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This answer might upset some people, but it’s really about balance. Spiritual healing is something many intelligent people quietly need. Too often, “intellectua

This answer might upset some people, but it’s really about balance. Spiritual healing is something many intelligent people quietly need. Too often, “intellectuals” dismiss the Bible outright. Relying on arguments they half-remember from TikTok or high-school debates instead of actually reading it and forming their own conclusion, like they would with any other subject. I’m just a developer, but I think intelligence can become its own trap. Pride in being clever can cloud judgment. We feel smart for rejecting faith. And in today’s culture, it’s often safer to follow intellectual trends than to walk an independent path.

kstrauser 1y ago
I tend to agree, although I wouldn't limit it to one religious tradition, or even to religion at all. For example, mindfulness meditation doesn't require any spiritual believe whatsoever. (In before: "But isn't that Buddhist?" Reply: "Who invented it is irrelevant. The practice itself is areligious, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise for yourself.") I find that being mindful of the world around me, and wishing well for the people around me, and even people I dislike and am predisposed to not wishing well upon, makes me a happier person. I think we all need that, or something like it: a reminder that the world is larger than ourselves, and that we're just one part of the whole, whether that be our relationship to the god of our belief system, or to our secular existence on a living planet in a tiny corner of an immense universe. That stuff's good for us. I'm convinced of it.
- wahern 1y ago
  > mindfulness meditation I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt. Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Which is why Buddhism has its very strong institutions, at least in Asia. Unfortunately, modern Western culture disdains institutional religion, understanding it only in caricature.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    That's probably all true, but it's the complaint I hear from people where I grew up in the Midwest when talking about meditation. "I can't do that, I'm a Christian" is an all too common refrain, as though it were inherently not Christian (or pro- or anti- anything else). And yes, in this specific case, if you attended a Zen Buddhist temple, you'd probably get a lot of assistance meditating, if requested. That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church.
    - wahern 1y ago
      > That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church. Institutional religion lets dedicated people practice full-time. It's why in Asia there's the culture of donating food and money to monks--the whole community supports those who dedicate their life to preserving, developing, and practicing these methods. Religion in America is more free market religion--much more dependent on big donors and the small subset of very dedicated lay practitioners. There's no appreciation for the wider benefit provided by religious to the community. In theory even atheists could appreciate the benefit. There are arguments for why this is a better system on-the-whole, but there's a loss nonetheless. Religion is literally the only area where community systematically supports people who have zero profit interest or motive in practices like mindfulness, charity, etc. For all the corruption and self-serving one sees in institutional religion, whether Buddhist, Christian, etc, it's even greater in the "non-profit" secular charity space. (I'm in SF where the city shells out hundreds of millions to organizations that do social work, and where we blew past the point reasonably diminishing returns hundreds of millions ago.) Secular charity just doesn't scale without having to pay salaries and wages; compare Buddhist or Christian religious, who usually take vows of poverty. It's like the debate about public funding of open source. It's very difficult to do systematically without inviting alot of corruption and freeloading. The interesting thing about religious charity is that the primary motives of the religious are separate from the social/charitable benefit. Institutional religious