The purpose of the 37 volumes of his On Nature is to free us from the fear of death and therefore from the control of priests and from the internal fears of the religion that Plato and his followers had in mind. Epicurus says:
…[W]e must recognise generally that the soul is a corporeal thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame….
…[T]he rest of the frame, whether the whole of it survives or only a part, no longer has sensation, when once those atoms have departed…. Moreover, once the whole frame is broken up, the soul is scattered and has no longer the same powers as before, nor the same notions; hence it does not possess sentience either.
The atoms that comprise the soul are immortal. They are passed on from being to being like the torch in one of the Athenian races. But the larger structure of atoms that is the soul of any one individual is itself mortal. Once we are dead, our atoms are recycled. Since there is nothing but atoms moving in the void, we as individuals are annihilated. After death, there is nothing; and because of that, death is nothing. Epicurus says:
Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensations is nothing to us.
After two thousand years of Christian spiritual hegemony, this may seem to many of us a gloomy doctrine. For Epicurus and his followers, however, it was a removal of the greatest barrier to happiness as they conceived it. That barrier was fear of endless punishment for the alleged sin of seeking their own happiness in life.
It may be, Lucretius says, that beating down religion is impious and the entry to a life of crime. Much rather, it is religion which has brought forth criminal and impious deeds. He lived before the most notable acts of religious mania. But he was poet enough to know the psychology of enthusiasm. In Book One of his poem, he produces one of the most striking of all denunciations of religion. He describes how, at the beginning of the Trojan War, the priests tell Agamemnon that a good passage across the Aegean required the sacrifice of his daughter. So a young girl was dragged to the altar for her throat to be cut by her own father.
Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum he concludes — “Such are the evils to which religion leads”
He says later, in Book Three:
Some wear out their lives for the sake of a statue or a name. Religion and its resulting fear of death can induce one man to violate honour, another to break the bonds of friendship, and to overthrow all natural feeling. It has induced men to betray their country or their parents for the sake of avoiding hellfire. For just as children tremble and fear all in the darkness, so we in the light of day often fear what is no more real. This terror must be dispersed, not by rays of sunshine nor by the bright shafts of daylight, but by the sight and understanding of nature.
It is Epicurus, he says, who brought us into this light of understanding. Do not fear the priests. Do not fear death. Pay no attention to dreams or omens. These latter have a natural explanation. The former have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact on us.
Follow the ethical teachings of Epicurus, and be happy.
None of this means, by the way, that Epicurus and his followers were atheists. They did accept the existence of gods, and were willing outwardly to conform to whatever cults were established. They only denied that the gods were immaterial, and that the gods had any interest in human affairs. Confronted with evidence for any supernatural event, they were content with insisting on a natural cause, whether or not they were able to think of one that convinced.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 19, 2018
QotD: The Epicurean view of the soul
April 18, 2018
Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Finding Meaning in Responsibility
ReasonTV
Published on 17 Apr 2018Jordan Peterson is an unlikely YouTube celebrity. The Canadian psychologist lectures about things like responsibility. Yet millions of young people watch his videos, line up to hear his speeches, and buy his book 12 Rules for Life. It was number one on the Amazon bestseller list for a month.
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John Stossel asks: What could make a book about responsibility take off?
“People have been fed this diet of pabulum, rights, and impulsive freedom,” Peterson tells Stossel. “There’s just an absolute starvation for the other side of the story.”
The other side of the story, according to Peterson, is that “it’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.”
Peterson instead advises: “Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth….That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.”
Many leftists hate Peterson. They attack him for saying people should be “dangerous.” Peterson explains to Stossel that he means people should have the capacity to be dangerous, but control it.
“People who teach martial arts know this full well,” Peterson says. “If you learn a martial art you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously you learn to control it.”
Advice about that, and responsibility, bring Peterson big audiences.
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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
Israel at 70
In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the world should (but largely will not) celebrate the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel on Thursday:
Making the case for Israel’s territorial and political rights involves a deep knowledge of Jewish and Arab history, understanding of the complexities around the reconstruction of the modern Middle East from the ashes of the Ottoman empire, and a plod through a litany of declarations, mandates, commissions, conferences and international legal documents that most Israel defenders aren’t even aware of, let alone able to deploy in debate with rhetorical economy.
