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I lost my religion.

I was once a very religious, evangelical Christian and now I'm not.

One night, a while ago, I found myself in a very placid lucid dream, it wasn't one of those lucid dreams where you are having sex and fighting with lightsabers, I was just in a dark room lounging on some bean bags, talking with a red-haired woman. I had conducted the digital text test so I knew I was dreaming and I asked her a difficult question:

I was once very religious with strong faith. Now I am not. When I was religious I always believed that non-religious people, while claiming intellectual reasons for their atheism were just using it as an excuse for their hedonistic activities. Now I carry on a fairly hedonistic existence and I'm not religious. Am I intellectually justified or am I just avoiding my maker because my moral standards are a shadow of what they used to be?

Tough question right? And a question that could only be answered by oneself.

The character in my lucid dream responded that I was indeed bullshitting myself; that I was a non-believer of convenience, not conviction. That I was not intellectually justified.

This book is less anti-religious than you might guess from its title. Its author is one of the most hated philosophers and current public intellectuals because of his politically incorrect criticisms of religion. This is interesting to me because he's the most polite politically incorrect person I can think of - really the polar opposite of the kind of rude anti-religious rants you hear from comedians and shock jock podcasters - yet he inspires vitriolic hate across the Internet. You can go look him up on YouTube and watch his videos and he comes across as just the most docile, sober, soft-spoken critic of religion.So this book is not like 250 pages just beating up on religion. It's really about meditation practice which is the solution to spirituality without religion. I suspect many religious people could read this book and will be better religious people for it.

On the other side of the spectrum, some strictly atheistic people may not even consider reading a book like this with the word spiritual in its title. However, I'll give them a more precise definition of spiritual to consider:

Seeking to understand our minds, the nature of self, and our relation to the world more deeply by way of reaching for extraordinary states of consciousness.