>>25328732
why ?

>>25328732
Because you read a novel? Are you 16? You will probably revert back to agnosticism within the next couple months.

>>25328732
Me too

>>25328732
You probably got the wrong message then.

>>25328732
Same.

>>25328920
t. Dmitri
>>25329308
>>25329794
t. Ivan
>>25329889
>>25329313
T. Alyosha

I don't but the closest I ever got to a feeling of religious awe was reading the Wedding at Cana scene.

>>25329957
kek

>>25328732
God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?

>>25328732
im reading this one too!

>>25331473
STOP NOTICING THINGS !!!

>>25328732
This made me lean towards athiesm

There really is no outright Christian apologetic message in TBK as it's target audience were still Christians back then.

File: dfec685f-896c-4189-9463-0(...).png (2.39 MB, 1536x1024)

2.39 MB PNG

>>25329957
Touche anon.

>>25331473
Glowsticks

>>25331473
https://www.gotquestions.org/light-first-sun-fourth.html

>>25328732
What does God do all day?

>>25328732
I'll go as far as to say that it didn't pull me out of my agnosticism towards that level of faith, nor am I an athiest or a nihilist but this book is probably the strongest argument against nihilism I've ever encountered and one of those books that has definitely saved lives.
My favorite passage was actually in the chapter of Zossima's memoirs. "The Duel," specifically the passage regarding the Mysterious Visitor. Damn that shit rocked me: "I carry in my prayer to this day, the servant of God, Mihail, who suffered so greatly."

>>25328732
Yeah you will revert back to agnosticism in tops two months. I tried to get into the Alyosha larp but it's just a big ideal that church sadly doesn't actually back up. It makes me want to be a better person that gets over my vices that's for goddamn sure and it's what you should get out of it. It goes back to Seneca that you should have an awesome man watching over you, so that you don't do wrong or take the easy road. Live up to those people you admire. Like ffs, just think you are to report to a friend back on how you're doing and don't let them down.

>>25329957
I'm actually Fyodor (based)

>>25329957
>>25332608
yeah I'm the narrator too

>>25332608
Ironically enough this is the message of the book. Except the based part, because neither Fyodor nor you are based.

>>25331473
>Where did the light come from on the first day?
god

>>25331473
>no one recognizing this as a Smerdyakov quote
kek this board really only pretends to read

>>25331473
atheist will post the dumbest shit like this and think they are some big brain geniuses who refuted theism lol

>>25332858
>Light first came out of God's penis a'course!
It looks like a simple question. Why couldn't you answer? Don't you have all the answers?

>>25328732
I lost my faith. I was raised in a cult and when I got out and deconstructed my beliefs, I determined that I do not believe in God. I don't know if I'm atheist, but I'm certainly agnostic
Would this book increase my faith or decrease it?

>>25333241
Why do you ask questions that can’t be answered in this dimension? Why would life ever occur in this vast empty universe? If you think your consciousness was created at random “because chemistry, math n physics “ then you don’t understand where to even begin yet.

>>25333539
If you're easily influenced, then you'll "convert" to orthodoxy (the internet version of it) for a year, listen to based orthodox chants on Youtube, and go down the rabbit hole of Orthotube, and then snap back to reality at the end of it (if you're lucky).

>>25333545
Are you speaking from experience?

File: 1772912824184439.webm (2.98 MB, 458x600)

2.98 MB WEBM

>>25333567
In a word, yes.

>>25333587
WTF?? That's creepy....

>>25329957
t. based

>>25333539
This book won't make you Orthodox, anymore than reading Milton would make you a Protestant or Tolkien a Roman Catholic. It will absolutely make you faithful in God to some degree, but Orthodoxy is a surprisingly insignificant part of this book for how central it might seem to be from the outside.

>>25333872
aw shucks anon. you are too

>>25332858
Do you literally believe that god created light on the earth? Only answer that makes sense is “well……it’s poetry”.

>>25334111
>Only answer that makes sense is
There are no such answers for any questions about reality THOUGH

>>25328732
If you are alluding to Dostoevsky’s worst novels, then, indeed, I dislike intensely The Brothers Karamazov and the ghastly Crime and Punishment rigamarole. No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation, but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journalese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search. Dostoyevsky’s lack of taste, his monotonous dealings with persons suffering with pre-Freudian complexes, the way he has of wallowing in the tragic misadventures of human dignity – all this is difficult to admire. I do not like this trick his characters have of ”sinning their way to Jesus” or, as a Russian author, Ivan Bunin, put it more bluntly, ”spilling Jesus all over the place." Crime and Punishment’s plot did not seem as incredibly banal in 1866 when the book was written as it does now when noble prostitutes are apt to be received a little cynically by experienced readers. Dostoyevsky never really got over the influence which the European mystery novel and the sentimental novel made upon him. The sentimental influence implied that kind of conflict he liked—placing virtuous people in pathetic situations and then extracting from these situations the last ounce of pathos. Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment—by this reader anyway. Dostoyevsky seems to have been chosen by the destiny of Russian letters to become Russia’s greatest playwright, but he took the wrong turning and wrote novels.

