Tfw you realize that the Christian concept of Grace in the face of suffering the only way to live a truly happy life

I'm not one of those people. I understand the need for dogma, and how self-imposed limits n human nature are often necessary to avoid its excesses, but I just don't believe in the literal truth of any of Christianity's supernatural claims.

Dostoyevsky's views on religion were exactly what you described, he said being a Christian was a psychological necessity for him and even if he knew it were wrong he would still be Christian. His works don't deal with this explicitly as far as I'm aware, but at least they're coming from someone with your mindset.

This is what the stoics did, but they were all rich guys. "Virtue is sufficient for happiness" is a very hard principle to live by when you're poor, lonely, and squalid

>it's not metaphysically true
top kek

I prefer Nietzsche's recommended practice of gratitude but it is basically the same thing.

See and. Every year some dumb fucking Protestant minister makes headlines in the liberal media for thinking he's the first person ever to discover what you did. It's not an entirely invalid belief system, but there are plenty of things to call it besides Christianity, which for reasons I am not prepared to go into (just trust me here) is inseparable from its miracles and minor dogmas.

>>tfw you realize that the Christian concept of Grace in the face of suffering the only way to live a truly happy life

Nah there are tons of alternatives from secular and other religious thinkers.

>Does anyone else think that Christianity is psychologically useful even if it isn't metaphysically true?

Of course it is.

I'm willing to observe the dogmas and understand their social and historical value, but one's willingness to accept the supernatural claims isn't really a choice. Either you do, or you can't. And if you can't, getting rid of the tradition as a whole, with all of the beautiful rituals and the scores transcendent art, seems like a form of cultural suicide to me.

Belief is an active and not a passive state. How do you "believe" in the existence of others, how do you "believe" what happened yesterday? Everything even mildly abstract is unverifiable in a solipsistically phenomenological sense; we believe in our friends by interacting with them, we believe in history by recording and commemorating it, we believe in things only by actively participating in them.

So also with Christianity. The only way to believe is not to understand Christ, not to study Him, but to follow Him. The act comes first and the belief comes second. This is what Kierkegaard meant by a leap of faith.

Here's the thing, in order to subscribe to a particular way of thinking one needs the emotional side of their being to be on board. Your rational mind can want you to live your life by Epictetus' precepts, but eventually your emotional core will give in. What religion does is that it imparts a sense of huge historical and spiritual importance to its philosophy, therefore making it easier to fully devote yourself to it.

It's sort of like poetry. You're more likely to see the "truth" of a poem if it's beautiful enough to make you cry. And you're more likely to accept the "truth" of Christianity if you listen to Palestrina and see Pietà up close.

(cont.) By positing that some people are more or less disposed to faith by their biological circumstances you are veering dangerously close to the doctrine of predestination, which is a heresy for everyone except the most bottom-feeding Protestants.

>Christianity is inseparable from its miracles and minor dogmas
>Just trust me
Meta religion. You tell us to accept a claim about a faith out of faith

>not being cool ultra-rationalist teenager
>having an emotional side
>2017

How does one get grace?

My contention is that accepting Christianity despite one's inability to think that there's an afterlife is itself a commendable act of faith. I don't think that makes me a heretic, I think that makes me someone who strives to understand God

Find a brothel and ask for her number.

But while you seek understanding, why you do have to say to yourself "I decide to accept this whole system"? What does that give you?

They said she only accepts clients that have already been saved.

Damn dude they could tell you're a virgin over the phone, sad.

watch a Terrence Malick movie

They said my voice reeked of nothing.

I accept it because it's a story that I can't live without despite the fact that it doesn't accord with what I know to be logically true or physically possible.

>tfw you realize that Christianity is a Jewish scam designed to make the goyim suffer by constantly harboring unresolved philosophical questions about it

>a healthy understanding
>healthy

I have no idea why this word, when used in order to make certain views normative, disgusts me to no end.

But suppose you were to interact with the scriptures and, without believing any of the metaphysical claims, were to live life as if Christianity were true, I think it would be a sort of meaningful faith, more so than the one that would limit itself to an intellectual conception of belief.

Oy gevalt go back to /pol/ retard this is a Zionist board you white trash!

How do you love your enemies, Veeky Forums? I can't do it.

Nietzsche does give me much reason and motivation to practice gratitude which supercedes reason. Nietzsche is not a cold logician, but a poet. His work is of the religious order primarily, to my reading. He creates a mythos.

He's one poet. He can't possibly compete with the entire Christian canon in terms of import and ability to elicit awe.

the pain is redeemed by moments when you experience the divine

the hardest part is starting. once you start, they'll be so surprised that they'll usually turn around

God doesn't put you into bad situations, your parents did.

>but why did they...

Because of their parents. Follow the reasoning far enough, and it is Adam and that bitch with the apple. The Human Race is responsible for its plight, it is up to you how you deal with life. You can either tell God that he is responsible for something he told the dense motherfuckers before you not to do, fucking explicitly, or, you can accept life as a test of what kind of person you are, and be generally good to others, improve the situations and circumstances under you, etc etc.

