Search Results

I have a long-time friend who calls me almost daily to report his latest observation of the "insanity" of the religious world around us. His specialty is pointing out the obvious contradictions and maddening trivialities we see on church signs. Today's call was about a public statement that a person who was killed in a senseless shooting is already now enjoying heaven so we have no need to mourn his death. Well if so why don't we all commit suicide today? Another of his favorites: "If god is you…

(Quote from Godfrey) At risk of going way off topic, this passage on on the issue of being able to understand yourself, reminded me of the "know thyself" phrase and issue, and that called to my mind a passage from a book I like very much and have talked about a little - "Dialogue on Innate Principles" by Jackson Barwis. I think the attitude he takes toward this issue is something with which Epicurus would agree, given Epicurus' view of the "canon of truth" and what it is it can and can not revea…

Yes that was the point of my going off on the tangent. It seems very Epicurean to me to take the position that surely off all the things we have information about, the thing we have the MOST information about is "us" -- so we need to start with understanding ourselves and not considering ourselves to be mystical black boxes that only a god or a magician could figure out.

This eternal return from Nietzsche is very deep and we'd have to go into it pretty far to do it justice. I don't profess to understand it all myself. But two points to consider is that there is an aspect of the atoms coming back together into the same form listed in Lucretius, and rather than being dark Nietzsche was advocating the view as an antidote to nihilism, which is far darker. Maybe we already have a thread on this, or need one, but I don't know that we currently have any Nietzsche afici…

I see I did a (poor) graphic a long time ago to cite the Lucretian text, but I don't see that we have a thread. Now we do. Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence (Eternal Return) In Relation To Lucretius epicureanfriends.com/wcf/galle…ine-2-eternal-recurrence/