Epictetus is Epic!

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),