How has the Veeky Forums you've consumed impacted upon your religious beliefs...

This nigga made me realise that agnostics are just inconsequent atheists.

It's difficult to explain. My readings have cultivated this sense of... thrownness in me: as if this body, this matter, is very much a living thing with its own biography, which has been going on and will go on for eternity. I wouldn't really call it divine in the typical sense, but it isn't necessarily malignant either, nor stupid. It remembers. I'm the result of millions and millions of years of habit and convention. At times, when coupled with my anxiety, this understanding has result into panics filled with an existential dread which tells me to get rid of everything, of these clothes, of this flesh, of these thoughts. They aren't me, then. But on the better days it means a love of matter, of material. It's all around been pretty humbling, it's made me not want to perpetuate the pain of the past, but not through obligation or a God given mission, has made me come to grips with the limitations of my scope.

>Inconsequent
You say that as if it's a bad thing.

I began reading seriously as someone who didn't believe in God and who didn't see the appeal of religion at all. So naturally I gravitated to the existentialists for philosophy and pessimistic literature for fiction. I never saw the corroboration of anything I read as an intrinsic state of mankind. I didn't really see the corroboration or justification my readings. During this time I was big into YouTube videos and alt media sources. But then I read Plato, medieval Christian philosophers, renaissance philosophers, neoplatonists, and German classicists, historicists, the American founding fathers, Humboldt and Leibniz. Ever since I have begun to see the intelegibility of the natural and have come to believe in intelligent design, in God.

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I'll never understand why people like you even bother to post at all.

My religious beliefs are almost entirely either an internal struggle or affected by the people around me. So the answer is not at all.

i dont give a fuck know wham sayin

Well, I grew up in a standard modern American household: my mother was Christian and my father was a Satanist. I had a distant relationship with my father because he was almost never home. But, Christianity didn't exactly resonate with me either. I never prayed and only loosely read the Bible.

I was far more concerned about the earth. I had a strange fascination with death; I would sit and think about the possibility of infinite nothingness when the body died, and the loss of everything, and it would bring me to tears, but things that brought me to tears I considered to be the most truthful and correct. I was more concerned about my personal responsibility to others and what I could do for the world here in the now than about any kind of god.

Life also always possessed a quality of divinity for me, but god was never in the picture. Life itself was divine. The world and everything in it were blessed. And it was my responsibility to make others feel that way about themselves too, and show them the possibility of that view.

Fast forward to me at 16 years old and I came across Nietzsche. He refined me completely. Reading him was like gazing into a mirror. 9 years later and I am exactly what I always was — not an atheist, but not a Christian either. Closer to a pantheist but not quite that either. More Dionysian than anything.

>Well, I grew up in a standard modern American household: my mother was Christian and my father was a Satanist.
>and my father was a Satanist.

we have different definitions of standard, you and i

>Well, I grew up in a standard modern American household: my mother was Christian and my father was a Satanist.

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