I finished The Kingdom of God is Within You, I really enjoyed it. The book aligned with many of my prior beliefs about Christianity and the Church, which was very validating. I appreciated the insight into the state of eighteenth century Russia, which I never want to visit. And lastly it made me deeply consider how much my current job makes me a party to violence. You’re right about it potentially making someone an anarchist.

Thank you again for mentioning it.

Weird, mine didn’t.

I thought you were talking about the Adam Sander movie Spaceman

That’d be why I’d sign up

Well the Chinese version on Prime doesn’t have any English subtitles so I guess it depends on if you can speak Mandarin

So can meditation, if you are good enough and go deep enough. I’ve heard stories of Buddhist monks that think LSD is weak stuff.

That’s a great way to see it, thanks for sharing.

That’s how I view different religions. Each one has one part of a big picture and a bunch of extra fluff. The trouble is that people tend to think that the extra fluff is just as important as the core message, and religions as a organizations encourage it.

The receptors for psychedelics aren’t there for no reason, heavy prayer and meditation can trigger similar effects. Substances are just a shortcut, that’s why religion don’t tend to like them. Personally I think that as long as it isn’t used as a crutch it’s totally fine to buy a day pass.

Never has been.

There is meaning in the endless toil, one can find peace in knowing that the boulder will never reach the top. Let go of expecting a reward for reaching the top, and appreciate the rewards in pushing the boulder.

Walking is the lazy option for me, getting into a car, driving, finding a spot, then parking just to walk to the place anyways is too much hassle

Religions are a single axiom and nothing else? Which ones?

If you reduce an entire religion down to a single axiom, then sure, they can be entirely contradictory.

But religions aren’t like that, they are each a thousand different beliefs, rituals, and directives. There are enough similarities in message to see a commonality between them.

Like you said, it’s all the same path to God, some paths are a bit more meandering than others, and some claim that there are no other paths.

You have to accept that religions can be wrong about some things to have the view that they’re all different paths to God.

Plus everyone should turn a critical eye to their own religion, every holy text and every doctrine has both wheat and chaff.

That Tolstoy book sounds interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

There are versions of the Bible where Big J’s words are written in red text, that’s what I would recommend to people so they focus on the part that matters (for Christians)