after twenty-odd years, I'm transcending christianity…

Great philospeaking.

We're all Kant's, are we not?

To put it bluntly.

The import of critical philosophy today can be seen in the failure of so many ideological projects.

Certainly.

recommendations on reading to flesh out my understanding of this shift? anything between Descartes' Meditations & Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy — I'm basically completely unread in the canon

Reading too much philosophy.

Will corrupt the purity of your thoughts.

And philosophy tends to be, either common sense, or philosophy for philosophies sake.

Leibniz was probably the ultimate apogee of the Platonic tradition in its rationalist form, although his work is very difficult to study as he was so prolific and didn't really summarize his philosophy anywhere. However, he proposed a "universal language" and was a forerunner to modern ideas of cybernetics. Spinoza (and also Descartes) represented a kind of absurd example of rationalism taken to its mechanical extreme. Viewing the entire world as a sort of vast, inhuman machine, of which philosophers could unlock the secrets through abstract deduction, he demonstrated the ultimate consequences of the idea that God was simply the rational principle of everything that exists. Jacobi pointed out the nihilistic implications of this "Spinozism" and how it demonstrated the absurdity of rationalism. Another important note is the Sturm Und Drang counter-Enlightenment movement of Hamann and Herder, who emphasized the embodied nature of thought and the role of language in determining thought, although they are often neglected as their works are largely unreadable.

Hume is the really important figure, and incredibly insightful, who put the poison dart into the entire Platonic enterprise. That is, he shattered the harmonious otherworldly unity of concepts - Kant cited him as awakening him from his "dogmatic slumber" - so he is definitely important to study in this connection. Instead of a metaphysical study of the conceptual structure of the universe, Hume proposed that the foundation of the system of sciences would become the study of human nature. Kant attempted a response to Hume in a kind of philosophical systematization of faculty psychology. This is the key point because here metaphysics shifts away from the Platonic idea that external reality holds a conceptual or semantic structure, and Kant lays out in detail how a rigorous study of metaphysics can be based in human faculties without ascribing the forms of reason to the external world. However, where previous philosophy had become frail after its multiple dogmatic and contradictory attempts at formulating absolute knowledge, the Kantian style of philosophy was eventually reduced to a sort of hand-wringing about the conditions of its own possibility. The bridge from Kant to more contemporary philosophy is Hegel, who attempted to show that philosophy can attain scientific certainty - that it can discuss the absolute - without returning to the dogmatic metaphysics critiqued by Kant.

I haven't read it, what is your interest in him?

everything can be condensed down to reducing errors in "communication"

Interesting, I will take a look at it. 

thank you very much. 

do you know of any sources for consuming this material OTHER than reading the books? I feel a bit ashamed to ask, but for whatever reason I simply have enormous difficulty mustering the concentration required to read books, but greatly desire to engage the core content. do you know if there are any good secondary sources, perhaps podcasts or similar? 

Eh.

I don't really get the appeal of New Age/Hindu stuff. It's a bunch of flowery feel-good nonsense designed to impress purely by virtue of how elaborate/convoluted it is, while designed to mask a grotesque polytheistic core.

In any case, it seems you don't have a deep understanding of either philosophy nor the theology of religions. And you can't have that without actually reading many difficult texts, slow and comprehensively enough that you grasp their full meaning and can compare, criticize, and ultimately synthesize different ideas.

This isn't easy. In fact, it probably takes as much work as to earn a degree in philosophy and/or comparative religion.

Political ideology is one thing. But religion/spirituality concerns matters that could affect your eternal state. Do not half-ass this.

(P.S.If reading is hard, you might want to try audiobooks. LibriVox is a free database of audiobooks.)

no reading required

let me know which one of these feels right to you

and i'm sure we can find something 

I have found the videos on this channel very useful.

That was a great video. This one reviewers comment says it all.

there is nothing higher than Christianity. You better reason and question your new worldview really well to see if it is truly logical:

which one ?