Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Leaderboard

Popular Content

Showing content with the highest reputation on 01/02/19 in Posts

  1. I used to believe in God, and study the Bible, when I was very young. I don't look at it as "lost time" at all. In fact, those were some of the most intellectually productive years of my life. I didn't just read the Bible, I also read Dostoevsky and several other Christian authors, but it was all connected to my faith, and it was all very much productive and worthwhile. I highly recommend crazy ol' Fyodor. Every single thing he ever wrote is genius. Insane (or maybe just insanely pessimistic) on some level, but he cuts to the essence of things on every other level. So does Nietzsche (who is very much Christian, and a fundamentalist at that, in his critique of the Church, though he's nowhere near as sophisticated as Dostoevsky). So does most of the Bible, as do some other religious texts. There's a lot you can learn from religion, when you're really young. You can even learn some stuff from it when you're old. The main things wrong about the Bible are the (occasional) altruism and the supernatural God part. Most of everything else makes quite a bit of sense, and is well worth studying. When you study the Bible, you're studying thousands upon thousands of years worth of human experience. And even the supernatural God part can just be interpreted as a metaphor for reality, and you're fine (well, it's more complex than that, it involves the context of knowledge people had before science was a thing, but there's no reason to get into that here). Thing is, this is all off topic. The thread is about the loss of a literal God. There's no loss there, because there's no literal God.
    1 point
  2. That sounds like your social anxiety, not anything caused by other people's shortcomings. That's one of many things a therapist will likely point out to you: it's not other people's job to alleviate your stress, it's your job to function in stressful situations. Everybody feels anxiety, and it's perfectly normal. Anxiety is only bad if you let it paralyze you. If you are able to act despite feeling anxiety, it can actually help you (it can make you more focused than if you were entirely relaxed and comfortable with a given situation). Obviously, there are degrees, and everyone needs to figure out what their threshold is for tolerating stress, but, in my opinion at least, a stress free life (never facing situations that make you anxious) is even worse than too much stress. You can always dial it back, if it gets too much. Getting into a habit of always seeking psychological comfort, on the other hand, is passive, isolating, and hard to snap out of. So it's better to push yourself, find out what your limit is, and then stay within your limits, than to shut yourself away from the world.
    1 point
×
×
  • Create New...