Stoic Solutions Podcast where I offer practical wisdom for everyday life focusing on topics including gratitude, acceptance, overcoming adversity, finding meaning in life, moderation, dealing with change, friendship, loneliness, and anger.
http://donaldrobertson.name/2018/07/28/interview-justin-vacula-on-marcus-aurelius/
What about the big parts of Stoicism? Separation of control, and separation of the "event" and our thinking about "event". What about the hard attitude toward death? What he seems to be selling is a washed down version of Stoicism as described by the original authors. Ah, but this is just the bait. After the hook is taken and the barb set, what is the story? Dose the answer lie in the donation button after being supported by a educational institute?
There is no doubt that the world needs preachers for those 60 some percent of the population who never read a book post high school. These people do need some guidance, but the real debate is over the name. Is "Stoicism lite" a more correct description? What they do is up to them, but truth is ultimate in Stoicism, so is this really Stoicism. But what do I know, I have only read, learned and studied this in isolation, more or less, for a short while, since the beginning of this century.
As I have said, Stoicism is a religion. It does encourage logic, self examination of the points, and allows a three way split of all intake concepts, acceptance, rejection or abayence. Based on what ever we currently believe, we can address any new concepts. That is the catch, we start learning from where we are at. If we have wrong ideas in our mind, we believe them to be right, and how are we to separate right from wrong?
Becoming a strong atheist has really forced change of my thinking. Many discussions, comments, or questions I have faced from the religious only make sense if they believe there is a god. If there is no god in our thinking, these quires are often not logical.
So you believe in "the big bang"? Well, that term is not a description of the events. It was big after a bit, but there was no atmosphere, so no bang. It did later produce a radiation pressure wave, which we can map today, 13.8 billion light years away, more or less. What happen before? There was nothing, Well it was cold, less that absolute zero, and a portion of space came to absolute zero. At absolute zero, the forces come into existence, the Higgs field comes into existence, which is spontaneous, and exothermic, and the chain reaction is started. It cannot be stopped. It would more exactly be described as a big flash. Sound, as described by the term bang, is a human perception of a shock wave in atmosphere. Not possible to understand if you think humans are anything more than a present day manifestation of aggressive cooperative bacteria. We all descended from that organic beginnings, through the fish.
It does not matter much. In the end we all just die anyway.
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