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Ask HN: What book changed your life?

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Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#281

Post by prometheus76 »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #156
agumonkey wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I tried reading the bible, maybe some pages are to be skipped, I couldn't keep after 5 ... too many "don't have sex with your cousin's wife unless her father owned a goat" logic.

Yeah I'm also slightly confused by those comments. I tried reading it from start to end, and it wasn't that enjoyable. It was mostly lost listings of names about peoples grand grand parents... and things that didn't really fit what was say two sentences ago. Am I missing the "proper" way of reading it? But if there is, that would eventually just leave to cherry picking...

A lot of the difficulty in approaching the Bible is that we are unaware of just how much modernism and the Enlightenment affects our worldview, and the ancient world did not see the world that way. A good place to get an introduction to their worldview is Language of Creation by Mattieu Pageau or another book called The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser.

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#282

Post by prometheus76 »

voisin wrote: post #106
geocrasher wrote: post #95

First and foremost: The Bible. Not the watered down "everybody goes to heaven" theology that most people subscribe to, but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Secondarily, this book saved my life in the sense that it helped me understand my depression, a clinical depression so deep that my psychologist had never seen such a thing previously: Get Out of Y…

> but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Can you expand? Did you create this approach yourself or just read the Bible directly?

I would recommend getting the Ancient Faith Study Bible, which uses a very readable translation, and has extensive footnotes that consist of commentary on the Bible from the Early Church Fathers.

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#283

Post by User23 »

The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Going into detail would get too personal, but reading that book as a young man changed my understanding of our experience of being and my life took paths it otherwise never would have.

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#284

Post by eigenheart »

geocrasher wrote: post #95

First and foremost: The Bible. Not the watered down "everybody goes to heaven" theology that most people subscribe to, but rather an evidence based approach that uses the Bible to interpret itself as it was designed to do. Secondarily, this book saved my life in the sense that it helped me understand my depression, a clinical depression so deep that my psychologist had never seen such a thing previously: Get Out of Y…

Love there's a passionate discussion/touch point about the Bible on this site. For anyone interested, biblehub.com is a tremendous resource to help deep-dive themes, passages, words, etc...

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#285

Post by SantalBlush »

crashingintoyou wrote: post #48
s0teri0s wrote: post #11

Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" and the sequel "Enlightenment Now" briefly helped to restore my faith that humanity is not entirely an evil virus best gone the way of the dinosaurs. Don't get me wrong though, these books are not easy reads. In the first one Pinker does spend an inordinate amount of time cataloging humanity's centuries of evils against itself before he can make the case that we're doing…

Going to assume that your use of "briefly" there is preceding your attempt at a short synopsis, rather than that your views have shifted again. Personally I'm depressingly cynical when it comes to Pinker's views, looking at, e.g., https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1496685550241292293 and then thinking about how now, given modern weaponry one man's decision could basically destroy all life on earth. A few billion…

Please tell me the chart in that twitter thread adjusts for deaths per capita. It looks like it doesn't.

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#286

Post by izzygonzalez »

captn3m0 wrote: post #4

Previous threads: - 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147034 - 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6413600 - 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10914079 - 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17168136 - 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22011867 - 2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24361132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535…

Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#287

Post by wnolens »

damontal wrote: post #276
hypertexthero wrote: post #240

The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti, with a forward by Aldous Huxley. I read it while living in California, during a trying time after deciding to move far away from my parents, and it helped me see all of life in a calm new light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_and_Last_Freedom

I can never seem to get to the heart of what Krishnamurthi is trying to say. I just find myself getting lost in his words. I can’t tell if there’s no there there or if I’m just not understanding his angle.

I don't get that much out of him. He starts off sounding very profound, but then makes a statement that doesn't compute. And then his arrogance makes him unable to explain himself further (see youtube clips).

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#288

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

Alistair McLean's HMS Ulysses was probably the main reason I ended up in nautical school and getting an engineering degree while being trained to be a merchant ship's navigation officer. Although it was a WWII story, his description of life on ships crossing the North Sea in winter for some insane reason made me want to do it. The people I met, the places I went and the things I did during that period set the stage for the rest of my life in ways I really can't explain.

Re: Ask HN: What book changed your life?

#289

Post by armitron »

react_burger38 wrote: post #206

Quoted post unavailable.

> A core principle the Book of Mormon teaches is agency. You truly are free to choose the path of your life.

Which goes against everything we know about the brain based on the latest neuroscientific evidence that indicates free will is an illusion.

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