Study Christianity, pray rosary, read books on prayer or moral theology, etc

>study Christianity, pray rosary, read books on prayer or moral theology, etc.
>find nothing but truth
>all of the shittiest, least virtuous people I've known were Christian, and the best just had no opinions on religion
>all of the Christian parents I've known have had at least one kid go off the fucking rails and become a drug addict, steal from them, get kicked out of their house, and go live some fucked up lifestyle somewhere else, while this seems exceedingly rare among non-religious households in my social class (upper middle class American)

Are there any books on this issue?

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were they protestors or Catholics. I mean man, this is pretty anecdotal. Do you think it's indicative of Christianity? I think it's indicative of their free will.

Too, if you're a good Christian, you're a liar! hahah

Idk if there are any books on this hypocrisy. You'll probably find some Catholic books criticizing sola fide and how it basically allows for people to deliberately sin with no care whatsoever because it is only faith that saves.

Also, please be very very careful that you are not committing spiritual pride man. That used to be a big problem of mine and it's not fun when you realize how dangerous it is.

Hope you can find some books! I think if you research stuff about the effects of sola fide and the problems with it, you'll find books that you are searching for.

God bless you brother. :-)

There are a lot of people who are only nominally Christian (i.e. go to church once a year, if even that) who are admittedly bad representatives of the faith. If you associated with people who were really invested Christians you would change your tune.

Those who are instinctively moral don't need Christianity to make them moral. It is those with bad impulses and 'evil' natures that need it.

That’s literally me

>It is those with bad impulses and 'evil' natures that need it.
the original sin parts yeah

Similarly, it is the weakest of people who cling to convictions to have any sort of spine. Those who have no confidence in themselves are drawn to Christianity because it has many absolutes they can borrow to have a semblance of strength.

Nietzsche is garbage when it comes to the science of group selection, kin selection, and altruism. His claims on morality lie on the dated idea of darwinistic natural selection. If being good is to be strong, alpha, selfish, individualistic etc, why the fuck is there so much success with—again— group selection, kin selection, and especially altruism.

You call Christianity's absolutes—I assume the belief system— weak and it is only a semblance of strength. How is it not just strength? That's such a cop out. The "weakest" philosophy hid behind a dumb curtain of strength being successful for like 2000 years? Rome didn't see through the façade in the 4th century? The Crusaders were weak? The philosophy that has bore the most fruit in so many practical ways was done by weaklings? How the fuck is a weakling who acts like he is strong actually strong? No one tried to hit him for 2000 years?

Are you American ?
I don't know why but my first thought was that it seems like an issue mostly present in the US.

Not sure, but I am sure a lot of the black sheep problem is caused not by the religion itself, but the pressure of overbearing parents.
Coming from a family who has seen black sheep in many forms, I can all but confirm that it is the stifling nature which the parents of any pious household go about enforcing their view. All my family members who were driven away (myself included) were often pressured quite hard to be successful god-fearing Christians, but instead ended up a bit broken and confused. Some of us turned to drugs, others turned to education, few just kept on keeping on.
This is a phenomenon I have witnessed not just in overly Christian houses, but also overly ambitious families (especially Asian ones, as our loose culture clashes with their high standards) or even overly hippy ones.
The message is this: the harder and faster you shove your ideology down someone's throat, the sooner they are likely to vomit it back up then lay in bed moaning sickly afterwards

Nietzsche hated darwinism. I can get you specific quotes if you like, but he viewed all science as decadent (though the best form of decadence). Look up Epistemological Constructivism and Perspectivism, those negate morality based on any science.

All convictions are illusions of strength. Nietzsche was a perspectivist and didn't believe we could "know" truth, only perspectives that reveal parts of it. Therefore, all beliefs in absolutes are cop outs to reality--propping up weak people.

>Therefore, all beliefs in absolutes are cop outs to reality--propping up weak people.
including that one

>muh rationality is above everything else
I thought postmodernism killed all you guys. Hopefully it happens sooner rather than later. Applying the axiom of internal consistency to a system that rejects such axioms is moronic.

>study Christianity, pray rosary, read books on prayer or moral theology, etc.
Be wary of that kind of insulation.

>Are there any books on this issue?
Its too complex of an issue to narrow down to one issue. That said your experiance as a person who came into the faith voluntarily will be different from someone who had it pressured on them

Thank you, Knee Chair

You must be fun at parties.

Many Christians passively believe, pray for stop signs to turn green and go to church. They've never delved into their faith, they don't know about the history of their religion, and their opinions on it are worth as much as anyone else's.

Being a Christian doesn't mean you know anything about Christianity.

Yup man, this is all I talk about ever. I give lectures at parties about the realm of theology

Contemporary Christianity is in an absolutely sorry state.

In America the most authentic and convincing advocate of a serious Christianity I've encountered is Stan Hauerwas.

His book "Resident Aliens" has a wonderful subtitle: "A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for those that know that something is wrong."