communities, especially those with vows of poverty, self-select in ways secular institutions haven't figured out how to do, yet. Communists and anarchists never figured it out; if they had capitalism probably wouldn't be as dominate as it is today. And it's why people like Richard Stallman standout--though an atheist, he's committed to Free Software in the same way monks are committed to their religious dogma, and while Stallman is hardly infallible, it lends tremendous credibility to his arguments, and he serves as a personal model regarding his commitment to the cause. I think separation of religion and state is a good thing and benefits all parties, but Western culture went beyond that into denigration of religion. Oddly we do provide public support to artists, whom are often similarly dedicated and self-selected, though we justify this by exaggerating the social benefit of pure art.
- kaicianflone 1y ago
  I completely agree. Mindfulness and goodwill are good for the soul. They quiet the noise and help us see ourselves more clearly. I practiced meditation for years (and I still do but with my rosary this time), and it helped me observe my thoughts, but it never really healed them. That’s where Christianity felt different. Most spiritualities try to empty the mind of what’s toxic, but Jesus calls us to bring our darkness into His light. When we try to cast things out on our own, they return stronger. Like the demon who brings seven more, or the widow who denies her grief only to carry it for decades. Mindfulness helps us watch the storm. Christ walks into it with us. One teaches peace through avoidance. The other offers redemption through surrender. That’s the difference that changed my life.
chermi 1y ago
Way to set up a false dichotomy. I agree with the "cleverness" and the pride people take in not being religious, it's silly. But there are many forms of religion/spirituality. At the end of the day, you're just pushing the Bible here, which isn't very admirable. Maybe instead you could encourage people to explore spirituality instead of a specific religion that you probably follow only because of where you were born. At least you didn't say we're going to hell if we don't, I guess.
- kaicianflone 1y ago
  I hear you and I’m not trying to push a cultural version of Christianity. What I’m saying is that Jesus wasn’t just another spiritual teacher. He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies written centuries before His birth, and instead of conquering through power, He conquered through sacrifice. That’s what makes His message different and why His story has endured when so many philosophies fade. Not all spirituality leads to peace. We live in an age where “spirituality” often means yoga, breathwork, or Stoic quotes. Things that calm the body but rarely heal the soul. Marcus Aurelius was wise, but even he couldn’t save himself from despair. I think many of us, myself included, have resisted Christianity because of how poorly it’s been represented. But the real Christ isn’t a tool of culture or control. He’s the God who stepped down, fulfilled His own Word, and died in our place. That’s not pride. That’s mercy.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - chermi 1y ago
    Uhhh. Ok. You lost me. Now you're just proselytizing. Have you truly not considered that people don't believe in Christianity because they don't think there's sufficient evidence for the miracles or prophecy fulfillment? That they find the bible full of contradictions and easily falsified claims? I have to doubt you ever weren't a believer the way you're speaking, or else it's really messed with your head that much. Either way, you're not convincing me, in case you wanted a sign.
    - 1y ago
asah 1y ago
lol, the majority of the world isn't remotely Christian...
- kaicianflone 1y ago
  Sure - How clever of you. It’s also the world’s largest religion by far. That alone says something about how deeply the message of Jesus resonates across cultures and centuries. Billions of people have found truth, hope, and transformation in Him. Not because they were born into it, but because the story holds up when you actually look into it.
  - hn_acc1 1y ago
    There are those of us who were raised to believe all that and truly believed it for years, and then, when we actually looked into it deeper, it all fell apart and became impossible to continue to believe.
