>>18247300
Christianity is the fanfiction rewrite of Stoicism where the Logos gets isekai'd as a carpenter to fix the shitty plot.

>>18247300
You have to have down syndrome to ask such a stupid ass question

>>18247300
>Is stoicism basically the secular version of christianity?
Yes.
>>18247305
Cope.
>>18247309
Cope.

>>18247314
I'll bite. What makes it secular Christianity?

>>18247300
Even if it is
>Christianity without supreme authority that justifies all its beliefs and claims
Loses all its luster really, it's no more morally justified than being a hedonist goober

>>18247300
Stoicism isn't secular. It can be secularized if you pick and choose it just right but the supernatural overtones will always be implicit.

But you are correct in spotting the similarity. I think Paul Tilich comments on it in "The Courge to Be", where he points out that both tackle the existential question human existence poses from a somewhat similar angle, but Christianity goes one step further in terms of not just passive suffering but active courage. Or at least that's what I remember from the first few chapters.

>>18247323
See:

>>18247323
See:>>18247336

Fuck

>>18247336
>Paul Tilich
Why are taking satanfighting techbro seriously?

>>18247323
Be humble. Live simply. Avoid evil whenever possible. Don't let anger and revenge control you. Help the poor and those who suffer. Be empathetic. Forgive whenever possible. Don't let worldly pleasures control you. Prevent injustices... These things are often found in Stoic texts; if I told you they were in the Bible, you'd probably believe me.

>>18247300
https://solascripturachristianliberty.blogspot.com/2022/03/stoicism-in-early-christianity.html

>>18247347
Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc all have the same ethical overlap as well. Is everything essentially just Christianity?

>>18247373
Yes

>>18247373
Yes, everything goes back to Christianity.

>>18247347
Thank you for this post anon

>>18247373
Christianity is just Dharma. They mistranslated emptiness as hell and non-attachment as original sin, the whole one son of God thing was a massive localization error for Buddha-nature in all beings.

It lacks the most important defining trait of christianity though, servile worship of jews.

>>18247389
>servile worship of jews.
Where in the Bible does it say that Christians must serve and worship Jews?

>>18247383
>They mistranslated emptiness as hell
"cast into [emptiness] where the fire never goes out" that's what you think was the original?
>mistranslated... non-attachment as original sin
How does this make sense? Non-attachment made Adam and Eve lie? One would expect the exact opposite.

>>18247401
> One would expect the exact opposite.
It was an opposite in the Bible, isn't it? Lie created the sin, not the other way around.

>>18247404
The original sin was eating the forbidden fruit and gaining knowledge they were unprepared for, resulting in them lying to God, blaming each other etc. This sounds like attachment as far as I understand the term. Detachment doesn't make you blame "the woman you gave me!"

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>>18247300
I do wonder how much of early Christianity comes from Hellenized Jews trying to sell their Hellenized beliefs to non-Hellenized Jews, or else to claim that the Jews had it all first even if that's questionable.

"We shall never desist from working for the common good, helping one another, and even our enemies, till our helping hand is stricken with age." — Seneca, De Otio

"God is near you, he is with you, he is within you. This is what I mean, Lucilius: a holy spirit indwells within us, one who marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. As we treat this spirit, so are we treated by it. Indeed, no man can be good without the help of God. Can one rise superior to fortune unless God helps him to rise?" — Seneca, Epistle 41.

Vice, Lucilius, is what I wish you to proceed against, without limit and without end. For it has neither limit nor end. If any vice rend your heart, cast it away from you. And if you cannot be rid of it any other way, pluck out your heart also. —Seneca, Epistle 51

>>18247432
>how much ... comes from Hellenized Jews...claim that the Jews had it all first
Seeing that Christianity often presented less than popular answers to Greek philosophical questions, not much.
>get rid of vice
>common humanity with enemies
>divinity within you
Fair. But one would be equally in their right to wonder whether Seneca wasn't just "claiming he had it all first" while rehashing wisdom common to most mystical traditions around the world. Which would be a stretch, too.