The long and short of it is this: American Christianity has been

1) infected with self help sentimentality (megachurches, prosperity theology, Joel Osteen)

2) subordinated to nationalist politics (evangelicals for Trump)

3) subordinated to a liberal politics based on a progressive view of history (where hope for mankind is vested in the ballot box instead of the Cross)

>Idk if there are any books on this hypocrisy. You'll probably find some Catholic books criticizing sola fide and how it basically allows for people to deliberately sin with no care whatsoever because it is only faith that saves.
Except that sola fide teaches a person without good works certainly doesn't have faith and Britain under calvinism was working under peak efficiency because everyone wanted to prove/believe they were one of the predestined ones with true faith.

Yeah, American Christianity has been completely co-opted by both nationalism and capitalism, at least among Protestants. Too much Calvinism, too much Prosperity Gospel nonsense. They're all too eager to be part of the world, forgetting that Christians are called to stand apart from it.

desu the post doesn't come off as pretentious or self-serving, seems like a pretty friendly and well-adjusted guy to me

I like to think I'm friendly and well adjusted! lol

This might be unrelated but I believe that parents often try to teach Christianity as 'this is the way it is now shut up and follow it'. This turns off a lot of kids as they want to rebel, especially against something they cannot understand. You have to let your children come to the realization that it is true. Kids today have been raised to understand Christianity as an authoritative 'because I said so' with no other explanation, of course they will turn away from it.

Christianity is an excellent tool.

Christianity became the mainstream, which lowered the bar and convinced most people that to be nominally "Christian" without any actual practice was enough. Kierkegaard talked a lot about this and it's only gotten worse with time. In addition, most Christian don't even understand their own religion. Like seriously, how many Christians actually understand what the "resurrection of the dead" means, and that there will eventually be a "New Earth"? Not many.

>Nietzsche was a perspectivist and didn't believe we could "know" truth, only perspectives that reveal parts of it
Any intelligent Christian also believes this

let me tell you something.

the more valuable something is, the more it will be swarmed by crowds of awful pretenders. look at this ICO shit. Everyone has a whitepaper, everyone pretends to be the perfect faultless Satoshi figure. But how many actually are? How many actually fucking are? Slim to none of them.

It's the same with religion. Someone who was actually saintlike would be worthy of the deepest respect, fear and love. Everyone wants that, so there are more fakers for it than anything else.

the measure of the man

How many of those people actually declare themselves Christian, and how many of those people are you just assigning Christianity to on the basis of them having been born in a, let's say, "Christianized" society, or because they fill in the "Christian" bubble on a census report?

What a bizarre thing to say. Why are you being a try hard pseudo-normie in a theology thread? Do you think that makes you cool?

Christianity exists on the timescales of thousands of years, while these people you mention are only around for a few years.

People don't have ideas, ideas have people.

>>all of the shittiest, least virtuous people I've known were Christian, and the best just had no opinions on religion
I'm very interested in Christianity and I study it all the time; I'm a pretty big degenerate fuckup, though. But that's my own dumb nonsense that I'm trying to work through.. I still have love and compassion for everyone and try not to judge, or at least try very hard to learn from my lessons when I slip up and do so. To your point I think this is an issue that has a lot to do with social polarity: many Christians repress the darker parts of their psyche to the point where they convince themselves that it's no longer there. But that energy doesn't go anyway. It sticks around and comes out again through self-righteousness - and that is nothing but inverse hatred. They try to outpace that subconscious hypocrisy by judging everyone else around them twice as hard. I think that's why you always see some kids in these Christian households freak out and go off the rails. They can pick up on the delicate psychic artifice that is kicking around in their families and they grow to resent everything about it.

Good psychological analysis, IMO.

>many Christians repress the darker parts of their psyche to the point where they convince themselves that it's no longer there. But that energy doesn't go anyway. It sticks around and comes out again through self-righteousness - and that is nothing but inverse hatred

That is an intriguing thought.

I think if a Christian is truly suppressing his dark, sinful nature, it is being shrunk rather than just barred. In Saint John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, he discusses something along the lines of this.

"For the sensual part of a man has no capacity for that which is pure spirit, and thus, when it is the spirit that receives the pleasure, the flesh is left without savour and is too weak to perform any action. But the spirit, which all the time is being fed, goes forward in strength, and with more alertness and solitude than before, in its anxiety not to fail God."

St. John of the Cross refers to this as a sign of a man's purgation of his senses. The desires of his flesh are so suppressed and deprived that they virtually cannot muster strength to urge man to indulge in his senses. And with the "painful care" to not fail God, the assumption or feeling that one "is backsliding," a man is gaining strength in his spirit for the sake of God by suppression of his senses.

