221–230 of 365 posts
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"How to win friends and influence people" contains so much self-repetition that it should be easily compressible to four pages, no doubt many people on the Internet have done that. Read one of those instead.
You can say the same for >95% of the "self-improvement" book market.
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It does when those books were purposely excluded because the author was female. It also matters a lot when one of the books excluded was written by the person who was actually closest to Jesus too. Thus her accounts should surely matter at least as much as the mens (probably more so in reality). The New Testament was collated in an era when organised religion was used as a tool for man to retain control. To that end,…
I do not think it matters whether a book is written by a man or woman, if the discussion is about worthwhile books to read. The bible is not just any other book though, and I understand why you'd have political, moral or religious ideas against anyone reading it. I do not think it was being recommended for any of those reasons though. Looked at as just a book, its very much worth reading regardless of what was edited…
My point was it doesn’t work either as a factual piece, as a piece of literacy nor even as a set of moral principles. It’s just not a good set of texts by any modern standards.
I decided to learn/understand why Religion is the center-stage for almost every event that happens to humanity. This year, I’m planning to read the books, at least, of the top 5 religions of the world. Read Bhagavad Gita[1], had read the Bible[2] in hotel stays but will read it again, and the Quran[3] is waiting in the book-shelf. No, not religious at all; in fact, very far from it. Some time back, someone did a nice…
As a non-religious myself, I can't understand how you found the willpower to read the Bible and even want to read it again. I tried reading some chapters and was either bored to death or couldn't understand the text because of how badly it is translated/written.
Mini-Habit by Stephen Guise. "A mini habit is basically a much smaller version of a new habit you want to form. 100 push-ups daily is minified into one push-up daily. Writing 3,000 words daily becomes writing 50 words daily. Thinking positively all the time becomes thinking two positive thoughts per day. Living an entrepreneurial lifestyle becomes thinking of two ideas per day (among other entrepreneurial things). Th…
This idea sounds like “tiny habits”, elaborated in the book by BJ Fogg? Have you read both? If so which would you recommend?
Everyone should read a platonic dialogue. Plato's Republic in particular due to its influence on western thought. Although some of the ideas may seem absurd from our modern point of view, it's still thought provoking and a good example of old school philosophy. Also, Plato casually outlines why our current system of government is doomed to fail...which is probably pretty important to understand.
I do agree more people should read a few early Platonic dialogues because he teaches you to question things. I think, beyond anything else, that is what he wanted to teach. A lot of people call themselves skeptics today, but they seem primarily interested in debunking ideas and attitudes other people have that they don't share, but don't see that there is a lot of things they themselves take for granted.
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I second the commenters that counter-argue that just because a book is hard, it does not make it a bad book. While it's hard to understand for the following reasons - It's not "a book" but a canon of dozens of books bound together, written by different people; - cultural distance: Middle East versus West; - temporal distance: authored approx. 2000 years ago; almost every book written afterwards refers to it explicitl…
> you will never understand the later works fully without having read some of the Bible Generations of kids have grown up understanding stories just fine without having read the Bible.
Beyond that, especially in English, the King James bible's phrasing of dozens if not hundreds of biblical passages are now common turns of phrase - where not knowing their origin reveals you as a uncultured.
Same as Aesop's or La Fontaine's fables, really -- you know it's fiction, you don't have to think it is a good story, you don't even have to agree with the morale -- but since everyone literate in the last two centuries is familiar with it, you will look out of place not knowing it.
Accelerando - Charles Stross (actually Glass House as well)
The New Testament, or any book that explains the key themes. Even if you are not religious, Western societies are built around this. If you live in the West or do business with the West, it explains many explicit or implicit cultural norms. If you want to go deeper in understanding the West, it's recommendable to also get a rough idea of it's philosophers, especially the Greeks and the important ones up to Kant, incl…
Maybe Cicero too, like De Officiis at least (although De Natura Deorum is a more enjoyable read imo). Cicero was a second rate philosopher and incredibly full of himself, but he was extremely influential for a very long time.