How to find God §10-16

An indefinite and possibly undefinable amount of easy to follow steps: 2

§10 Historical transmitted truth

There is a living record, a direct line of generationally transmitted Truth, but, in the case that there was not - if in some thought experiment of a man in a perfect historical vacuum, or even if the record was lost, it would be entirely possible to reinvent it using only mans capacity for reason and intuition. IF there was no record and Tradition was lost, it could be recreated through pure logic and intuition.

All of Tradition/God/Truth is contained within each human heart, like the entire genetic structure of your body is contained within each cell.

If every holy book and every written record was destroyed and wiped from human memory, any one single man could rewrite all of it the next morning (§6).

But luckily for us we don’t need to do all that, because there is a written record, that we can read humbly and carefully, and trying to understand what they mean when they say “God” (§2).

§11 Prayer is not “asking for gifts”, it is “offering yourself”

§12 Forgiveness of trespasses against you is a literal miracle that breaks the laws of physics

Laws of physics are derivative of a rational worldview, it treats “the world” as a rational, logical machine, and a closed loop. In this, the notion of forgiveness is nonsensical: A man trespasses against you, that is, he does, or intends you, harm. In a closed material loop, in a logically optimising evolutionary survival based world view, you either a) overpower him and prevent it from happening again by some kind of force or b) deem that he is no threat to you. Every other possibility is irrational, sub-optimal, and not logically optimising for survival.

§13 Atheism is not something you have reasoned yourself into and it is not something you will reason yourself out of

Atheism is a “lack of belief” in God. A “lack”. It is keenly felt exactly as this, a separation, not a choice. It is felt as a lacking, like something is missing. You can be stoic about it and pretend to be an atheistic absurdist existentialist, or you can be a grown up.

This text is written as a How To guide, and not as an argument or a proof, for an explicit reason. “God Proofs” are missing the point, and are at best, art. Curiosities. A little cool thing to look at and enjoy. Proving the existence of God is to call it into question, due to the nature of language.

““Believing in God” is a protestant heresy” (quoting from memory, twitter.com/LandsharkRides)

Atheism is not a lack of will-towards-God. If anything, today many desire and thirst for God, but simply, don’t know how to believe (§3).

Much like a weak fat person doesn’t know how to identify the straining of his muscles that calls out to be used, and his digestion that calls out for rest, and identifies both as simply “pain”, so too are you blind to how to believe. in the same way that the weak fat person doesn’t know how to perform a certain hip exercise, that will relieve his “pain” and strengthen his muscles for the future, so too do you not know how to believe.

There is a lot of talk today about people “turning things [they like or do] into a religion”. This is almost always a mistaken analysis. Political beliefs and so on are not a “new religion” for certain people. it is, specifically, a pseudo-religion; an attempt by someone who doesn’t know how to lift weights, to build a gym from scratch. It is a shallow pastiche, that is created exactly as an outlet for the desire to believe, and it is a rambling mess, exactly because they don’t know how to believe.

§14 Lift Weights

(see §11)

§15 We Only Ever Touch By The Fingertips

The new testament is parables because direct communication is impossible, and the only way genuine communication between hearts is possible in this world, is indirectly. Parables are indirect communication. Whenever we Touch, we Only Ever Touch By The Fingertips.

§16 Indirect communication, transcendence, and psychological apologia

If you try to make sense of it all and think something like:

“well maybe what if it’s a sort of, you know, comparative religion thing, where religion is some kind of spontaneously appearing function of human psychology, and we can read the Bible as a sort of metaphor for all the inner workings of the mind, and it’s all really a sort of layered metaphor for a theory-of-mind, a psychology, that has been intuited and then gradually accumulated and changed bit by bit over thousands of years, reinterpreted and rewritten as a sort of communal literary project, that says something about the human experience, or psychology, or something. what if it’s all not LITERALLY true, but it’s “true” true, you know, wink wink, like, it’s morally true or efficient or good rules to live by or something”

imagine that this is the case, but then also that it’s also literally true.

That little “woosh” in your body, when you imagine a world where both are true, that’s what it feels like. (§13)

The perfect metaphor works both ways.