>>18247445
The final form of Christianity would be an, often awkward imo, syncretization between the views of more and less Hellenized Jews. And it isn't just the vague abstract ideas that I see as commonalities, but often specific phrasing and metaphors used, like Seneca saying to pluck out your heart if that's the only way to get rid of vice, similar to Jesus saying to pluck out your eyes, hands, feet if necessary. Though determining which direction the meme-transfer might go would depend on whether you accept the traditional or scholarly dating of the gospels.

>>18247531 (cont.)
Other examples of possible intertextuality:

“If,” our adversary may say, “you wish to imitate the gods, then bestow benefits upon the ungrateful as well as the grateful; for the sun rises upon the wicked as well as the good, the seas are open even to pirates.” —Seneca, On Benefits

vs.

"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous." (Matthew 5:44-45)

So in context Matthew is partly disagreeing with Seneca here (as he might, being the most pro-Jewish of the gospels), taking the role of Seneca's hypothetical "adversary". But Seneca goes on to say,

"In the case of him who has the vice of ingratitude just as he has every other, a wise man will bestow a benefit, because if he sets aside all such men there will be no one left for him to bestow it on. As for the ungrateful man who habitually misapplies benefits and acts so by choice, he will no more bestow a benefit upon him than he would lend money to a spendthrift..."

Which aligns well with Paul's ideas about salvation as I understand them, so that, on the one hand, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but, on the other hand, wrongdoers won't inherit the kingdom of God.

>>18247300
No, Stoics were pagans and stoic emperors like Marcus Aurelius literally persecuted Christians

>>18247537 (cont.)
"The wise man will not be angry with sinners. Why not? Because he knows that no one is born wise, but becomes so: he knows that very few wise men are produced in any age, because he thoroughly understands the circumstances of human life. Now, no sane man is angry with nature: for what should we say if a man chose to be surprised that fruit did not hang on the thickets of a forest, or to wonder at bushes and thorns not being covered with some useful berry? No one is angry when nature excuses a defect. The wise man, therefore, being tranquil, and dealing candidly with mistakes, not an enemy to but an improver of sinners, will go abroad every day in the following frame of mind:—"Many men will meet me who are drunkards, lustful, ungrateful, greedy, and excited by the frenzy of ambition." He will view all these as benignly as a physician does his patients." —Seneca, De Ira

>>18247541 (cont.)
Mark 2:16-17
When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician but those who are sick; I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

(Mark's Jesus uses the same metaphor as Seneca around the same topic)

Matthew 7:16
By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

(Again Matthew uses the same imagery as Seneca, but goes a different direction with it)

Mark 11:12-14
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry.Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it.

(Perhaps a deliberate playful response to Seneca saying that no sane man gets angry with nature and bringing up for comparison the situation of not finding fruit where there's no reason to expect it, though this passage also has old testament connections and serves a symbolic purpose in relation to the cleansing of the temple)

>>18247538
>Marcus Aurelius literally persecuted Christians
That may not have happened. For one thing, Tertullian who should've been around to know about it counts Marcus as a protector of Christians, and for more see
https://donaldrobertson.name/2017/01/13/did-marcus-aurelius-persecute-the-christians/

>>18247531
>>18247537
>The final form of Christianity would be an, often awkward imo, syncretization between the views of more and less Hellenized Jew
That is the premise secular scholars usually start out with and often spend their entire careers rationalizing in hindsight, yes. But like in most humanities, it is an unfalsifiable fad that lasts thanks to inertia and convenience rather than merit.
>Seneca saying to pluck out your heart if that's the only way to get rid of vice, similar to Jesus saying to pluck out your eyes, hands, feet if necessary
And it does sound similar on the surface. But since the Bible considers the heart to contain a person's inner-most being, plucking it out would make no sense even symbolically.
>Love your enemies in action, the sun shines on all
Pretty close, but like I said - to conclude that one spawned the other is more of an assumption than a reasonable conclusion given the evidence, such as "love your enemies" predating Seneca in the Jewish canon. At some point one has to ask if the theories they construct around the text aim to better understand the text or better explain it away.

