Religioud anons, why are you religious? And do you believe your belief is rational?

BARFIELD MENTIONED

Catholic here. I'm religious for a few reasons. First, there's the fact that the classical metaphysical arguments for the existence of God are really strong. If you want to learn about these arguments, Ed Feser's Aquinas is a really good introduction. If you're less interested in the details of the arguments and instead just want a beautifully written description of the God of classical theism, David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God is great. The author is Eastern Orthodox, but the God he's writing about would be recognizable to Muslims, Jews, some Hindus, and Neoplatonists.

Second, the state of ethics in the modern world is abysmal. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a great case for this and for virtue ethics in After Virtue. I'd also recommend The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers for an introduction to Christian ethics, with an emphasis on the thought of Thomas Aquinas (one of our greatest theologians).

Also important: faith is a supernatural gift from God. Sure reading these things will probably help you get there. You could also just as easily start praying.

and whatever you do, avoid this hideous edition

Kierkegaard is the endgame in terms of religious philosophy, the best bar none. Definitely changed some of my views.

* of course I am referring to Christian philosophy.

>I want to be convinced that there ontologically exists an objective reality, characterized by morality, order and a deity.

Not all religions believe in this.

The Buddha's Assurances are an interesting, convincing version of Pascal's Wager that predated Pascal by millenia:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalama_Sutta

then I guess he isn't looking for those religions

I took on an interest in Islam after spending a few months abroad in eurasia. I wouldn't quite say I fully identify as a moslem or even a religious person for that matter, but the works of Frithjof Schuon and Seyyed Nasr have been pretty influential for me.

In particular I think Schuon's Understanding Islam could be interesting for you, if you'd like an approachable philosophical approach directed at Western audiences.

I have something kinda like deistic faith after doing a lot of philosophy. It's partly a mystic hunch about orderliness and purposiveness, from nature and science, and partly the firsthand experience of seeing how few people really "get" certain religiously-inspired philosophy.

Sometimes I get moments of what feels like true appreciation of Kant's wonder at faith, Aristotle's wonder at entelechy, Aquinas' wonder at his revelation, stuff like that, and I realise in a way I can't really describe that modern "rationality" is a very cold, neutered way of thinking. Whenever I've read deeply into some major philosopher, I always feel like the vast majority of coverage of him is giving only a "thin" account of his insight, only reproducing concepts in our own language and for us, rather than really trying to pry open his architectonic as just a mirror of something real and tangible. It's like we memorise all the lines without reading the meaning between them. Once you get a glimpse of something bigger, some "holy shit" moment of really UNDERSTANDING what you think Hegel himself actually saw, and it's so big that you can't even keep all of it in your mind's eye at once and you're afraid it's going to slip away, but for one brief second you're sure you saw what he saw too, you just get this hunch: All these people were onto something somehow, all onto fragments of something. It makes you want to make a life's work out of making sense of it.

At some point you just get a certain habit of habitually trying to imagine ways of seeing beyond your own limited possibility of knowledge. I noticed I picked up tendencies from certain philosophers who gave me that feeling that they were in sight of something, and I started to see it myself and apply it myself in ways that were infinitely bigger than a lifetime of studying it merely conceptually or rationalistically could have ever given me. It's sort of like vipassana, this glimpse of something realer that you can't shake.

I think getting older helps too. I both can and can't remember what it was like to be a 20 year old completely convinced of atheism. I can remember that I felt that way, but I can't remember the experience of it. When I try to picture my mind back then, I sort of see my thoughts trapped in an iron cage made of "base" reasoning, scientistic, instrumental reasoning that is trying to discover magic by killing magic, trying to find purely psychologistic bases for divine reason, trying to find cynical explanations for the Good. I think a big part of my semi-religious self-discovery was allowing myself to consider that the cage wasn't really there, and that you don't have to be ashamed of feeling awe when you wonder why there is something instead of nothing.

Nowadays I literally can't imagine how a grand, mystical-philosophical openness to the "purpose" or "cause" of existence and the universe is any less plausible than a scientistic one. And I say that as a science lover.

>Religioud anons, why are you religious?
Yes, I'm a Catholic.
>And do you believe your belief is rational?
No, belief is supported by reason in the sense where the world will show both man's inclination for God and metaphysical necessity of God existing, but Christ did not die for the class of intellectuals. Catholicism isn't platonism.
God speaks to everyone in the language that moves the simple and the genius alike, hence, one of the most important theological writings of the 20th century is made by a nun who had 2 years of school.
It has both Aquinas and the whole plethora of the most brilliant minds in philosophy and the simple people.
>But at one point I realized that nihilism cannot be true - so how do other philosophers approach about this problem, too?
Nihilism and naturalism are faith based as they lay on axiom, one being that there is only the material. If you simply reject the naturalist beliefs, thinking in religious terms becomes easier. This of course isn't as simple and requires thinking and research, so here's the philosophy which I recommend, in order. Keep in mind that reading all of this will take you years and that religious fiction and regular spirituality lead to God as much as any philosophy does.
Fredrick Copleston, History of Philosophy I
Plato, Republic, Apology, Phaedo, Meno, Symposium, Laws
Aristotle, Politics, Ethics, Categories, Metaphysics
Fredrick Copleston, History of Philosophy II
Edward Feser, Aquinas,Scholastic Metaphysics
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Whose Justice Which Rationally (and really this is THE moral philosophy which you are looking for)
St. Augustine, Confessions, City of God
David S Oderberg, Practical Ethics, Real Essentialism
Aquinas, Summa Theologica

My diary desu

You "want to be convinced"

What a terrible way to start any philosophical discussion.

This post reeks of Reddit. I hate to be that guy but I'll be that guy. This is a bunch of big words strewn redundantly together to make a very simple question/concept.

I'm eastern Orthodox as a ruski because protip: there is no objective truth and even if there was I'd still reject it

>these digits are predetermined, user

No dubs, you are going to hell.

So are you.

At least we know it wasn't our fault, God made us dubless

Honestly, it's quite a blur. I started researching meditation as an atheist 3 years ago and now I'm a Calvinist. Over this time I've interacted with many different religious leanings and while I admit that I've proven myself to be pretty shaky when it comes to belief, the direction that I've been going in since the start has now become very clear, and as a Calvinist I of course believe that this was the work of God rather than my own doing. If it were up to me I'd still be a nature worshipping Unitarian Universalist who believes that all religions are about the same God.

good post

>start meditating
>become a Calvinist
don't meditate, kids

I am an agnostic deist because I was brought up in a conservative Catholic context, and as any Catholic anons know, its impossible to shake that shit despite years of study into what the church was, what it became, and what it is today.

I go to a liberal protestant Church with my children because I think the moral instruction of Jesus provides us with the ideal precepts for a moral society, and if there is a God and the peoples of the past were sincerely connected to the divine, the teachings of Jesus and James not Paul are most certainly God's law for man today.

tl;dr No faith, lots of hope, acts of charity and love>faith.

R E D E E M E D

(I actually don't know how Calvinism works, fucking heretics)

>not Paul
>and love>faith

St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians:
>13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

>4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; 5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

>8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; 10 but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. 13 So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Paul did nothing wrong

The lamb's fleece is warm.

Nice read. It seems Buddhists follow the Buddha in the same was Christians are following the Christ. Not at all.

>impossible to shake that shit

I feel you. And you are doing right by your kids to take them to a church like that. Even if they don't become spiritual per se, they will have a good framework from which to build morality from. How do you discuss religion with your children?

>I want to be convinced that there ontologically exists an objective reality
>everybody wants that. you're not going to get it.
/thread