Has a book made you more or less religious?

A lot of you are christfags, have you always been religious, or did you just read the biblia and become a catholicfag?

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Raised lax protestant, never really got into it.
I see religion less as a holy thing to be obeyed and more as a "how to treat thine neighbors for Dummies" told in the form of parables.

Oddly enough I have ended up more religious in the last few years because all the hate thrown at Christianity specifically got me to look back into it. I started to appreciate the lessons long forgotten in those years going to church every week, the lessons which teach you to be a better person. Both of my parents went down a similar path, and I only now understand why they too turned back towards religion.
Not for the need of governance, but for the need of self improvement.

Reading Joseph Campbell has absolutely made me more spiritual. I've been reading select chapters from the Masks of God series and he's absolutely convinced me of the value, in fact the necessity, of myth in human life, whether that takes the form of the Bible, fairy tale, or baroque architecture.

>While in the larger course and context of the evolution of life itself, from the silence of primordial seas, of which the taste still runs in our blood, the opening of the eyes occurred only after the first principle of all organic being ("Now I'll eat you; now you eat me!") had been operative for so many hundreds of millions of centuries that it could not then, and cannot now, be undone -- though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us to regret the monstrous game.

they were emotionally neglected by their fathers or indoctrinated as children into the blood cult

Reading multiple times Paradise Lost made me realize that the absence or refusal of God doesn't set us free, rather we can use our free will to question the value held by blindly accepting a being higher, more powerful than we are.
So I'm not a religious or spiritual person, but believing that there is something absolute out there help reinforcing my sense of self-determination. God existing is fine, but my mind is its own place as Milton wrote, thus I don't feel the need to strictly subdue myself to its teachings.

Augustine desu

was raised in a Mestizo branch of the Catholic church, rejected it as a child partially because it didn't make any fucking sense and partly because the apes running the facility couldn't explain their faith. idolatry and Marian worship is rampant, i don't understand how these people are actually Christians.

spent a few years as a new age / shaman / druid / crowleyite /x/ fag, long before Veeky Forums existed. also explored other more sensical but less familiar religious traditions. most of it was folly, or i was not properly initiated into mahayana buddhism. the idea of the bodhisattva had incredible appeal though. got really busy for a while and was basically agnostic, didn't give a hoot about faith.

started reading classics in mid-20s: Homer, Virgil, Milton, Blake, but not Dante. then histories, bits of Plato here and there, then tackled the Bible. realized a lot of this shit was bodhisattva behavior. tried jumping into big boy philosophy by reading Sartre but it just made me mad, so I assumed all modern philosophy was circular trash. read Masks of God like ten years ago, started on a skeptical tour of human belief. read it twice since then, and a lot more Greeks. found Veeky Forums, shilled Masks of God a lot, discovered continental philosophy was not garbage and became a fan of Girard and a few others especially given how their thought coincides with the christ consciousness/bodhisattva/platonic mission of creating harmony.

Plotinus' essay On Beauty convinced me of the existence of god as a philosophical concept. now I'm not a christfag in the traditional sense but do recognize christ as a powerful image. currently studying platonists. man has a gift in reasoned compassion, and it is the only thing that will save us as a species.

I feel like I shill it every time I get on Veeky Forums but Bodhicaryavatara made me a Buddhist philosophically at least, dunno about the spiritual side as much

raised religious, all of my life experience and learning has done nothing but strengthen my faith, i did switch denominations though

Unironically “Thus Spake Zarathustra”

War and peace by Tolstoi

The Brothers Karamazov and Levin's story line in Anna Karenina increased my faith in a higher power

Still an Atheist but reading Hegel, Husserl, Horkheimer & Adnorno made me much more sensitive to spirituality and what it means in a deeper sense than the whether God exists debates

>Still an Atheist but reading Hegel, Husserl, Horkheimer & Adnorno made me much more sensitive to spirituality and what it means in a deeper sense than the whether God exists debates
whoops

Art in general made me religious, I still don't believe in a creator deity, creation seems more chaotic than that.

The God Delusion made me an edgy hat tipper but Kierkegaard and Augustine brought me back to the light

I turned to Calvinism from fedora tier atheism after reading The Recognitions.