Moreover, since the 1967 war, which changed so much on the ground, even the Israeli government hasn’t pressed itself to defend Israel’s historic rights in any systematic way (apart from crises, as in 2016, when the Palestinians drafted a resolution for UNESCO, whose language deliberately detached Jewish ties from Judaism’s holiest sites). With the 1993 Oslo peace process, the issue of legal rights fell further off the communications radar.
When it became clear over the next tumultuous decade that terrorism could not destroy Israel, Israel’s enemies ramped up the campaign to undermine her legitimacy as a member state within the international community. Once the Palestinian strategy of revisionist history replaced organized physical violence — including outright lies as in the UNESCO fiasco — it became clear that a fact-based counteroffensive was needed.
For in the end, it will be international law and accords, not blood libels and emotional mantras, that will settle the matter of Israel’s literal legitimacy. Israel was created, like many other countries, after a successful war in which no other country came to its aid. Gaza, Judea and Samaria were conquered by Jordan and Egypt illegally, as they had no claim to them, while Israel did. The Palestinian territories are not in fact “occupied” in law; rather they are “disputed.” The word “settlements” imply Jews are foreigners in their own homeland, which they are not. Jews have built 140 communities in Judea and Samaria since 1967, which excites condemnation. The Arabs have built 260 communities in Judea and Samaria since 1967, which excites … silence.
April 14, 2018
QotD: Plato’s ideal society
This [controlling the poor to protect the wealthy] is a problem addressed by Plato in at least two of his works — The Republic and The Laws. The first is his description of an ideal state, the second of a state less than ideal but still worth working towards. I do not claim to be an expert on Plato, though am dubious of many of the claims made against him. However, his general solution to the problem was to stop the enlightenment and to reconstruct society as a totalitarian oligarchy.
His ideal society would be one in which democracy and any degree of accountability would have been abolished, together with married life and the family and private property. Poetry was to be abolished. All other art and music were to be controlled. There was to be a division of society into orders at the head of which was to be a class of guardians. These would strictly control all thought and action.
His workable society would be one in which some property and some accountability would be allowed to remain. Even so, there was to be the same attempt at controlling thought and action.
The stability of these systems was to be maintained by a new theology. A single divine being would take the place of the quarrelling, scandalous gods of mythology and the Homeric poems. The common people could be left with a purified version of the old cults. But these gods would be increasingly aligned with the secondary spirits through which the One God directed His Creation.
People were to be taught that the Platonic system was not a human construct, but that it reflected the Will of Heaven. Rebellion or disobedience would be punished by the direct intervention of God through His Secondary Spirits. Before then, though, it would be punished by the state as heresy. At the end of the fifth century, Anaxagoras had been exiled from Athens for claiming that the sun was a ball of glowing rock. This had been an occasional persecution — indeed, it is hard to think of other instances. In the Platonic system, there was to be a regular inquisition that would punish nonconformity with imprisonment or death.
Thus there is at the heart of the Platonic system a “noble lie” — though Plato may have believed much of it himself. This is of a religion that looks into the most secret places of the mind, and dispenses rewards and punishments according to what is found there. In the old theology, Poseidon had no power beyond on land. Apollo had none in the dark. Zeus had no idea who was thinking what. The Platonic God was just like ours. No sin against His Wishes could go undetected or unpunished.
And so the people were to be kept in line by fear of hellfire, or by fear of everything short of that.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Englightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
April 11, 2018
The Aesir-Vanir War – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Apr 2018Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH
One day, a mysterious visitor appeared among the Aesir, one of two races of Nordic gods. An epic and long war began, and yet despite the bloodshed, their war eventually gave poetry to the world.
Penn & Teller: Dalai Lama and Tibet
infinit888
Published on 13 May 2008Mainstream media seems to be only pushing the story about an oppressed Tibet and referring to the Dalai Lama as a saint.
This is a compilation of clips from Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! “Holier Than Thou” speaking about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.
