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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7606 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Why not seek truth instead of willingly undertaking a new life of added delusion?

This isn't the first time I've seen people here, atheists, "looking for a church". It boggles my mind.

What are you really looking for? If you look inside your heart and ask it?

It's probably something like freedom from anxiety, more connection, etc. I would start from there.

My understanding of my faith as an atheist who converted, is that seeking truth led me to Christ.

What I'm really looking for is love, forgiveness, and mercy. Christ provides that.

Interesting! What sort of truth did you find, and how do you define Christ?

Thanks for asking! It’s too long a story to get into now but the basics were listening to Peterson and John Vervaeke talk about how reality and truth can differ between “objective” reality versus “narrative” or “participatory” truths.

It’s a deep rabbit hole but long story short I went down it for a few years and ended up believing Christ was the Son of God, both in fact and in narrative.

Try turning this around, though. You’re pretty pro meditation and so I assume “seek truth” corresponds to enlightenment.

But try looking at it from another perspective: meditation means putting your mind into an incredibly unnatural state, hyperfocusing on the internal experience of that, heavily guided by ancient texts, and assuming that the result tells you anything meaningful about the state of the world.

I’m not trying to attack Buddhism here, I’m saying that there is no known way to seek truth that doesn’t also look a lot like seeking out delusion from the perspective of a nonbeliever. In practice Buddhism, like Christianity, is benefiting from a cultural belief that ‘it works’, backed up to some extent by statistic and anecdote. Unhappy people are willing to seek truth / consider delusion and accordingly partake in whichever of these traditions they feel most comfortable with.

It sounds like he trusted people in the 90s whom he no longer trusts, which was also part of why he dismissed Christianity. If the 'experts' were clearly wrong about other things societally, then why could they not also have been wrong about Christianity? Hence an increased openness.

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