In this episode, Aeric brings his Great Conversations reading to City on a Hill! Is stoicism a viable ideology for Christians?

NOTES:

Epictetus is a Stoic philosopher whose ideas are very, very common today.

Epictetus quotes:

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”

“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

RECAP & TAKEAWAYS:

Stoicism may be helpful for an individual who is facing adversity but it fails when you have any kind of team or community.

Like modern liberalism, stoicism focuses on the individual and defines freedom as individual expression and the absence of external constraints.

Love and community depend on constraints.

Stoicism, like so many ideologies we have examined, fails to account for enough of reality to be a viable ideology to live by.

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MUSIC:

Little Lily Swing, Tri-Tachyon, Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International, https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Tri-Tachyon/the-kleptotonic-ep/little-lily-swing

Sorry, Comfort Fit, Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Germany (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 DE),