April 7, 2018
QotD: Organized religion
Careful examination of the background, and also of the foreground of the Scriptures, has led me to the conclusion that they are authoritative, if often misunderstood. I note that Our Lord was personally guilty of founding one of these “organized religions,” and of appointing the deeply flawed Saint Peter as its first CEO. And that, whatever can be said against it, the organization is still around, with the same sales message never yet updated, and in as much of a mess as ever before.
Verily, the more I read of history, the better persuaded I am that Catholic Church, TM, has been on the brink of collapse, continuously, these last two thousand years. As Hilaire Belloc put it, and I do love to quote this:
“The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.”
By comparison, I suppose, the Prophet of Submission could be accounted wiser, to have taken arms against his sea of troubles. His outfit would descend from the unattended dunes upon complacent strangers, in hours when they were unaware. (The whole process arguably in anticipation of the Welsh art of Llap-goch.)
For our “Christian” part, even in the colonies, it was the piratical State that arrived this way — with a disorganized gaggle of proselytizing priests, seldom in their baggage, under the impression they must save men’s souls, wherever the ships sailed — unarmed, and frequently alone, in circumstances perfectly unpredictable, except for the reasonable expectation of a grisly end. They were, in the Americas as elsewhere, more likely to be pleading on behalf of the beleaguered natives against the State, than exacting tributes to the State’s command.
There is a real contrast here in marketing strategies.
David Warren, “Organized religion”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-08.
March 31, 2018
More on “Hellgate”
Ann Althouse is still puzzled by the recent accidental-on-purpose revelation by the Pope that there is no hell:
I’m reading “Does Hell Exist? And Did the Pope Give an Answer?” (NYT). I’ve been writing about the reported news that the Pope said Hell does not exist, and I keep hearing that the Vatican has attempted to squelch the news, but I continue to believe the Pope said it. One reason I believe it is that Hell is such an implausible notion that I think an intelligent person, such as Pope Francis, is unlikely to believe it, though he might choose to keep quiet on the subject and not rock the boat the Vatican seems not to want rocked. Upon this not rocking of the boat, I will build my church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, because there is no hell, but let’s tell them there is, because it will scare the wits out of them.
I don’t give a damn (not that there’s any such thing) what “The Vatican” thinks, but I do care what Pope Francis said in his conversation with his friend, the 93-year-old Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari is — as the NYT puts it — “an atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism.” Scalfari has no audio recording or even jotted-down notes to back up his statement that Francis said, “A hell doesn’t exist.”
[…]
The Pope is deliberately choosing and using Eugenio Scalfari. There’s something complex happening there, and a flat denial that the Pope said there is no Hell is at least as much of a simplification as the Scalfari report that he said it. So you can believe what you want.
I think the Pope likes talking with Scalfari so he can get some good back and forth and so he can get his ideas out to the world filtered through this slightly but not completely unreliable narrator. There is deniability, and there is also the leakage of the good news (that there is no hell).
But it’s hard to admit that the Church has propounded a frightening, painful lie for so long, harder than apologizing for the 150,000 indigenous children who “were separated from their families and forced to attend the schools between the 1880s and the final closure in 1996, often suffering physical, sexual and psychological abuse.”
Pope Francis won’t do that. He has a different approach — he talks to the atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism who doesn’t take notes but spins out the story in that impressionistic Italian style that sophisticated readers understand.
March 30, 2018
Having served its purpose for two thousand years, the Pope now says there is no Hell
Who said that Holy Week was a slow news week? Michael W. Chapman (via Ann Althouse) reports on the latest revelation from the head of the Catholic Church:
In another interview with his longtime atheist friend, Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis claims that Hell does not exist and that condemned souls just “disappear.” This is a denial of the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of Hell and the eternal existence of the soul.
The interview between Scalfari and the Pope was published March 28, 2018 in La Repubblica. The relevant section on Hell was translated by the highly respected web log, Rorate Caeli.Pope Francis in a meeting with President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina in the Casa Rosada.
Attribution: Casa Rosada (Argentina Presidency of the Nation), via Wikimedia CommonsThe interview is headlined, “The Pope: It is an honor to be called revolutionary.” (Il Papa: “È un onore essere chiamato rivoluzionario.”)
Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”
Pope Francis says, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
The post was later updated with a note from the Vatican:
“The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews. What is reported by the author in today’s article [in La Repubblica] is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”
So either Scalfari misunderstood what his old friend was saying, or he’s just been thrown under a holy bus. I have no god in this fight, but it’s interesting either way.
March 26, 2018
Rick McGinnis on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Peterson’s book and lecture series has been much in the news lately, so Rick McGinnis shares his thoughts, particularly about the message and intended audience for 12 Rules for Life:
It was probably inevitable that this sudden notoriety would create a demand for a book-length statement of principles from Peterson, and he obliged earlier this year with 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Deceptively packaged as a self-help tome, the book expands on a series of postings Peterson made on Quora, a crowdsourcing website that, instead of asking for money, invites its readers to contribute answers to questions posed by other readers.
The book’s structure is straightforward; after sketching in the origin of the dozen precepts, he states them at the outset of each chapter, explains them in varying degrees of complexity with examples from his practice as a clinical psychologist, anecdotes from his own life or – and this is proving to be most tantalizing – ruminations on quotes from history, philosophy, mythology or (most often of all) the Bible.
On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.
But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.
Early on and quite often, Peterson comes across with butt-clenching dread as the smartest-man-in-the-room, laying out the stories behind the facts, culled from his years of reading and research, with the force and volume of a firehose. He relies heavily on evolutionary biology to explain our hardwired need to create and find our place in hierarchies, with examples that distill our endlessly troubling social responses to bluff, authority, and even violence down to chemical and neurological mechanisms set in place way back in time with far less complex creatures (a scenario that’s easily satirized as “we are all lobsters”).
It’s been observed – and confirmed by Peterson – that the ideal audience for his book is young people in general and young men in particular. As a former young man, I can attest that being told by a wise older man, clearly on your side but unwilling to sugar coat the facts, that the bully and the big-man-on-campus are better armed than you are to jockey for status and fulfillment – the alpha lobsters, waving their claws around to appreciable effect – is very much less than comforting. Peterson’s ideal audience will have to endure the climb up a very steep hill of biological determinism to reach the far more hospitable plateau beyond.
I’m not saying Peterson is wrong. From the perspective of an older man, I’ve seen this lobster battle played out too many times to deny its plausibility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that the ideologies that he decries, imagining that there is no biological determinism – not even the binary division of gender – or even a landscape governed by measurable standards or objective truth, is far more appealing to young people raised to believe in an ever-expanding entitlement of “rights” and a pursuit of “justice” that needs to triumph above history or biology.
It’s when Peterson tries to explain the philosophical and even theological roots of our cultural systems that things might be rewarding, for both young and older readers. He has a core group of texts that he relies upon, with particular emphasis on Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn on the modern side, and while he will evoke ancient mythology – the gods of Egypt make several appearances, though even he can’t overcome the essential strangeness of their myths – he reaps more rewardingly from the Bible, especially in one passage where he analyzes the difference between the Old and New Testament God.
March 23, 2018
The use of the euphemism “grooming”
Mark Steyn from a recent Clubland Q&A session:
If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Tuesday, here’s the action replay. Simply click above for an hour of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet on various aspects of identity politics, from micro-aggressions at the University of California to macro-aggressions in Telford and Rotherham – with a semantic detour into nano-aggressions and quantum-aggressions. Speaking of semantics, I saw this question after the show ended, from Steyn Club Founding Member Toby Pilling:
If with regard to language, clarity is the remedy (as Orwell would say), shouldn’t the ‘Asian Grooming Gangs’ be re-named ‘Moslem Rape Gangs’? I’ve been trying to make the case that they should at the local council I work for, but over here in the UK one can be hauled in for hate speech at the drop of a hat.
I agree with Messrs Orwell and Pilling on clarity in language, and have never liked the word “grooming”, a bit of social-worker jargonese designed to obscure that what’s going on all over England is mass serial-gang-rape sex-slavery. “Grooming” is, in that sense, a euphemism. An hour or two after yesterday’s show I chanced to stop at the Upper Valley Grill and General Store on an empty strip of road in the middle of the woods in Groton, Vermont, a small town of a thousand souls that feels, if anything, rather smaller than that. And paying at the counter I noticed that they had a can next to the cash register for donations to what the hand-written card called the “Groton Grooming Fund”.