>>25333895
Those four years of penal servitude Dostoyevsky spent in Siberia he spent in the company of murderers and thieves, no segregation having been yet introduced between ordinary and political criminals. He described them in his ''Memoirs from the House of Death'' (1862). They do not make a pleasant reading. All the humiliations and hardships he endured are described in detail, as also the criminals among whom he lived. Not to go completely mad in those surroundings, Dostoyevsky had to find some sort of escape. This he found in a neurotic Christianism which he developed during these years. His emotional life up to that time had been unhappy. In Siberia he had married, but this first marriage proved unsatisfactory. In 1862-63 he had an affair with a woman writer and in her company visited England, France and Germany. This woman, whom he later characterized as ''infernal,'' seems to have been an evil character. Later she married Rozanov, an extraordinary writer combining moments of exceptional genius with manifestations of astounding naivete. (I knew Rozanov, but he had married another woman by that time.) This woman seems to have had a rather unfortunate influence on Dostoyevsky, further upsetting his unstable spirit. It was during this first trip abroad to Germany that the first manifestation of his passion for gambling appeared which during the rest of his life was the plague of his family and an insurmountable obstacle to any kind of material ease or peace to himself. Just as I have no ear for music, I have to my regret no ear for Dostoyevsky the Prophet. The very best thing he ever wrote seems to me to be ''The Double.'' It is the story - told very elaborately, in great, almost Joycean detail (as the critic Mirsky notes), and in a style intensely saturated with phonetic and rhythmical expressiveness - of a government clerk who goes mad, obsessed by the idea that a fellow clerk has usurped his identity. It is a perfect work of art, that story, but it hardly exists for the followers of Dostoyevsky the Prophet, because it was written in the 1840's, long before his so-called great novels; and moreover its imitation of Gogol is so striking as to seem at times almost a parody. Dostoyevsky characterizes his people through situation, through ethical matters, their psychological reactions, their inside ripples. After describing the looks of a character, he uses the old-fashioned device of not referring to his specific physical appearance anymore in the scenes with him. This is not the way of an artist - say Tolstoy - who sees his character in his mind all the time and knows exactly the specific gesture he will employ at this or that moment.

>>25328732
I read this at the lowest point in my life and it helped me convert to Orthodoxy. Been steady in the faith for a few years now. There are those who read Dostoevsky and those who have a personal relationship with Dostoevsky - if it weren't for him I would probably still be a homeless crackhead.

One winter I was living in the mountains in New Zealand, sleeping in an abandoned hospital for WW1 veterans built on hotsprings. A group of drunk people broke into where I was sleeping and we started drinking, chatting, having a good time all around. One of them invited me back to her place to stay and I opened her trunk to put my stuff in. And the only object in the trunk - laying there, face up, was a copy of The Idiot. At that time it was the only one of his post-exile novels that I hadn't read. It was a wonderful act of providence. When you don't have people, God gives you books.

I'm not in the business of evangelism but I will offer you some encouragement, which is simply to continue pursuing the truth sincerely. If you simply pray to God with a humble heart to help you then He will.

>>25333895
I was regularly attending Catholic mass in the first year of my conversion to Christianity. But I read Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot during that time, and Dostoevsky's critiques of Catholicism are so brutal in those books that it created a lot of spiritual pain for me. At that point I needed to discover if Catholicism was the true Christian church or if Dostoevsky was right in his depiction of it as a false Church succumbed to the Devil. Eventually I agreed with Dostoevsky.

So, in a fairly direct way, Dostoevsky did bring me into Orthodoxy, although converting people is definitely not his intention with those novels.

>>25334366
I think you missed the point of the Grand Inquisitor.

>>25334548
There are multiple points in the Grand Inquisitor. One of them is to provide an absolutely brutal dismantling of Catholocism.

>>25334554
I don't know, I think if you take the meta critiques of Catholicism in the Grand Inquisitor at face value, you get a kind of dissonance with the rest of the narratives more balanced approach to religion and Orthodoxy. To me the whole Grand Inquisitor chapter characterizes the typical epistemic flaws of atheist/nihilist arguments, they deliver what they imagine to be a death blow to the entire concept of religion, but they fail to realize how little what they say actually means to someone who has faith.

>>25334340
if not dostoevsky then who o'l great sage ?

What does this book say about Protestantism?

>>25335056
Russian "old believers" were a bit like protestants and he seems more accepting of them in House of the Dead

>>25328732
cool

>>25334706
Yeah because Atheists make the same stupid arguments as the literal Devil in the bible lmao.

>>25333895
It was written in a point of the liberal Startsy currents in Orthodoxy and takes a very pro science and pro rationality stance in the Zosima - Ferapont duality.

So yeah it's not a BEGOME ORDODOX book.

I just started reading it. Huge Dosty fan but I just haven't gotten around to this one yet. 3 chapters in
I am someone who completely lost my faith in Christianity and don't even know if I believe in a god anymore, and if I don't believe in God when what is stopping me from doing whatever I feel like
I think now is the best time in my life to read it

>>25334706
I think that what you're describing applies more to the chapter before the Grand Inquisitor, where Ivan is laying out his nihilistic critique of God. Alyosha is intellectually inferior to Ivan, however he proves through his character and actions that he's the better man.

If you read The Idiot, Dostoevsky goes into a passionate refutation of Catholicism through the voice of the main character. The Grand Inquisitor is partly meant to prove that Catholicism is the inverse of Orthodoxy: that the Catholics accepted the temptations of Christ in the desert and instead of honoring human free will, they use their church purely as a means of social control to bring about a false utopia. The Inquisitor chastises Christ for refusing the temptations, claiming that it's better for men to be slaves free from suffering rather than to retain their free-will and starve. The project of the Church, he says, is to "correct" Christ's mistake. And it's for that reason that Christ must be crucified again.

This is also the core of Ivan's nihilistic philosophy. He literally believes in God's existence, but he's a true atheist in the sense that he is completely opposed to God. God permits the immense suffering of innocent children out of respect for human freedom. But that freedom is not enough to atone for "a single tear" shed from an innocent child.

In the end, however, as he departs the jail, the Inquisitor 'leaves the door open' for Christ - who has not said a single word in his own defense, but simply kissed the Inquisitor out of compassion. Alyosha mirrors Christ by doing this same thing to Ivan, showing that Christ wins the hearts of broken men not through intellectual arguments, but through sincere acts of love and humanity.

>>25334340
t. Nabokov

why?