I don't know too much about Rome, but the story of Romulus and Remus does strike me. I don't know how important these ancient myths are or their importance within the culture. It does give me reason to pause, however, when a culture's founding tale involves bloodshed, especially between brothers -- it just seems to start a questionable precedence. — Moses

Well, it was a dispute among brothers, which led to bloodshed, but Remus wasn't killed by Romulus. The dispute was over where the city to be known as Rome was to be founded. Remus preferred the Aventine Hill, Romulus the Palatine Hill. The brothers agreed to settle the dispute by recourse to the practice of augury, which involved prediction through the observed behavior of birds (thought to have originated with the Etruscans). I don't know the details of the ritual, but it was performed and Remus saw six birds while Romulus saw 12, meaning, it seems, that the gods chose the Palatine Hill.

Remus refused to accept the result, and commenced building his city on the Aventine. Romulus began building his on the Palatine. Romulus began building a city wall, but while it was being built Remus climbed over it and began to insult his brother. Violence broke out, and one of Romulus' followers killed Remus. Romulus saw to it that his brother was accorded all honors and an appropriate burial.

It's thought that the myth of the brothers was significant to Romans because they first triumphed over adversity together, avoiding death initially by being suckled by a she-wolf, then raised by a shepherd, and succeeding ultimately in gaining revenge against the king who wanted them murdered, knowing their semi-divine origins (through Mars and their human mother). So, unity among Romans led to their success. But Remus broke that unity, and refused to follow the choice of the gods, and so was killed.

. I think a substantial case could be made that Christianity, inherently, is more war-like than Judaism in that they envision a figure of pure evil (the Devil) that must be opposed (usually by force) as opposed to Judaism which has no such equivalent. Christianity is also a religion specifically designed to spread and influence other cultures, as explained in the Gospels. Again, this is not a Jewish quality. In sum, I think Christian violence in that period is reasonably understood as the continuation of the Gospel and not in contrast to it. — Moses

All good points. I've read that there was some effort to convert Gentiles to Judaism during the Empire, but nothing extensive. Frankly, I have no idea if that's true or not. I doubt there was anything extensive or any coordinated effort, though, because you're right--Christians are enjoined to spread Christianity. It ties into the Christian version of what took place at Pentecost after Jesus was crucified, I think. Jews, on the other hand, are notso enjoined, to my knowledge.

Jews were not particularly tolerant of pagan practices, of coursed, as we know from the two great revolts against Roman rule, but except in the case of rioting between Jews and pagans in Alexandria, Jews were reacting to the spread or imposition of pagan religion within Israel itself and not trying to impose Judaism on others or beyond the land they thought they'd been promised.

Intolerance combined with the belief that they were commanded to spread the Gospel would be likely to result in violence. I think you're correct. I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the rather bloodthirsty rhetoric of the Old Testament, it seems. But again, it can be argued that the violence was to be employed in conquering a certain area in particular, as opposed to the entire world.

The Roman Empire even got to name its God: "Jesus" is a Roman name like Brutus, Aurelius, etc. — Art48

Well, no, not really. No "J" in Latin, you see. So it became "Iesus", derived from the Greek spelling, in turn derived from the Aramaic and Hebrew forms, Yeshua or Y'shua.

You might suspect a State such as the Roman Empire would choose a religion that serves it, a religion designed to help the State be strong and be able to defeat its enemies. — Art48

It's appropriate to note that Christianity didn't become the official religion of the Empire until the 4th century C.E. By that time Rome had already reached its greatest extent. In fact, it was somewhat less than its greatest extent, some of Trajan's conquests having been lost or abandoned. So the establishment of the Empire was accomplished while most of the citizens of the Empire worshipped pagan gods, but not one in particular, pagans, unlike Christians, being quite tolerant for the most part. Sol Invictus was favored as the high god for a time, from Aurelian on, but nothing permanent.

But Christianity, once established, was zealous and relentless in assuring its predominance, and was thus imperial in its own way, that way being the suppression of any other beliefs by any means necessary. And of course Christians, when they differed with one another, were inspired to kill off or repress their erring co-religionists, and did so for many centuries. So it may be said Christianity or those who profess to be Christians have always favored war of one sort or another, despite the Gospels, and more in the spirit of the tribal god of the Jews according to the Old Testament.

