There is no peace and happiness in this world, it is a valley of tears. There is no perfection or anything that is complete, sometimes you can get close to these things, but it never comes, as if it were an asymptote. To seek happiness in prestige, fame or money is to make a hole in the water, because one day you will die and all this will remain there on earth, that is, it was all vanity. Even something like history is vanity, because one day it will end, the human species will cease to exist.

In my view, we as human beings, essentially seek two things: to be perennial and satisfaction. With these two things in mind, the only search that makes sense is that of religion, there is no other. But you asked a good question about which of the countless gods to serve, I can give you a general outline and suggest that you read some authors.

Frithjof Schuon and René Guénon note brilliantly that all religions start from the same basic metaphysics. It is clear that the symbols and archetypes of pagan myths are the same and they all condense and articulate in the person of Jesus Christ. These symbols were not in vain, they were not nonsense. The difference is that they were imaginary, and the life of Jesus actually happened, I mean, his life has a mythical scope, and it is a historical myth. Our biographies are copies of copies of his true biography.

Another point that differentiates the Christian religion from the others is the miraculous events that are abundant. The true God is the one who acts in his religion. There are people who say that God stopped talking to us, that the last time he appeared was in the Bible and it was over; it couldn't be further from the truth. The Marian apparitions during the 20th century are historical facts, which already predicted both Russian imperialism (in Fatima) and the corruption of the Catholic clergy (in Garabandal) without counting the miracles proper to these apparitions. And the lives of the saints too, who are full of miracles, and bleeding wafers, etc. Such things don't even come close to happening in any other religious tradition.

It is perfectly possible to reach God through reason. To believe in miracles you don't need faith, because they are well documented facts with countless testimonies, even if you were not fortunate enough to have witnessed them personally. Also, to understand the structure of the universe, I recommend Plato, Louis Lavelle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, who prove the need for an uncaused first cause, among other things.

You shouldn’t focus on happiness. There is a time when the individual realizes that if he really wants to stabilize certain feelings, the first thing he has to do is to feel good about himself, and that is no longer the same as seeking happiness.

Happiness is always something that comes from outside: it is a situation, a state, any gift you receive. For example, if you fall in love with a girl, your happiness depends on her repaying you, and the most unhappiness will be her indifference. There comes a time when the succession of these emotional experiences is over and the individual realizes that in some ways he is the author of his own states, that much of what he feels does not depend on what is happening or what others do, but his own. It is the moment when he needs to take possession of himself, in the total existential sense. That is, he has to show that he is the master of his own destiny.

From then on the criterion is no longer happiness versus unhappiness, but victory versus defeat. The individual has to win and prove to himself first — not to others — that he is something. It may have some coefficient of exhibitionism as well, but the key is to take possession of its strength, to feel like a creator of situations that depend solely on it. During this period, the coefficient of happiness or unhappiness received from outside is no longer so important, because even the factors that can depress him are seen as challenges that he has to overcome. In this period the individual has to come out on top in everything but is just trying to prove something to himself. What matters is subjective victory, being able to look at yourself and feel a certain pride. Being proud of yourself is important during this time.

I am no longer seeking my happiness. The axis has now moved elsewhere. That is, I understood that happiness is a more or less accidental result. Happiness is like pleasure, said St. Thomas Aquinas. Pleasure is a side effect resulting from something that worked. It is not a goal. It is never a goal. After all, pleasure is an abstract term that designates a constellation of feelings that can differ greatly from one person to another. The pleasure is too evanescent for you to pick it up. You will have to look for something concrete.

For example, what is gastronomic pleasure? Can you eat the gastronomic pleasure? Of course you can’t. You will have to eat something concrete. This thing can give you pleasure or displeasure. Saint Thomas Aquinas is absolutely right. You ate, that worked, so you say you’re happy. Pleasure is the name you give to the subjective side effect of something. With happiness the same thing happens.

Seeking happiness is the most useless thing in the world because you never know what will make you happy or not.

Admittedly, some things make you happy and some things make you unhappy, so these are the things you will have to look for. Our endeavor is always to do something, to achieve something, not something abstract called happiness. These days there is a kind of material view of happiness. Happiness is like something that can be guaranteed to this or that person, as some kind of right.

But this I have understood for a long time: to seek happiness is to make a hole in the water. If you seek happiness you will be unhappy, so it is better to seek victory, self-assertion, strength, etc. At this point, you are past the stage of the pursuit of happiness.

Read Matthew 7:3-5. No one sholud judge the other; quite the opposite. The Christian religion, the genuine, 2000 year old Catholic tradition insists on humiliation, confession and thus the remission of sins. It is very clear that in Protestant countries people are more inclined to judge others (precisely because they have abolished the sacraments), the same constant does not happen in Catholic countries. Remember the time that Bill Clinton was spotted as an adulterer and everyone detonated him? In Brazil this does not happen, I can say from experience. Of course, you will be punished by the law appropriately from case to case, but no one will point the finger like it does in the States.