    - kaicianflone 1y ago
      What do you mean?
  - lisdexan 1y ago
    Religion is not my jam, but isn't it a little... crass to talk about your deity like that? The evangelical industrial-scale proselytizing always seemed kinda disrespectful to the whole "finding truth, hope, and transformation in Him", like god-almighty needed a used car salesman to connect with people. Plus, it's not the best moment to make this point considering that Mohamed is probably going overtake Jesus on the race in the next decade. I know, conversions are cooler than births, but the reality is the same (also conversions in LATAM are just raiding the Catholics for followers).
    - kaicianflone 1y ago
      I get that. I’ve felt the same cringe at times. The sense that faith is being sold instead of shared. The irony is that the heart of Christianity doesn’t need promotion. It’s supposed to be recognized in how people live, not in how loudly they talk. For me, following Jesus has nothing to do with market share or population stats. If every chart in the world dropped tomorrow, He’d still be who He is. Faith isn’t about the numbers (Christianity has waxed and waned for centuries). It’s about the truth of one life, one death, and one resurrection that keeps changing hearts in every century. The Church has made mistakes in how it presents Him, but the reality behind it, the Person Himself, doesn’t need a salesman. He just keeps finding people, quietly, the way He always has. PS - Conversions in Latin America were deeply shaped by how God met people in their own culture and symbols. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil are perfect examples. Moments when faith didn’t arrive through conquest like most believe, but through divine encounter.
int_19h 1y ago
You know, I am jealous of religious people sometimes precisely because they can believe in things that give them something to pin their hopes on in situation where there really isn't any hope, and even more so, to give them some higher meaning in life that is universally applicable. But it's not about pride. This trick only works if you deliberately exclude at least some premises from rational scrutiny, which is basically what religious upbringing does. But if you grow up irreligious and learn to ponder everything, it just doesn't work out because the holes are so glaring. Besides, if at least there were one religion to choose from, then I could see making a form of Pascal's Wager on that, but as it is, there's simply no obvious reason to me as to why I should prefer Christianity to, say, Islam - or, for that matter, something like Asatru. True belief requires a certainty that anything contradictory to it is automatically false, but if I were to accept the premises necessary to even consider Christianity, then by those same premises those other religions are no longer obviously false.
- kaicianflone 1y ago
  I actually appreciate how clearly you put that. The honesty in what you said is exactly where most people’s quiet struggle lives. You’re right that faith doesn’t begin with airtight logic. It begins when reason finally runs out of things that can satisfy the soul. The point of Christianity isn’t to switch off rational scrutiny. It’s to realize that reason itself points beyond its own edges. The disciples didn’t follow Jesus because they stopped thinking. They followed because they met a Person who made sense of what their thinking never could. As for “why this faith and not another,” for me it wasn’t about comparing systems. It was that every story in Scripture, from Genesis to the cross, keeps tracing one pattern: God coming toward humanity, not demanding that we climb up to Him. Every other belief I studied started with what we must do. This one begins with what He already did. I don’t expect that to “prove” anything to you, but maybe it’s something to sit with and find Faith in. The story of Jesus resonates with billions of followers, more than other religions, not because it’s the best or default religion.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Let's be honest: most people follow a specific religion simply because it is the predominant one in their society, and what they were taught to believe in and not question since childhood.