Reading Memorial of the Saints by Fariduddin Attar when I was 14-15 made me a hardcore muslim until this very day (26 now).. I'm more towards Sunni + Sufi sect.. it's all good.
>i was raised muslim, but to read the memorial of the saints kinda change every aspect of my belief for me.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazkirat_al-Awliya

Understanding Nietzsche and Heidegger made me a turbofedora.

Kierkegaard made me understand my faith more and made me more confident.

Philip K Dick helped me understand that I believed in something.

Paradise Lost helped me reconcile a lot of problems I had with Christianity.

Wittgenstein made me agnostic. Considering that I was an atheist prior to that I guess that counts as more religious.

Nice

Moby Dick honestly strengthened my faith

What should I read to restore my faith and spirituality? Feel kind of out of touch with God right now. I forget to pray and before I know it weeks go by without me doing so.
Inb4 Bible, I'm looking more for philosophy or theology

Augustine's Confessions

Moby Dick made me understand the necessity of spirituality

>tfw you don't know fideism is a heresy and quite new

Can you people seriously not see the historical contingency of your beliefs?

Book of the New Sun, then Canticle for Leibowitz, then Brothers Karamazov all have brought me closer to religion.

I was raised as an Orthodox Christian.
Chesterton and Lewis are two geniuses. It was because of them that I started going to church and praying every day.
Graham Greene and Susaku Endo blew my mind too. After them I read only Christian literature. I consider Dickens as the greatest Christian writer (Chesterton’s thought).
I respect Catholics and dislike Protestants.

Jordan Peterson

Please elaborate.

I am 18, soon to be 19. I have always been religious, then kinda went into a phase where I questioned everything, and ended up back where I started, except with more resolve in my beliefs, as I had now believed them by my own choice and not simply told so. I think Augustine and Kierkegaard are my "inspiration" in a sense. More relate able than the bible in some ways, to be honest.

The Idiot

Honestly most of them go into it because Veeky Forums told them to, they usually treat it like a phase.

I was raised in the Catholic Church but I was not very religious.
Plato made me realize for the first time that God didn't necessarily have to fit the Christian concept of God.
I could see right through the supersticious rituals and the hippocrisy of the afterlife.
The Stranger changed me. I started "listening" only to myself.

The social doctrine stayed with me though. I read a lot of Catholics and converts and I sympathize with them. Their aesthetics and hero journeys are inspiring, but not the other stuff.

Maybe I'm just too proud or a hippocryte who refuses to acknowledge a magic man in heaven should rule my life. I still second guess myself thanks to all those years of conditioning. I'd second guess myself even if I "believed". I'm simply a man with no convictions outside the realm of the mundane.

Faith in what?

I've been an atheist ever since I was a kid.
Although I agree with the statement that religious belief can have a positive impact upon people's lives, I do not believe in non-physical entities of any kind, nor could I ever do so. Explanations on the nature of the universe should always, in my opinion, strive to be as close as possible to material reality.

Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Rosenzweig, Augustine, Luther, Rilke('s Book of Hours). All these guys managed to draw me closer to faith.

To elaborate a bit further on this, I grew up in a moderately religious Roman Catholic family. My mother and my grandparents went to church every single Sunday, and prayed almost every single day. My father was an atheist, but he never told me anything about his beliefs (or rather, lack of them). I became an atheist shortly after reading Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Dostoëvsky's The Brothers Karamazov (mostly because I didn't see the point in Alyosha being so steadfast to his religious beliefs). My convictions on religious people being delusional fucks were heavily cemented shortly after reading James Joyce's A Portrait of an Artists as a Young Man. I shortly afterwards read The God Delusion and God is Not Great. Over the years, my convictions on religion being poisonous for the mind have mellowed down, mostly due to my exposure to other people's experiences with how religion has given them a sense of purpose in life.
Admittedly, I have a strong appreciation for religious art and other kinds of expressions of religious faith, but I see them as being no different than any other kind of strongly emotional expression of deep-held beliefs (be they about morality, beauty in nature, or an open trust in others).