MARCH BOOKCLUB TITLE WINNER!! Good afternoon !bookworms !verifiedhot 
I hope you are all having a great week so far, I've been working literally nonstop 
so I'm really excited to have a new book to read in my downtime! 
I'm hesitant to declare The Gambler as the winner bc most of the votes were clearly by the g**mblers 
and not by bookclub members 
, so what I'm going to do is veto The Gambler, move forward w/ the runner-ups, and let y'all choose between them in one final voting thread 
Sorry to do this 
, I just somehow highly doubt that our resident (!)slots addicts are actually going to fricking read it or participate in analysis threads 
, so I don't want y'all to have to suffer through a book you didn't vote for yourselves. 
You have a period of 12 hours to vote and then I'll post the winner when I get off work tonight! 
final poll 
wildcard: 
ily have a great day <3 i pinged verifiedhot bc literacy is sexy!
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If you don't mind me asking, what exactly soured you from Christianity? I think it is extremely common for everyone growing up in the west to go through that “Richard Dawkins Atheist” phase so I think it's normal to end up as that standard irreligious person in your early 20s. To briefly blogpost, I went through that atheist phase, then graduated and “felt” empty. Went through a “spiritual” phase where I'd read a bunch of philosophy and “woo woo” spirituality shit, did tons of drugs (oooo ego death) etc etc, typical bs. But it never amounted to anything satisfying, it always felt shallow. Blah blah, got into a LTR, literally ready to make babies and propose, and it fell apart so fricking quickly right before proposal. Guy selling me drugs told me to read the book of John and told me the relationship failed because we didn't have God in it. Started reading the Bible, read some Daoist books (Zhuangzhi), picked up Fear and Trembling and certain things felt self evident for me: I need faith (this is Kierkegaard's point through his philosophy) and all the reading I have done (read tons of philosophy, from the basics like Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, to the more obscure like Land and Evola) didn't give me a solution…I could not rationalize myself to faith. Ultimately, I read “The Orthodox Way” by Kallisto Ware and it solved all my issues with faith. Orthodox Christianity doesn't believe in rationalizing faith…it's all a Mystery and that's it. That particular book (and Orthodoxy in general) felt like a summation of everything I have read and yeah, here I am. I close my blogpost with the story of the prodigal son…tl;dr God loves you and is waiting for you to come back, He won't judge you negatively, he will embrace you with tears:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+15%3A11-32&version=NKJV
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I was gonna ask you what going to church is so giving but after reading all that I'm convinced you're just mentally ill.
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totally fine, i'm not super sure but aside from exactly what you're saying ab the woowoo philosophy and skepticism shit, what drew me away from religion was prob the sort of doomer leftist mindset every edgy teen takes on when they don't want to see the world burn and feel helpless w/ all the awful shit going on in the world, which naturally leads to an abandoning of faith/hope that a being who has all of this control (omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, the other trait i'm forgetting rn bc i have not slept in 48 hours lol) could allow all of that shit to happen. i also was susceptible as a child to a lot of the more negative aspects of life in the church (idk things like seeing those big neochurches take over and capitalize on something that is supposed to be sacred, members of the church being openly homophobic/hateful or otherwise constantly going against God's word, etc), and I've always been rly skeptical/a contrarian so i'm sure a lot of it was just natural rebellion as well! ultimately as you say i was trying to rationalize something that cannot be rationalized, which is still kinda difficult for me but i'm slowly reconciling it!
naturally i grew out of leftism (mostly)
and eventually started to find value/healing/hope in believing in literally anything as life has not been amazing for the past year or so, based largely off of what I grew up believing about God. from there, philosophy of religion exposed me to some of the more compelling arguments for/against God's existence and I took an interest in it, which helped me with my faith. i completely resonate w/ the arguments for the necessity of faith and also agree most w/ the "leave it alone, it's supposed to be a mystery, understanding God's plan/work/character/etc detracts from his purpose/meaning). i'm def not perfect but i'm trying lol. i hope all of this makes sense, i'm so deliriously tired. that last line made me cry bc i'm a 
and am doing my very best rn to carry on and live w/in my own values and such hahahahaaaa... partying and drugs and alcohol and self-destructive behavior in general are all things i'm working on stopping in part through faith (if i can) so thank you sincerely, i prob really needed to hear that rn lol! 
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Sorry ma'am, looks like his delusions have gotten worse. We'll have to admit him.
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