We spend so much time wiping our behinds, I don't see how we can't know that we each have one. If, then, we each have a behind, it follow there's always one behind us.

Excessive thinking habits are a leftover from our past. — Seeker

There's a parallel here with excessive food consumption as well, — Seeker

Well, there's bound to be fewer leftovers given excessive food consumption, so perhaps excessive thinking isn't that much of a problem. In any case, let's refrain from thinking about it, and not add to any excess, just in case.

You're right, as I was taking too narrow a perspective. What I was thinking of was the debate whether the change of roles in society, as you describe it, is good or bad, "natural" or "unnatural." That doesn't interest me, at least. I think the likelihood is that humanity will change in many respects over time, given advances in technology and population, tribal gods, superstitions and cultural atavism notwithstanding. Assuming we don't manage to destroy ourselves or the planet, ways will have to be created to address those changes in an orderly and, one hopes, equitable fashion.

For me, these issues have little interest beyond their implications for the law. Any qualms people may feel due to religious beliefs, or political or cultural beliefs for that matter, are of concern only if they cause harm, and I mean harm as something beyond hurt feelings. One should do what one can to avoid insulting or disparaging others--that should go without saying, but if it doesn't there are limits to what can be done about it. Something can be done, through the law, in cases of violence, repression or discrimination.

Escape from "existential angst" by denying, rather than affirming, existence – how the Shepherd pacifies the sheep into bleeting happily on their way to slaughter. :mask: — 180 Proof

An excellent point. In which case, the Stoic and Epicurean insights I thought were being repeated are instead being perverted, and used for an entirely different purpose, contra naturam. rather than secundum naturam.

Ancient pagan philosophers made similar statements in recommending the proper way to live centuries before the gospels were written. As guidance in that respect, they may serve that purpose. I'm not sure there's much else which can be said of them.

If the uses to which they've been put since they were written is any indication, though, I think it's difficult to maintain they were intended only as a remedy for "existential angst."

If only Lewis had died in that train wreck, too.

Poor old Lewis. If only he had died in that train wreck, too.

Can't delete, alas.

Dicens, advena fui in terra aliena.
[Moses] :flower: :ok: — javi2541997

I always figured Moses was a Roman. Well, as much as he was a prince of Egypt, anyway.

A genuine word of God would, I think, be very big if written, and very loud if said.

It is ironic that to be someone who has a mind that searches for meaning that the results of that search are often meaningless when related to others. — introbert

Example of irony: Yes. That's certainly ironic.

The same thing applies to white people crying over "reverse racism" whenever some random person on the Internet says something not nice about white people that hurts their fee-fees. Chill out already you privileged fucks. — _db

The appeal to equal treatment is a common dodge indulged in by those obviously better off and better treated than others, who resent being reminded of this and who will do nothing to remedy the situation.

It's an egregious disregard of context. One of my favorite quotes about the law is this, attributed to Anatole France: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread." Ah, irony. How I love you.

Any specific trigger? — Amity

If it has nothing to do with Heidegger, or phenomenology, or antinatalism, or God, it's presumed not to be philosophy in this place. It's your burden to overcome the presumption.

Forgot Nietzsche, dammit.

I tend to think of billionaires, and persons of great wealth, as equivalent to gluttons or hoarders in circumstances where food and resources are unavailable to many others. They have no need of their wealth and property, which serve only their own pleasures. Like gluttons and hoarders, they evoke a kind of disgust or loathing; but gluttons and hoarders often are victims of compulsions, and so may be pitied and assisted.

There shouldn't be billionaires, but they're allowed to exist in the current system.

That of Gregory Hays or Robin Hard. They're more modern translations. Hard's contains correspondence between Marcus and Fronto, his rhetoric teacher, which are interesting.

Remind me Ciceronianus - what is to be virtuous? — Amity

Very Socratic of you. From the Stoic perspective (more specifically from the IEP which gives a decent summary, I think:

The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness. Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing. Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness. Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control. Similarly, the Stoics divide vice into foolishness, injustice, cowardice, intemperance, and the rest. The Stoics further maintained that the virtues are inter-entailing and constitute a unity: to have one is to have them all. They held that the same virtuous mind is wise, just, courageous, and moderate. Thus, the virtuous person is disposed in a certain way with respect to each of the individual virtues. To support their doctrine of the unity of virtue, the Stoics offered an analogy: just as someone is both a poet and an orator and a general but is still one individual, so too the virtues are unified but apply to different spheres of action.

