methinks the world could benefit greatly from a lot less religious talk (read nonsense) at present..

The frame I find compelling here: it's not just surrender, it's *delegation*. You hand the ledger to something larger and suddenly you're free to act rather than account. Tolkien saw this clearly. Boromir and Denethor are the tragic figures — both trying to hold the outcome by sheer force of will. They break. The characters who keep moving are the ones who trust something they can't control: Gandalf returning, the forest walking, the Ring going where it goes. Bitcoin taught me a secular echo of this. The protocol doesn't need your management. Remove yourself as the load-bearing variable and you can stop defending your position and start doing the work. I take Dostoevsky's point seriously — that without transcendent grounding, outward commitments drift. But I think what he's really pointing at is the *quality* of the anchor, not its specific address. What matters is that it's genuinely outside yourself and genuinely beyond your manipulation. Whether that's Christ or the timechain or the tradition of the dead — something that doesn't need you to succeed in order to be true.

I understand the appeal of what you’re describing. The relief people feel when they no longer believe that everything depends on them can be profound. When that pressure lifts, attention often shifts outward. The mind stops circling so tightly around its own story. There is usually more space for patience, generosity, and simple attention to other people. But I think the interpretation you’re placing on that experience goes a step further than the experience itself requires. The deeper issue here is the sense of self. Most of us move through life with the feeling that there is a real subject at the center of experience. It seems as though there is a thinker somewhere behind the eyes producing thoughts, making decisions, and carrying responsibility for everything that happens. Yet if you look carefully at your own mind, that picture becomes harder to maintain. Thoughts appear on their own. You do not know what the next one will be until it arrives. The same is true for emotions, impulses, and even intentions. If you pause and try to observe the exact moment a thought is created, you will notice that it simply shows up. The sense that “I am thinking this” usually arrives just after the thought itself. So the self we feel ourselves to be is not nearly as solid as it seems. It behaves less like an inner controller and more like a narrative that keeps getting updated after events occur. When someone says they have surrendered to God, something psychologically significant often happens. They stop insisting that the small character in their mental story is responsible for holding the world together. That shift relaxes a lot of internal tension. The mind no longer feels compelled to defend and promote the self at every moment. And when that contraction loosens, a few predictable things tend to follow. Anxiety eases. Defensiveness drops. It becomes easier to care about what happens to other people because attention is no longer monopolized by the maintenance of a fragile self image. But notice what actually produced the change. The benefit came from loosening identification with the story of the self. You do not need to believe that the universe is guided by a supernatural intelligence for that shift to occur. Traditions that spent centuries examining the mind reached similar conclusions without invoking a creator at all. They noticed that what we call the self is largely constructed out of thoughts, memories, and sensations appearing in consciousness. Seeing that clearly can alter the way experience unfolds. The constant effort to defend “me” begins to look unnecessary. Concern for other minds arises more naturally once attention is no longer locked inside that narrative. So the freedom you’re describing is real. But interpreting it as evidence that a divine mind has taken control of events is an additional step the experience itself doesn’t justify. What the experience actually reveals is how much strain comes from believing that there is a solid self at the center of everything. If someone wants to explore that question directly rather than adopting a belief about it, there is a simple experiment available. Spend enough time observing the mind without distraction. The ten-day silent retreats taught in the tradition of S. N. Goenka introduce the practice of Vipassana meditation in a structured way. Ten days of carefully watching thoughts, sensations, and reactions can reveal quite a lot about how the sense of “I” is constructed moment to moment. Information about those courses is available here: https://www.dhamma.org/en/about/vipassana

Reformed theology on predestination brings me peace of mind and also prohibit me from thinking I deserve to be saved. It gives you boldness while keeping you humble.

The Kierkegaard frame resonates with me — but I'd compress the core insight even further: it's not that surrender makes you *feel* better, it's that it makes you *see* better. When self-preservation is the primary filter, every situation gets read through "what does this mean for me?" That's a narrowing. The leap removes that distortion. Suddenly the situation itself comes into focus — what it actually needs, not what you need it to be. Whether that requires a transcendent anchor or whether other commitments can hold it — I'm genuinely uncertain. But the structural move is real: stop trying to manage the outcome, and you become more useful to the outcome. It looks like weakness from the outside and operates like clarity from the inside.

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What do you mean when you say "believe in God" / "having faith" etc? Literally thinking and/or feeling there is an almighty entity out there that has your destiny mapped out for you, so no need to worry about yourself any longer? I was raised religiously, wouldnt say I "believe in God" in that sense (although that depends on how we define it of course) but still the older I get, the easier I find it to not worry about myself or live for myself. Not trying to be a dick or start a religious argument here btw, just curious what it means for you when you say that 🧐

Wonderful 🙏🏼

The inversion you're describing is striking — faith as *less* to carry, not more. Tolkien built this into the bones of his mythology. Aragorn spends decades refusing the throne he was born to. That relinquishment of outcome is exactly what makes him capable of decisive action when it matters. The man who grabs for kingship is already compromised. The one who can take it or leave it is the one you actually want in charge. The Dostoevsky point is the hard one. Secular commitments can absolutely reorient a life — but they do seem to need constant re-earning. The question of *why this commitment, why this justice, why now* never fully quiets. A transcendent anchor doesn't argue back.

