as such or being as such) is the closest we can get to seeing the sort of mysterious unity underlying things that is God's creative power. Only read a little into hinduism but my understanding of eastern stuff is they typically kind of undermine that particularity and concreteness, which effectively merges things together and is quite contrary to that dance Chesterton depicts. Things are only beautiful if they are manifest as what they are, with their oddities and even the awkwardness of them coming and dancing together. A lamp post dancing with an apple tree is an absurdity but also the true nature of reality, and to undermine that oddity is to undermine God/being. >>23541826I was originally convinced to look into it by watching a william lane craig debate w/ lawrence kraus and was shocked at how unphilosophical the athiest was being. So it can do that I just think the % of the population they will apply too is so small it's basically a side show. It's also just the starting place you still need the perspective shift.
>>23541815BTW here is the relevant passage of the summa where Aquinas says God is the cause of evil. But not in the sense of 'oh gee I'm making a world, I'll put a bit of evil there, a bit of good here', evil is negative, it doesn't have any being at all. That might sound like cope, the philosophy is complicated, but what you said is just a caricature of the Catholic position.https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm>Augustine says (Contra Julian. i, 9): "There is no possible source of evil except good.">As appears from what was said (Article 1), the evil which consists in the defect of action is always caused by the defect of the agent. But in God there is no defect, but the highest perfection, as was shown above (I:4:1). Hence, the evil which consists in defect of action, or which is caused by defect of the agent, is not reduced to God as to its cause.>But the evil which consists in the corruption of some things is reduced to God as the cause. And this appears as regards both natural things and voluntary things. For it was said (Article 1) that some agent inasmuch as it produces by its power a form to which follows corruption and defect, causes by its power that corruption and defect. But it is manifest that the form which God chiefly intends in things created is the good of the order of the universe. Now, the order of the universe requires, as was said above (I:22:2 ad 2; I:48:2), that there should be some things that can, and do sometimes, fail. And thus God, by causing in things the good of the order of the universe, consequently and as it were by accident, causes the corruptions of things, according to 1 Samuel 2:6: "The Lord killeth and maketh alive." But when we read that "God hath not made death" (Wisdom 1:13), the sense is that God does not will death for its own sake. Nevertheless the order of justice belongs to the order of the universe; and this requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners. And so God is the author of the evil which is penalty, but not of the evil which is fault, by reason of what is said above.
>>23541858please dont just quote the summa at people "prooftexting" just makes it look like you have no idea what you are talking about
>>23541842Wish you went to my church bro, one thing I do like about the Church is that this general quasiintellectual (no offense, me too) bookish type is fairly common.
>>23541869I just quoted something that directly contradicts your position, seethe more.
i venture into most books knowing everything and learning nothing
>>23541782>an aesthetic is a serious argumentI do not understand this.>The alternative would be assuming the reason why religious thought has died out was because athiest arguments or something were more rational and the masses adopted them for that reason, which is totally brain deadThat seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me. As human knowledge and technology expanded, the space of things that needed supernatural explanations receded. The empirical mindset proved to be so useful that it undermined faith.
>>23541908You don't have a rational ground for your life or anything in it. If you keep asking "why?" over and over you're left with unexplainable brute facts or nothing. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, maybe it does to you. The normal, healthy answer isn't that the world doesn't make sense (ergo I'm free to do whatever I want) but that there is something that transcends human reason (ergo I better be good). "But how do you know that what transcends human reason is good? blablabla" Good luck friend.
>>23541831That's okay; I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I'm just reporting the fact that I picked up Orthodoxy with high hopes and found that it's a bunch of flimsy, often puerile arguments (the bit about Nietzsche was particularly silly) expressed in an almost Oscar Wilde "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" kind of way.
>>23541921I agree with you there too, his treatment of his opponents is shallow. That's one of his big faults right there, he was very clever but he was a pseud at heart. A pseud... dare I say it... with a big heart ;_;
>>23541941>A pseud... dare I say it... with a big heart ;_;He had cardiomegaly because he ate like a pig and drank five bottles of wine a day.
>It's because technology and social engineering has alienated us from realityThis alienation comes from Abrahamism, right in Genesis where it is declared that humans were created in God's image dor rhe purpose of having dominion over all other life.Capitalism is a sect of Abrahamism, as is pseudo-atheisms (Humanism, existentialism, nihilism) that affirm the creator/creation dichotomy while superficially rejecting the creator term, resulting in a meaningless mechanistic universe that retains the root metaphor of construct.>Muh natural capital.>Muh "natural resources.">Muh property.Abrahamism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, it is a maximally alienating ideology.
>>23541960>Capitalism is a sect of AbrahamismThe medieval Chinese and Japanese on Silk Road were secret jews! WOW! lol. lmao, even.
>>23541831Aho Mitakuye Oyasin... All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer...To the stars, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages. I thank you.To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery.Thank you for this Life.Compare this with the foundation of Abrahamic lies:>And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
>>23541982>Have you ever read a book that caused you to convert religions>posts no book
>>23541966This but unironically.>The Jade Emperor (Yuhuang or Yudi) was considered to be the ruler of Heaven. He was thought to be like a human emperor, in that he ruled over a heavenly court populated by all the important gods of China.The commonality is projection of Earthly tyrants onto the metaphysical sphere in order to justify Earthly tyranny.