I like the "and the rest."

Hammond suggests that Marcus only advocates the penetration of others' minds all the better to identify their deficiencies.
Also that Marcus just as often dismisses others' thoughts as a distraction.
(Other sections cited as evidence). — Amity

As Hadot and others have noted, what we call The Meditations is an example of Stoic practice; reminding oneself of Stoic maxims and their application to daily life. This leads to the repetition of certain themes and ideas, and doesn't mean that you're obsessed with them.

The opinions of others that are referred to are generally their opinions regarding the Emperor--what they thought of him, what he wanted them to think of him. Whether they think bad of you or good of you, their opinions of you ultimately have nothing to do with how you should live your life (virtuously, of course). You shouldn't act to please others or win their admiration; you shouldn't disturb yourself if they think ill of you. Just be virtuous, regardless of how you're perceived by others.

Hammond should have spent more time playing with his organ. Get it? Tee hee.

"What is religion?" said jesting Ciceronianus; and would not stay for an answer.

Do you really think that if we're not absolutely certain about something we're uncertain about it, i.e. that we can't rely on it, that we're doubtful about it, that it's unknown?
— Ciceronianus

That is the case indeed, either you like it or not. — dimosthenis9

So you doubted you were posting your response to my post when you responded? You were unsure you were doing so--perhaps because you were uncertain you were typing on or using whatever device you used? Or is the fact you responded, and used whatever you used to do so, examples of absolute truths?

Do you doubt you're reading this, or that there is something to be read?

So you think that we are condemned to uncertainty about the general picture? I don't want to admit it but it might probably be the case. — dimosthenis9

Do you really think that if we're not absolutely certain about something we're uncertain about it, i.e. that we can't rely on it, that we're doubtful about it, that it's unknown? I wonder how you live if that's the case. Are you God, or perhaps a good friend of His, to invoke absolutes?

Well no, we can't really know exactly how the external world is.Only what senses tell us. And neither what is really true about the universe and what its actual form is. — dimosthenis9

If we're part of the universe, there is no "external world." There's just the world, and we're part of the world. If you seek absolute truths which aren't "human-ish" then you will have to find another world. We interact with the rest of the world as we must given our capacities and our place in it, and if that means there is no "absolute truth" so be it (so IS it, in fact). You put "absolute truth" beyond our reach in that case, making it insignificant. We cannot know it and have no reason to know it.

I just object to the notion that humans aren't part of the universe, i.e. that we're apart from it in some sense. It's a view which I think fosters, among other things, the belief that we can't really know the universe (sometimes referred to as "the external world"), and so can't really know what's really true about the universe.

The absolute truths that if you remove everything "human-ish" from them, everything phenomenalogical etc they still apply also in universe . — dimosthenis9

Humans are as much a part of the universe as everything else. How's that for an "absolute truth"? Try to remove the "human-ish" from that.

Threads like these make me wish there was no "external world."

Neat. Not true, I would say. But sometimes I prefer neatness to truth. (That's a confession, not a boast.) — Cuthbert

Chesterton was a very glib, amusing fellow, and that sometimes makes his relentless special pleading nearly tolerable.

The law shouldn't and for the most part doesn't treat marriage as anything more than a partnership. Partnerships have property, income, debts; so do marriages. Divorce therefore deals with marriage as a partnership being dissolved. Legal rights and obligations of parents and children aren't dependent on the marital status of parents. A parent has certain rights and obligations whether or not they're married. Children have certain rights regardless of the marital status of their parents.

From the legal standpoint, then, it should make no difference if a marriage is same sex or opposite sex based. Personally, I think what is called marriage should be considered a civil union regardless of the sex of those entering into the union. "Marriage" carries too much baggage, moral and religious. Religions may impose what requirements, rituals and ceremonies needed for the existence of a marriage they may please, but that shouldn't be any concern of the law.

Marriages resulting from incest and marriage to children won't be an issue until incest and sex with minors is legalized.