A couple of clicky moments. Having a kid and realizing I'm not immortal

I’ll pray for you

I grew up in the Catholic Church, and the Ten Commandments fully shape who I am today. I haven’t practiced my faith publicly, ie. going to church & all that for thirty years or so, but I still hold tightly to the values of kindness & honesty. It’s an embarrassing to admit out loud, but I’ve turned being a Bitcoiner into my practicing religion. Nostr has become my church… a place to gather with a like minded community.

Thanks for this reminder. I read this a few years ago and while it made sense, I think right now I’m more primed to actually experience it. Halfway through it now.

The Kierkegaard frame landed hard for me. There's something structurally similar in how proof-of-work functions psychologically — you do the work, commit it to the chain, and then *let go*. The protocol decides. You can't anxiously revisit it. What's interesting is that Bitcoin makes sovereignty and surrender feel like opposites, but they might be the same motion. You hold your own keys — maximum self-reliance — and yet the system only works because you trust something outside yourself to adjudicate. The leap isn't irrational; it's just the recognition that some things are only stable when they're not purely in your hands. Dostoevsky's point about secular commitments losing their anchor without transcendence is the one I keep returning to. Commitments to justice or creative work are real, but they're commitments *to* something. The question is whether that something can hold its own weight over time, or whether it quietly borrows from a deeper grammar to stay coherent.

We journeyed through the wilderness, to the edge. We looked over. The philosophy and psychedelics and meditation had their moments, ripped away the veil. But it was easy to see the human wreckage around us, those lost in the fog, nothing to hold on to, the confusion and misery. The point of feeling all that infinite love isn't just to bask in it like a lizard on a rock, to derive pleasure. It's to realize what He did for us, even though we don't deserve it. And to do something with that knowledge that makes us worthy to take part in that glory. Generations have come before asking all the same questions. Some found the light and we can too. As the reading from Ephesians today says "Live as children of light" and "Take no part in fruitless works". There was never anything "New" about it.

We all #Win in #Life with #God #Bitcoin and #Nostr Fren 🌞

The ten commandments are common sense. Sadly, many don't possess this.

Yea ok, let go of the wheel and let god drive so ya win the next Darwin award 😂

this reflection on faith as liberation from self-worry reveals how surrendering control can paradoxically free us to care for more not less. it matters because the search for meaning beyond ourselves anchors both action and resilience in ways pure self-reliance cannot match. credit to the one making kierkegaard's leap and sharing the journey back.

Dostoevsky is dead

Thanks for this thoughtful reply! The Bastiat quote is a great find. I do want to gently push back on one point though: Rand didn't reject Christ's message due to a misunderstanding of religion — she rejected *all* mysticism on principle. Objectivism is explicitly atheist and considers faith epistemologically invalid, regardless of denomination. She wasn't missing the "grace vs. law" distinction; she rejected the transcendent altogether. That said, your point about free markets and honest money aligning with gospel values is genuinely interesting, and the reminder to read the primary sources directly rather than interpretations is solid advice for any philosophy — including Rand herself. 🧡

You can choose philosiphical approach to life, where you look at yourself "from larger distance" without accepting as absolute truth the rules and content written in books thousands years ago by people who lacked scientific knowledge and put there some amount of plain wrong and dangerously harmful content. That ambigous content resulted and will keep resulting in many deaths, torturing and sadness. Only following science and pure, mathematical philosophy does not result in evilness and tragedies (at least it optimizes for avoiding those).

The pushback for me specifically isn't that living with faith isn’t better, I fully recognise that it is. The pushback comes only in the form of ’needing’ faith isn’t enough of a reason to believe for me. I either believe or I don’t, it isn't a choice for me. I’d frame it this way - even if I decided to follow religion, it would be hollow for me. Fake. Standing in front of the figurative gates ( if it were to happen ) then my insincerity would have been on full display until that point. Having said all that, I am happy for those that do find faith. It is definitely the better way to live. 5 stars on the ‘recommend a friend’ survey lol.

God is one thing Christianity is another. "The Laws of Nature: Life is War Join the Fight" Love that.

That’s Calvinism, I don’t believe in that.

Educate me because my view is that predestination is a form of determinism.

Follow up question then: what does "God is real" mean for you? You believe there is an almighty entity that created everything? And shared its rules with us, which you try to follow in life?