Having just been on the air yakking about Telford, I was momentarily startled. It is, in fact, not a whip-round to enable the gang-rapists to buy more petrol to douse the girls in, but a contribution toward the volunteer group that maintains the local ski and snowmobile trails – ie, they “groom” the snow. Happy the town in which grooming is left to the snowmobile club rather than the Muslim rape gangs. The slogan that greets you on the edge of the village is “Welcome to Groton – Where a Small Town Feels Like a Large Family”, which I always find faintly dispiriting. But it’s better than Telford, where a large town feels like a small prison.
March 18, 2018
Genghis Khan – Beginnings of the Great Mongol Nation – Extra History – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 17 Mar 2018The man now known as Genghis Khan, leader of all Mongols, was ready to show the world what he was made of. He acted in fairness towards his own people and happily began integrating Chinese citizens and their culture, but showed no mercy to those who opposed him.
March 17, 2018
“Schedule 7 of [Britain’s] Terrorism Act … effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence”
Brendan O’Neill on the British government’s decision to refuse admission to Canadian videographer Lauren Southern:
In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian…’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’.
This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. For what we have here is the ringfencing of Britain from anti-Islam blasphemy. The purification of the kingdom against those who would take the mick out of the Muslim faith. In refusing leave to enter to Ms Southern because she handed out those leaflets, the UK authorities are making it clear that this is a nation in which certain things cannot be said about Allah. They are sending a message not only to Ms Southern but to Britons, too: trolling of Islam is a ‘threat’ to society and counter to ‘the public policy of the United Kingdom’. They haven’t only banned one woman; they have sought to chill an entire sphere of ‘blasphemy’.
Ms Southern was stopped at the border in Calais. She was reportedly questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This is an extraordinarily broad and illiberal part of the law. It can be used to stop anyone at Britain’s borders, even if there is no suspicion that they are involved in terrorism. The individual can be detained and questioned for up to nine hours. There is no right to silence. There is no right to a publicly funded lawyer if the person is at a border. That such a repressive measure was allegedly deployed in the questioning of someone for distributing leaflets, for speech, should horrify anyone who cares about liberty. This effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence, mere words as things to be kept out of the nation, setting a terrible precedent for free speech in this country.
H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.
QotD: Translation error?
Here are two more facts known to many educated people:
1. The Christians did not begin to arrive at a settlement of the question of the divinity of Jesus until surprisingly late – the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and important controversies remained live until the Third Council of Constantinople in 680.
2. The original Aramaic-speaking Christians of Palestine having been effectively wiped out in the aftermath of the Bar Kokba revolt in AD 70, Christianity was re-founded by Paul of Tarsus among speakers of Koine Greek. The entire New Testament is written in Koine Greek.
Now here are two facts generally known only among a handful of specialist scholars. I picked them up through omnivorous reading and did not fully realize their significance for a long time.
3. In other Aramaic sources roughly contemporary with the New Testament, the phrase “Son of God” occurs as an idiom for “guru” or “holy man”. Thus, if Jesus refers to himself as “the son of God”, the Aramaic sense is arguably “the boss holy man”.
4. The Koine Greek of the period, on the other hand, did not have this idiom.
Now, imagine a Koine speaker reading the lost Aramaic source documents of which the Gospels are redactions, with only an indifferent command of the latter language He does not know that “Son of God” is an idiom…
Yes, that’s right. I’m suggesting that Jesus got deified by a translation error!
(Correction: The Bar Kokba revolt was AD 132; I was confusing it with the revolt of AD 70 in which the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed.)
Eric S. Raymond, “Translation Errors”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-02-12.
February 22, 2018
Curse of the FRIDAY THE 13TH I IT’S HISTORY
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 21 Feb 2018On today’s episode we are going to talk about the end of the Templar Order and the famous curse of Jacques de Molay.