If you murder, you ought to murder gently.
You cannot murder gently
Therefore, you ought not murder

Because maths tells us that chaos must have structure as free possibility becomes its own system of constraints. — apokrisis

I don't know if this is an assertion based on Peirce's views or on something else. If I recall correctly, though, he thought that chaos would result in structure through the development of what he called "habits" which it seems consist of actions or patterns which have already taken place. But I've always found his thoughts on this issue difficult to comprehend, though very interesting.

I'd keep living until living became intolerable, for one reason or another. Lot's of things to do and see, assuming there's food and drink and shelter. A Ferrari would be nice as well, assuming there's gas available.

Oh, it always comes down to math, doesn't it? A real show-stopper. Who can dispute math? Not me, God (or is it math?) knows.

Why do you keep framing this as a problem of "something rather than nothing" when that has already been agreed as a self-contradicting metaphysics? — apokrisis

So drop the "something rather than nothing". It's the first thing to get chucked out here. — apokrisis

I was under the impression from one or two posts in this thread it was a subject of discussion.

The question becomes why something and not everything? Why a state of structured order and not some wild material chaos? — apokrisis

In what sense is the question "Why is there a state of structured order instead of some wild material chaos?" significantly less problematic than the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Instead the universe emerged as a persisting stable structure because it discovered reason. It was organised by the inevitability of a rational or logical structure. The cosmos is itself the expression of evolutionary reasonableness. — apokrisis

I don't know why the universe emerged. I suspect that's not something we'll come to know through philosophy. Through physics or cosmology, perhaps. It makes sense to me that once it emerged, constituents of the universe interacted and certain things took place as a result of that interaction and continue to take place, and that we're able at least to some extent to determine why and how they took or take place. There is, then, a structure. We can make certain inferences from that, some philosophical. Keeping with the Stoic theme, for example, we may infer that wisdom is that we live "according to nature" (what we perceive to be the reason or intelligence suggested by the structure of the universe).

I don't think we can say that the universe came into being in order for the structure to be realized, though. You may have no issue with that; I'm not sure.

We may be able to theorize that "existence is evolutionary"; we may be able to ascertain a tendency toward organization. I have problems thinking of that as explaining why there is something rather than nothing, however. Does the universe exist in order to evolve, or does the evolution take place because it exists? The super-explanation I was thinking of, which I think is the goal of the question necessitated by the form of the question (why something instead of nothing) would be an explanation along the lines of "there's something because the universe was created for a reason." In other words, the question presumes a transcendent cause with an end in view--not a something which always is instead of nothing.

I personally sypmpathize with the view that any deity or divinity is immanent rather than transcendent, along the lines of what the ancient Stoics thought. They thought the universe organized and guided by a Divine Reason represented by fire, itself a part of the universe. I don't know if we can determine a purpose or reason, because of which there must be something, but we may be able to determine a tendency or process, and speculate from there.

Reality seems more a process - a developing structure - than just some eternal set of material objects.

So existence might seem a brute fact, but persistence requires it contextual explanation. — apokrisis

Accepting this, I still don't understand what assuming "nothing", whatever that is meant to mean, as--seemingly--an alternative to existence or persistence, does beyond supporting a belief that something in the nature of a super-explanation, which doesn't merely explain why a phenomenon or event exists or take place, which may be resolved by scientific inquiry or even common sense, is required to account for the universe and every part of it. There must be a super-explanation, or reason or purpose, for everything, because otherwise (instead) there would be nothing.

It strikes me that the question, as stated, should never arise. Why assume that "something" requires an explanation because it exists rather than or instead of nothing?

One might reasonably inquire why X exists, i.e. seek an explanation of its existence. This is something we do all the time. We arrive at an answer, or we don't. But it seems that this question, with its assumption of an alternative to something called "nothing", doesn't really seek an explanation, but instead searches for a purpose.

Why is there something rather than nothing ? — Deus

"Rather than"? Do you think there's something called "nothing" which would exist if there wasn't something?

Do you mean to ask "Why is there something?"

It's quite simple. No persons, no religions.

I can confirm that this member asked to be banned. — Jamal

Yes? Diogenes the Dog, when reminded that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, responded that he had sentenced them to remain in Sinope.