Friday, March 8, 2013

Epictetus Fullofshitus


I am so sick and tired of the god thing. 
I miss the ‘olden days’.
This is gonna be décousu I can tell!
First the god thing I guess.

Let’s start with Epictetus now.  I was kind of boiling in the bathtub where I was presumably sitting in in order to RELAX reading the golden sayings of Epictetus part of a much broader liberal education apparently called the Harvard Classics, assembled by a dénommé  Charles W. Eliot in 1909.

Well maybe in 1909 you could get a liberal education but I doubt one can get one these days because in 1909 it was a different world, a world with no television and no internet.  I read of people like Dickens and Mark Twain who have read Thomas Carlyle’s long (and probably very tedious) French Revolution not ONCE but MANY times over and over.   
Also back then many a scholar and polymath were well-versed into every single old Latin and Greek writing from Ovid to Homer, from Cicero to Plato, from Horace to Sophocles, Virgil to Aristotle.

Anyway back to Epictetus now the father of so-called Stoics.  Here is one thing I said yesterday about him:

I only have 2 words 
for someone who wants me to be 
a better slave, 
a better soldier:

FUCK YOU!

Assumptions like “so-called non-existent gods know better” piss me off.  Plus the deceiving translation of Zeus into God is to say the least misleading. 

God, Yahweh, Allah, and Zeus are all different MYTHS, different LIES, with different attributes and qualities.

Add on his all-knowing, all –present daimons here and we have a nice mixture of Greek and Christian mythological mash.  There is no such thing in the bible as the notion that each one of us has a guardian angel but it is a clear Greek mythological teaching that we all have a personal daimon, a spirit to look over us.

Nevertheless he has placed by every man a guardian, every man’s Demon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived. For to what better and more careful guardian could He have entrusted each of us? When, then, you have shut the doors and made darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is within, and your Demon is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
Epictetus Discourses Chapter 14

So when I hear of how a proud US G.I. survived years of horrors in horrific Vietnam camps (insert visions of Deer Hunter here) I am not overly impressed to begin with since the horrors were somewhat self-inflicted, choosing a way of life I totally oppose.

And now again we have so-called science, psychology, fornicating with mythologies one more time where Epictetus is one of the champions of Albert Ellis and his therapy style.  

Some of you will still remember my rant on
Marsha M. Linehan fornicating with Buddhism’s Mindfulness.
DBT, REBT and all the other bastards BT one can think of. Let’s not forget CBT now where your mind is apparently a computer: garbage in, garbage out.

If one tries to eliminate all possible myths and lies out of his life one is left with nearly nothing and utterly isolated from so-called normal society. I mean try so find some form of help somewhere that is not FORCING you to

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be


Why Oh Why Can’t I conceive it/him/her to be non-existent now?

I mean it would be impossible to communicate without using some sort of mythological metaphors now like this is hell or it is a Sisyphean task etc.  It is a very concise way of communicating, much shorter than to explain the whole story of Sisyphus before using the expression anyway.

I do understand some Stoics principles and I do yearn for some stoicism at times the high and lows of my epicurean life get a little hard on the system at times, like going ballistic over dogs barking and such other disturbances in the force.  But the whole base of it is ruined now, totally ruined, because if the reason for acceptance is in order to properly

worshit some godhole 

somewhere, 

especially when one can fill the fucking hole 
with whatever he/she 
wants it, 
conceives it 
to be 

well it is all BULLSHIT then.

The way I see it I guess is Stoic equals flatline, Epicurian equals high mountains and low valleys of passions, burnings. 

What is moderation called then?

2 comments:

  1. when it comes to the god concept I stand with Yoda
    Do or Do Not
    There is no Try!
    A puny human being cannot invent a god as he simply wishes or conceives it, a god that can be conceived is no god at all in fact.
    Plus if there was ONE god as monotheists insists he would be
    I AM THAT I AM... some sort of cosmic Popeye..one cannot create him, reshape him and what not... I would love to achieve the goals of Epictetus without the basic principle context, it'a bit like wanting to be an atheist A.A. or N.A. or what not... quite impossible because THEY do NOT give you the option of NOT conceiving him, have any god you want but have ONE...so Epictetus was simply deluded and yes delusion can take you through hardship if it is what one wants... so does heroin too...it's a matter of choice really
    It often seems to me that the ultimate goal of all these people is to create subservient men for the purpose and profit of a smarter class at the cost of many's humanity... a world where we are all equal is as unthinkable as a drug without profit really

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