I will say, St. John of the Cross made clear that this process of purgation of the senses isn't an overnight thing. It is a many years process. Perhaps Christians might have backsliding or failures along the way. I would say that is not his dark nature—the nature that you say he represses— is breaking free from a prison in the back of the Christian's mind under the idea that this nature is a constant force or of constant mass before and after the repressive imprisonment. I say it is that the dark nature—the sinful nature depicted in our flesh and senses— has not been weakened enough, where weakening would be along the lines of deprivation of their entertainment and affirming their temptations, to safeguard against a reveal of that nature in the future.

If you want, I can provide the page numbers for those quotations, too. Glad you brought that up, it's interesting.

Christ came to heal the sick, not the well.

>try not to judge
literally nothing to do with christianity and everything to do with secular humanist ethics as understood through a contemporary framework.

>Glad you brought that up, it's interesting.
Cheers, mate. That was a really well-thought reply. Wasn't expecting that. Incidentally the 'The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross' has been hovering near the top of my buy list for quite a while now; might have to seek that out soon.

You're saying this to an avowed drunkard - that's the least of my worries.

>An Uncondemning Monk is recorded in the Prologue from Ohrid as having led a saintly life by never condemning another person in all his earthly days.
>This monk who is unnamed is said to have been lazy, and undisciplined in prayer as well as all other aspects of his life. Due to this the brethren were surprised at the monk's joy as he lay on his deathbed. The brother monks asked him the reason for his joy to which he replied,
>'I have just seen the angels, and they showed me a page with all my many sins. I said to them: "The Lord said: 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' I have never judged anyone and I hope in the mercy of God, that He will not judge me." And the angels tore up the sheet of paper.' Hearing this, the monks wondered at it and learned from it." (From the Prologue)
>The commemoration of the Uncondemning Monk is celebrated on 30 March in the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Catholic Churches.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncondemning_Monk

Highly recommend! The Peers translation of the Dark Night of the Soul is great. It's a little hard to unpack at first, but you get used to the style.

>I don't understand what "judge" means in the passage, and I probably also think "enemy" as used in the gospel refers also to public enemies and not just private enemies
He's called the uncondemning monk and not the unjudging monk for a reason.
I think understanding what the religion you think might be true actually says is kind of important regardless of you being a drunkard or not.

t. hasn't read Nietschze

>He's called the uncondemning monk and not the unjudging monk for a reason.
And he says "I have never judged anyone." You're arguing semantics. Condemning is judging.

Condemning is judging but judging isn't the same as condemning. Judging without condemning is not only perfectly fine but absolutely fundamental, since without judging someone or something you literally can't have any morality. The reason why he said "I never judged" is because he's using the term as it was used in the bible, not in the modern "LOVE IS LOVE DON'T JUDGE" meaning of the word.

I am acutely aware that I am pursuing this from a necessary remove. If you'd care to read my first post again you'll find that I only said that I am interested in this and often study it, nothing more. I never once claimed to be any sort of arbiter here. And why is someone mentioning that they try not to judge others in their personal life getting you this heated? Seems pretty innocuous to me, but whatever.

I'm not heated at all, I'm disgusted.
>Seems pretty innocuous to me
The reason why it disgusts me is because the "don't judge" attitude is a fundamental component of today's consent morality, which I find infantile and outright evil.

>not in the modern "LOVE IS LOVE DON'T JUDGE" meaning of the word.
And who used it that way? The initial person you responded to when you brought it up didn't do that.

The common use of the word "judge" nowadays is precisely in the meaning I was referring to earlier. If he meant it in another way, consider my criticism to be retracted.

unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman

I don't believe that you're above reproach. And considering that you like to find very haughty pretexts to funpost your time away on Veeky Forums I don't think that you believe that either, regardless of the performance that you're putting forward right now.

>I don't believe that you're above reproach
When have I said that I'm above reproach?
>And considering that you like to find very haughty pretexts to funpost your time away on Veeky Forums
what did he mean by this?

born again christian girls are pure

>When have I said that I'm above reproach?
And just what are you in need of a reproach over, user? Care to share? Or are you the secretive sort?
>what did he mean by this?
That you get bored and enjoy playing arrogant games to whittle the time away.

>Care to share?
Not really even though I should. I have issues with being uncaring.
>to whittle the time away
I'm writing here in between duolingo sessions.

>I have issues with being uncaring.
You don't say.. Look this will end up being one of those dumb back and forth fiascos that will go nowhere so let's just leave it. Go back to your duolingo lessons.

>You don't say..
Wait, what?
Also, I'm not sure how you can even go forth, I've already explained the issue with misusing the word juge, something that is quite similar with the misuse of the word enemy in the bible. This is commonly accepted stuff among the relevant academics as they're perfectly aware how often greek words tend to be badly translated into english.

good post. that scene aroused my interest (if you know what I mean)

..Did you just use me to go on a linguistics tangent about Greek misnomers? What are you even doing? Do you always soapbox this hard?

Again, what? I was just explaining myself in case I didn't make myself clear.