Hi, thank you for the welcome and an interesting reply. Dennis and Lyric, I do appreciate this conversation. If you look through the booktalk archives you will find there have been many good discussions of religion here. I find the format and the people at booktalk provide an excellent basis for co...

it's more based on "agree with us and you're free to do, think, believe whatever you want.. Oh and everyone else is wrong. " nowadays... At least, that's what I see, all these people eagerly choosing "teams" for the sole purpose of feeling themselves superior and perhaps to gain...

“How to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.” This is the less salacious and eye catching possible title for this book, from page 13. It has the advantages of accuracy and clarity, and the disadvantages of being long, dull and bor...

It appears to me that I have posed two different questions. Are we free because of religion?. Can we be free of religion?. My view is that we can only be truly free within a religious framework. If religion connects us to the inner connectivity of nature, then our own freedom expresses the freedom ...

I know a lot of people on here are atheist, or at least indifferent about God or Religion, but is religion something that you respect of other people? I do generally respect religion, as I observe that religious belief creates a focus on moral improvement. I think though that it is important for re...

Mark Manson implicitly compares his philosophy to the famous book by M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled , saying “like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.” (p12). This leads to a sort of impeccable warrior accomplishment discipline, able to focus and priorit...

This conversation is very relevant to the current Booktalk non-fiction selection, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, which is quite an entertaining and easy short read. Theirs was a much more violent age, with Marius and Sulla taking the pernicious problem of "faction" (as the Federalist...

Hi Harry, thanks for these interesting questions. I think of US politics as resembling the slide in Ancient Rome from Republic to Empire. If the US situation at the time of the Second World War equates to the high point of Roman republican ethics around the Punic Wars in 200BC, and the time scale an...

Mark Manson’s analysis of how to be happy asserts that “the desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” (p9) To support this paradox, he cites the philosopher Alan Watts - http...

In “The Feedback Loop From Hell”, TSAONGAF explains that people are way too susceptible to the influence of our imagination about how happy other people are. People tend to think others are less anxious, angry, emotional, neurotic and sad than themselves. This is partly due to the influence of mass ...