kstrauser 1y ago

I tend to agree, although I wouldn't limit it to one religious tradition, or even to religion at all. For example, mindfulness meditation doesn't require any spiritual believe whatsoever. (In before: "But isn't that Buddhist?" Reply: "Who invented it is irrelevant. The practice itself is areligious, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise for yourself.") I find that being mindful of the world around me, and wishing well for the people around me, and even people I dislike and am predisposed to not wishing well upon, makes me a happier person. I think we all need that, or something like it: a reminder that the world is larger than ourselves, and that we're just one part of the whole, whether that be our relationship to the god of our belief system, or to our secular existence on a living planet in a tiny corner of an immense universe. That stuff's good for us. I'm convinced of it.

wahern 1y ago
> mindfulness meditation I doubt mindfulness meditation started with Buddhism. For one thing, it also figures heavily into Christian practice, especially of Christian religious--priests, nuns, monks, etc. Though, curiously, Christian asceticism arose adjacent to a community of diaspora Jain or Buddhist Indians near Alexandria, Egypt. Institutional religion provides structure to help people pursue these practices. Which is why Buddhism has its very strong institutions, at least in Asia. Unfortunately, modern Western culture disdains institutional religion, understanding it only in caricature.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  That's probably all true, but it's the complaint I hear from people where I grew up in the Midwest when talking about meditation. "I can't do that, I'm a Christian" is an all too common refrain, as though it were inherently not Christian (or pro- or anti- anything else). And yes, in this specific case, if you attended a Zen Buddhist temple, you'd probably get a lot of assistance meditating, if requested. That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church.
  - wahern 1y ago
    > That's far from the only way to get that framework. By analogy, you can pray without attending church. Institutional religion lets dedicated people practice full-time. It's why in Asia there's the culture of donating food and money to monks--the whole community supports those who dedicate their life to preserving, developing, and practicing these methods. Religion in America is more free market religion--much more dependent on big donors and the small subset of very dedicated lay practitioners. There's no appreciation for the wider benefit provided by religious to the community. In theory even atheists could appreciate the benefit. There are arguments for why this is a better system on-the-whole, but there's a loss nonetheless. Religion is literally the only area where community systematically supports people who have zero profit interest or motive in practices like mindfulness, charity, etc. For all the corruption and self-serving one sees in institutional religion, whether Buddhist, Christian, etc, it's even greater in the "non-profit" secular charity space. (I'm in SF where the city shells out hundreds of millions to organizations that do social work, and where we blew past the point reasonably diminishing returns hundreds of millions ago.) Secular charity just doesn't scale without having to pay salaries and wages; compare Buddhist or Christian religious, who usually take vows of poverty. It's like the debate about public funding of open source. It's very difficult to do systematically without inviting alot of corruption and freeloading. The interesting thing about religious charity is that the primary motives of the religious are separate from the social/charitable benefit. Institutional religious communities, especially those with vows of poverty, self-select in ways secular institutions haven't figured out how to do, yet. Communists and anarchists never figured it out; if they had capitalism probably wouldn't be as dominate as it is today. And it's why people like Richard Stallman standout--though an atheist, he's committed to Free Software in the same way monks are committed to their religious dogma, and while Stallman is hardly infallible, it lends tremendous credibility to his arguments, and he serves as a personal model regarding his commitment to the cause. I think separation of religion and state is a good thing and benefits all parties, but Western culture went beyond that into denigration of religion. Oddly we do provide public support to artists, whom are often similarly dedicated and self-selected, though we justify this by exaggerating the social benefit of pure art.
kaicianflone 1y ago
I completely agree. Mindfulness and goodwill are good for the soul. They quiet the noise and help us see ourselves more clearly. I practiced meditation for years (and I still do but with my rosary this time), and it helped me observe my thoughts, but it never really healed them. That’s where Christianity felt different. Most spiritualities try to empty the mind of what’s toxic, but Jesus calls us to bring our darkness into His light. When we try to cast things out on our own, they return stronger. Like the demon who brings seven more, or the widow who denies her grief only to carry it for decades. Mindfulness helps us watch the storm. Christ walks into it with us. One teaches peace through avoidance. The other offers redemption through surrender. That’s the difference that changed my life.

chermi 1y ago

Way to set up a false dichotomy. I agree with the "cleverness" and the pride people take in not being religious, it's silly. But there are many forms of religion/spirituality. At the end of the day, you're just pushing the Bible here, which isn't very admirable. Maybe instead you could encourage people to explore spirituality instead of a specific religion that you probably follow only because of where you were born. At least you didn't say we're going to hell if we don't, I guess.

kaicianflone 1y ago
I hear you and I’m not trying to push a cultural version of Christianity. What I’m saying is that Jesus wasn’t just another spiritual teacher. He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies written centuries before His birth, and instead of conquering through power, He conquered through sacrifice. That’s what makes His message different and why His story has endured when so many philosophies fade. Not all spirituality leads to peace. We live in an age where “spirituality” often means yoga, breathwork, or Stoic quotes. Things that calm the body but rarely heal the soul. Marcus Aurelius was wise, but even he couldn’t save himself from despair. I think many of us, myself included, have resisted Christianity because of how poorly it’s been represented. But the real Christ isn’t a tool of culture or control. He’s the God who stepped down, fulfilled His own Word, and died in our place. That’s not pride. That’s mercy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- chermi 1y ago
  Uhhh. Ok. You lost me. Now you're just proselytizing. Have you truly not considered that people don't believe in Christianity because they don't think there's sufficient evidence for the miracles or prophecy fulfillment? That they find the bible full of contradictions and easily falsified claims? I have to doubt you ever weren't a believer the way you're speaking, or else it's really messed with your head that much. Either way, you're not convincing me, in case you wanted a sign.
  - 1y ago

asah 1y ago

lol, the majority of the world isn't remotely Christian...

