Ciceronianus

Yes. A God so devoted to watching humanity must be terribly bored, unless peculiarly obsessed by us. In either case, a sad, strange figure.

The God of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions is more a Peeping Tom or voyeur than a stalker. Stalking requires far more effort than watching...

I haven't read that work of James. Control need not be absolute in order to be exercised. What is it you feel you don't have any control over? If you ...

They're "the rest" yes, or part of it. Ancient Stoicism was grounded in large part on the belief in an immanent divinity. Stoicism need not be (see La...

Pragmatic, yes, which would mean to me, being a Dewey fan, no absolute conclusions but an appreciation of the fact we deal in probabilities and recogn...

The striking thing about Stoicism is that the significance of things outside your control is discounted. So, desire, envy, greed, hate don't arise and...

Imperial Rome was aggressively, even militantly, Christian and therefore enightened from about 306 C.E. or A.D. on, until it was finally extinguished ...

All this time I thought Omar actually owned a ruby yacht. If you can't trust Bullwinkle, who can you trust in these sad times?

After some thought, I thought it would be appropriate to return to this place where topics and ideas are repeated so frequently, to repeat what I've s...

"Good Heavens, Holmes! They may have been the footprints of a gigantic hound after all!"

If you mean by "philosophy" philosophers, those teachers of philosophy who taught me in college, and people who write/talk about philosophy, several t...

Yes. It and Stoicism were it seems most popular among the more intellectually, philosophically inclined among the Roman elite. Some have claimed Stoic...

Well, consider Rome's experience with walls (and that of other civilizations/nations) for purposes of making a determination of the value of the thing...

Defending billionaires is like defending gluttons and hoarders. There's nothing admirable about them. I would have no problem with greater taxation.

Epictetus was a slave of a freedman in the court of Nero. He probably didn't have an easy life in that place. It's said his master (or someone) delibe...

Stoicism requires discipline, and practice. But in many things it is simply the application of intelligence to circumstances encountered. Many people ...

Stop allowing yourself to be unduly disturbed by things beyond your control--which would include "people in general." As Epictetus said (I quote from ...

That fact is suggestive, isn't it?

Henry Hazlitt, the journalist, was one of the few persons (perhaps the only one, I'm not sure) who could tolerate Ayn for any extended period of time....

Ayn Rand has been mentioned, and so I'm obliged to repeat: Ayn Rand is to philosophy what L. Ron Hubbard is to religion. My work is done, here.

Like Dasein, and other vocabulary introduced by everyone's favorite Nazi. Another of those good things Nazis did.

Good old St. Tommy A. A paragon of special pleading. And, of course, gluttony.

It may be my character is such that I'm unsympathetic to explanations of history, and peoples, and civilizations or most anything by reference to such...

I've heard about this, and am glad for it, but haven't attended. Perhaps I should.

I simply see Christianity as a fascinating and very successful (in terms of longevity) mixture of religious and philosophical beliefs prevalent in the...

My belief is that strange as it may seem, Jesus has always been a problem for Christianity, or at least for those Christians who are philosophically i...

I think it was more a case of: Since Jesus is God, the insights of pagan philosophers we find admirable must be consistent with the fact that Jesus is...

I don't know what interpretation you refer to, here, but it would seem to me quite likely that the early Christian Fathers borrowed freely from the Gr...

This is just one of many examples of early Christians incorporating or assimilating pagan philosophical ideas and concepts, probably on a largely ad h...

I have considerable respect, and a certain degree of (sentimental, I think) fondness for the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The fondness is i...

Yes, there's a great deal of ignorance in this respect, currently. But I think it's true nonetheless, as even those who are ignorant ascribe what was ...

I've looked. What now?

They still are. We've been trying to be what they were, or what we think they were, since the 5th century.

Governments which pay the bills of news sources may have a degree of influence over them, you see. Just as governments may have a degree of influence ...

You'll have to remind of what happened in 1958. I was in Catholic schools until my junior year in high school, alas. Money is the spirit of America,, ...

I'm afraid I have no knowledge of the law of Israel, or for that matter that of Venezuela, which apparently is the primary source of funds for TeleSur...

You may. I'm here, but right now am generally limiting myself to posts that involve parts of history or the law I'm interested in, so not to be tempte...

There's nothing weird about it. Private entities may certainly act to restrict speech. You may too. If you do, though, you do nothing illegal here in ...

Just what good the Abrahamic religions have generated, themselves, would be an interesting study.

Yes, that in itself means little. However, difficult though it is for us to understand what life was like before the imposition of Christianity in the...

The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church wisely co opted popular female deities like Isis and Magna Mater into Christianity through Mary, who was gi...

In ancient Greece and Rome, sexual conduct was seemingly much more a matter of casual public discussion and display than it is now. I have more knowle...

I doubt there's any significant difference between those annoying urges and "the mind" myself. We're a part of the world, and there is no separate par...

We've always been uncomfortable with sex here in God's favorite country, preferring as we do to express our more primitive urges through the use of fi...

Ah, Plato's Republic. Whatever it was intended to be, I suspect it's given comfort to all manner of totalitarians and fans of benign autocracy over th...

Because we're part of the world, we necessarily interact with other parts of the world. There's no denying that. But we have a certain, albeit limited...

I think a Stoic would say that desire related to things beyond out control leads to suffering. I don't know if that's what Buddha meant. And, I'm not ...

I'm not sure I understand, but I don't think it's necessary to distinguish "inner" from "outer." It isn't clear to me that can be done, nor do I think...

Well, if the point being made is that there were problems with the proceedings, that certain evidence was ignored or given short-shrift, that Dassey (...

I don't think "indifference" is the central theme in Stoicism. I think the central theme, if there is one, is understanding the difference between thi...