Am I resentful towards God? Being as truthful as a faceless pile of text can be, I am not. I am happy we aren't automatons forced to believe in God, that we have free will to do what we want, within the limits of our bodies. Life is arbitrary, and good things happen to bad people. But the test of whether you are or are not a good and holy man is if you can withstand committing evil when great evils have befallen you.

>inb4 the choir arrives

Take a philosophy class in it, or something along those lines. You should only believe in it if you see it to be true.

I'm guessing you're in your early 20's? It's easy to hate Christianity because of the the ideological and physical holocausts it has spawned. But that is only true due to the fact that there is an intense amount of personal and interpersonal revelation within the metaphorical imagery, even in the most basic and widely known metaphors. You aren't morally bound to wholly accept the religion as a practice, but once you understand, truly, what Jesus is a metaphor for its difficult for the rest of the imagery to not flower in your mind. It's actually quite settling.

Well, people make mistakes. Really, Hitler did nothing wrong.

Excuse me but Veeky Forums is a Sharia Zone you filthy kuffars, please leave this area as you are neither proper dressed or worthy. Please stop destroying our community with your unfit ways, elhamdullelah.

That's what Jung is for, user. Jung (and Kierkegaard) turned me from a depressed atheist with a domination complex to a mentally healthy person who can whole-heartedly embrace Christianity as a truth, but not necessarily capital-T Truth. I would recommend familiarizing yourself with Jung first, because his system of self-actualization is completely compatible with Kierkegaard's wager while approaching it from a pragmatic psychological point of view. The human mind has an intrinsic affinity for Christian symbolism at this point in history, and simply engaging with it in earnest can open whole realms of your mind that would be closed off through any other method.

But Kierkegaard's concept of the leap of faith is what can really takes Christianity from a simple source of symbolism to a lived experience of the divine. Being able to have true faith in God and to experience that divinity within your daily life goes so far beyond simple psychological band-aids.

Where do I start with Jung?

I'm sorry but no. Veeky Forums is a thoroughly protestant board. Everyone is welcome regardless of belief and you can wear whatever you like. Grape-juice and crackers will be served at noon, enjoy your stay.

I'd first familiarize yourself with Freud a little, given that most of Jung's work was first confirming and later refuting Freud's work. The Portable Jung is the most comprehensive introduction to his work, and I would highly recommend it if you want to really engage with his work. Despite it ordinarily being a bad idea, wikipedia is actually a decent source for a brief overview of his theories, as there's an extensive amount of dedicated articles for many of his theories, and it would be a much shorter and easier read than the Portable Jung to start with.

I converted to Christianity in my early 20s. The combination of theological dilemmas, moral expectations, and guilt eventually broke me until I stopped caring at all and abandoned it. I wasted several years of my life, and the thought of worrying about theology again fills me with anxiety and dread.

Sounds like a problem with obsessiveness more than anything else. Failing to meet a religious moral expectation fills me with a minor sense of disappointment and a renewed interest in being a good person. I think that might be because I've never believed in hell, so I can just contextualize moral failings and move on.

This is great advice, although I would add that Memories, Dreams, Reflections could be one of his most accessible works (being an autobiograohy) but also spends most of its early content focused on the Christian mystery due to the fact that Jung experienced the divine directly and then had to watch his father and many others fake their way through a belief system they never had any evidence for.

Oh, the question of hell. That's a good one. Spent a lot of time worrying about that. Feeling sick already.

You realise that obsessive terror you were in WAS hell, right? As real as it gets.

Fucking phonies

Yes, I realize that now. Like I said, I don't care about it anymore. Whether there is a god, whether any of our religions our true, it is simply beyond my concern or ability at this point. But thinking too much about the things that used to bother me, that bothers me.

Devoting wholly to the maze of religious practices developed by Christian devotees over the millennia is counter to what the religion was spawned from. If I tell you that Jesus is a metaphor for yourself, it's easy to brush that off as 'Well, no shit". But when you really dig deep into the idea behind that statement, and understand the almost hive-mind-like inspiration it seeks to give, you can't help but smile to yourself. It's so simple, yet almost-alarmingly acute once you actually 'see' what it all is conveying, to You.

We're silly little monkeys, user.

You should look into a Blakean Christ or mystic/gnostic theism that reduces mere reason and theological dogma to "best guess," and so to human error.

Since Plato, men have talked about pure Truth, pure Love, pure Goodness, etc. And since Christ, we've talked about pure forgiveness and redemption, and a (non-hubristic) anthropic image of man as God, God as man, who came to Earth during a time when high rationalistic moral philosophy was being conducted by slave-owners in a massive slave empire. There's value in all that, beyond syllogism and beyond doctrinal quibbling. Belief comes from appreciation of things like that, not from logical ontological proofs.

My sympathy for any organized religion vanishes once it imposes arbitrary rules on its followers, and then defending said rules by saying it's "Gods word". I know there's nothing rational about faith, but trusting a divine being in such a way seems to me to be a symptom of knowing your mortal and needing to find meaning before this life is over.

I want to add that I respect anyones right to believe what they want, I just don't understand how anyone can have faith like that.