kaicianflone 1y ago
Sure - How clever of you. It’s also the world’s largest religion by far. That alone says something about how deeply the message of Jesus resonates across cultures and centuries. Billions of people have found truth, hope, and transformation in Him. Not because they were born into it, but because the story holds up when you actually look into it.
- hn_acc1 1y ago
  There are those of us who were raised to believe all that and truly believed it for years, and then, when we actually looked into it deeper, it all fell apart and became impossible to continue to believe.
  - kaicianflone 1y ago
    What do you mean?
- lisdexan 1y ago
  Religion is not my jam, but isn't it a little... crass to talk about your deity like that? The evangelical industrial-scale proselytizing always seemed kinda disrespectful to the whole "finding truth, hope, and transformation in Him", like god-almighty needed a used car salesman to connect with people. Plus, it's not the best moment to make this point considering that Mohamed is probably going overtake Jesus on the race in the next decade. I know, conversions are cooler than births, but the reality is the same (also conversions in LATAM are just raiding the Catholics for followers).
  - kaicianflone 1y ago
    I get that. I’ve felt the same cringe at times. The sense that faith is being sold instead of shared. The irony is that the heart of Christianity doesn’t need promotion. It’s supposed to be recognized in how people live, not in how loudly they talk. For me, following Jesus has nothing to do with market share or population stats. If every chart in the world dropped tomorrow, He’d still be who He is. Faith isn’t about the numbers (Christianity has waxed and waned for centuries). It’s about the truth of one life, one death, and one resurrection that keeps changing hearts in every century. The Church has made mistakes in how it presents Him, but the reality behind it, the Person Himself, doesn’t need a salesman. He just keeps finding people, quietly, the way He always has. PS - Conversions in Latin America were deeply shaped by how God met people in their own culture and symbols. Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Our Lady of Aparecida in Brazil are perfect examples. Moments when faith didn’t arrive through conquest like most believe, but through divine encounter.

int_19h 1y ago

You know, I am jealous of religious people sometimes precisely because they can believe in things that give them something to pin their hopes on in situation where there really isn't any hope, and even more so, to give them some higher meaning in life that is universally applicable. But it's not about pride. This trick only works if you deliberately exclude at least some premises from rational scrutiny, which is basically what religious upbringing does. But if you grow up irreligious and learn to ponder everything, it just doesn't work out because the holes are so glaring. Besides, if at least there were one religion to choose from, then I could see making a form of Pascal's Wager on that, but as it is, there's simply no obvious reason to me as to why I should prefer Christianity to, say, Islam - or, for that matter, something like Asatru. True belief requires a certainty that anything contradictory to it is automatically false, but if I were to accept the premises necessary to even consider Christianity, then by those same premises those other religions are no longer obviously false.

kaicianflone 1y ago
I actually appreciate how clearly you put that. The honesty in what you said is exactly where most people’s quiet struggle lives. You’re right that faith doesn’t begin with airtight logic. It begins when reason finally runs out of things that can satisfy the soul. The point of Christianity isn’t to switch off rational scrutiny. It’s to realize that reason itself points beyond its own edges. The disciples didn’t follow Jesus because they stopped thinking. They followed because they met a Person who made sense of what their thinking never could. As for “why this faith and not another,” for me it wasn’t about comparing systems. It was that every story in Scripture, from Genesis to the cross, keeps tracing one pattern: God coming toward humanity, not demanding that we climb up to Him. Every other belief I studied started with what we must do. This one begins with what He already did. I don’t expect that to “prove” anything to you, but maybe it’s something to sit with and find Faith in. The story of Jesus resonates with billions of followers, more than other religions, not because it’s the best or default religion.
- int_19h 1y ago
  Let's be honest: most people follow a specific religion simply because it is the predominant one in their society, and what they were taught to believe in and not question since childhood.