Anyway, the big mistake that consists of mortal sin and recognized as heresy is the intention of wanting to determine good and evil, which is everything that modern culture encourages "Oh, there is no right and wrong, do what you like, etc", and that was the cause of the fall of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. Recently, Netflix did not release a movie for pedophiles and there was no major serious uprising from the media, or from anyone for that matter? We live in a mad world, and in the next decade it will only tend to get worse, unfortunately.

Is it so difficult to understand that the mere logical proof of the existence of a "first cause" only proves the existence of "some" God and not of the Christian God in particular? And is it so difficult to understand that as proof of the existence of the Christian God in particular, this proof only has at most a REASONABILITY value, not a SURE one, so much so that it is accepted equally by Muslims and deists? And is it so difficult to understand that, if we admit the Christian God as the only true God, the distance between the mere logical concept of "some God" and the reality of the true God is immeasurable?

This is the same difference between the knowledge of God by logical necessity and the knowledge of God by his action in the world. The first is generic and the second is, specifically, the Christ.

Mystical psychologies deal fundamentally with the meaning of the individual’s life, of the individual before his ultimate moral responsibility, something that is above the character, something that Humanity itself does not know. It is fundamentally the individual as Universal Man, as Christ, as pastor and responsible for all humanity.

The Christ’s model represents the action of the individual as a function of the ultimate purpose of all things. For Gandhi — who is a prototype of Christ— only his relationship with a purpose that transcends the biological life and life of the human species is of interest. When both were over, God would be left, and it is waiting for this moment that his action is guided.

In Gandhi’s case, not even the political objective explains his behavior, since he did not accept India’s independence in any way, placing moral demands far above what humans usually imagine. Gandhi acted just the opposite of political reasoning, appealing to the center of the issue and offering as a guarantee not only his own life, but his postmortem fate. In Jesus’s life all actions were guided by the following rule: “What will God think of this?” Such is the subject who, walks before God and knows what He is thinking. Normally, even an exceptional person does not submit all acts to this criterion. The confrontation with God presupposes that man must be able to conceive his every act in an eternal light.

Duty fulfillment regarding a social role presupposes the existence of people who have an expectation regarding the occupant of that role. To act on the coherence of one’s own biography presupposes that it must continue. Acting toward goals dictated by the culture and intelligence presupposes that there are achievable ends within the time frame of a historical existence. But if the individual acts solely on the basis of an end, he is acting precisely on the inexistence of a world around him. With or without the world, he would act the same way. Acts then acquire a supra-temporal, supra-historical meaning, that is, eternally man should do so before the world exists or when it ceases to exist. Here action is taken as the direct expression of a divine quality that acts without the existence of the world.

Anyone who believes in God eventually proceeds from the eternal, though it is difficult to understand someone who acts permanently, such as Gandhi, for whom we must use another key to behavior. It’s as if he knows what God wants, as if he is talking to God all the time.

An accomplished holy man acts on the eternal sense of existence, has no other motive, not even History

In the divine, the actions of the individual seem too complex and enigmatic. To understand the actions of a saint just believing in him. Then everything falls into place, we begin to realize a coherence, an explanatory principle of actions. This occurs regardless of vocational motivations that have arisen in the course of biography, related to the previous goals in life (social approval), that may have contributed to put the subject in a certain way, but are not enough to clarify the unfolding of his history.

We can speak of holiness only when one’s relationship with an eternal God motivates each of his actions. Not only accidental acts, but all, one by one, there is no single act that can be explained outside this dialogue. Who does the guy talk to, who does he respond to? If we erase this connection, his life becomes a collection of meaningless acts. There are individuals who are already born in this eternal realm, so much so that as they go through the antecedents they are quickly absorbed.

In a word: A life that is not guided by the question: "What will God think of this?", is an unfulfilled life.

To assume that "science" knows reality is impossible, because it can only know objects previously cut to adapt to the availability of its methods. These objects do not exist in themselves, they do not exist as reality.

Everything that exists, exists simultaneously in various dimensions of reality. For example, you take a cow "Ah, the cow is a biological being!" well and isn't she a chemical being? Isn't a physical one? Or an economic one? Is it not a sociological being? She belongs to all of this at the same time! Is there any science that can study it on all these aspects? No. This thing has different aspects and dimensions that intersect, this is what is called the concrete being.

Concrete comes from concrescere, that is to say that which grows together despite having nothing to do with the other. There is no science of the concrete object, science only studies an abstract object, an object as such that exists only for it. It is not the same object that exists for another science.

Science does not teach us reality, it highlights certain aspects that, properly articulated with other aspects, help us to see reality.

But one science does not replace the other, and it cannot speak about the object of the other.

*Philosophy is an effective tool for developing knowledge.

Just correcting you. Science only cuts off aspects of reality, and with that all you have is information, not knowledge. Science without philosophy that is the queen of all sciences (that is why there are PhDs) is nothing to take serious ;)

"So, if I were totally predetermined, I couldn’t ask this question." Wrong. I could be predetermined to ask this question, like any other. It's just a question. This would only make any attempt to change reality a mere illusion. That simple.