>>18247541
>The wise man will not be angry with sinners.
>Those who are well have no need of a physician
This tracks neither textually nor thematically. Jesus did show anger in the Gospels and here he doesn't address his emotional disposition whatsoever.
>Matthew uses the same imagery as Seneca, but goes a different direction with it
Which makes it a different metaphor.
>Perhaps a deliberate playful response to Seneca
Pretty much no reason at all to suspect this.

>>18247569
>Pretty much no reason at all to suspect this.
I think it's easier to start to start suspect things like this if you have the idea that the author of Mark was a decently literate and clever allegorical myth writer (who even *wants* the reader to know they're reading allegorical myth!) rather than a compiler of oral lore, which is what I think, but I admit that the dominant scholarly opinion is still that there's probably some real oral lore about a historical Jesus in there. I can only say that I don't think the consensus will hold up indefinitely, especially as Christianity, at least in its current form, becomes a less poweful force in the world.

>>18247585
The consensus will shift based on what is politicall expedient, as it did up until now. The entire point of having the critical method at all was that humanities get to pretend that they are being "objective" by treating the text as an object that can be divorced from subjective intentions (like hard sciences do). And the evolutional hypothesis of religions, where you get to assume that similarity in form infers adaptation of content, provides a similar benefit. Suddenly, those who want to explain theology away from a text get to do so under a convincing guise of objectivity. But even among Christians I sometimes observe a negative correlation between understanding the text and time dedicated to scholarship.

>>18247600
>But even among Christians I sometimes observe a negative correlation between understanding the text and time dedicated to scholarship
That would depend on taking your own understanding as a yardstick, right? But as a non-Christian I would agree in that from view dedicated Christian apologists must spend huge amounts of time studying only to become better at arriving at wrong conclusions.

>>18247347
What part of that remotely maps onto Christianity?

>>18247604
*from my view

>>18247604
>your own understanding as a yardstick
In some cases, but I sometimes don't have to measure them against this at all, since the reading these people produce is either incredibly convoluted (having to sustain their biases) or incredibly obvious, to the point where I could ask an illiterate Romanian tomato farmer for his reading and it would be more comprehensive or outright more valid.
Biblical scholarship has always inadvertently given its students tools to project their ideas into the text. But in the past decades it became intentional and I'm seeing people who don't have any business re-shaping the text taking their shots at it.
>wrong conclusions
What makes them wrong?

>>18247373
all of them are teachings to help you live a good life. so yes there is a lot of overlap.
the differences you will find is due to cultural differences because of the region. it makes sense the chinese in the mountains came to the same conclusion in a different manner than the roman's who found greek philsophy kino

>>18247626
>What makes them wrong?
Well, I said I was non-Christian, so to me thinking Christianity is correct would be a wrong conclusion. But an in-depth argument about that would derail the thread from its less overdone and more specific topic of the relationship between Christianity and Stoicism, so It'd probably be better for anons just take their perspectives on deeper topics like that for granted in their posts rather than defend them here.

>>18247300
>secular version of christianity?
Isn't that just Protestantism?

>>18247708
kek

One interesting idea the Stoics and Christianity had in common is that the world will end in fire, though it looks like the Stoics thought no one survive the fire, not even the immortals.

"And when the time shall come for the world to be blotted out in order that it may begin its life anew, these things will destroy themselves by their own power, and stars will clash with stars, and all the fiery matter of the world that now shines in orderly array will blaze up in a common conflagration.Then also the souls of the blest, who have partaken of immortality, when it shall seem best to God to create the universe anew – we, too, amid the falling universe, shall be added as a tiny fraction to this mighty destruction, and shall be changed again into our former elements." —Consolation of Marcia


"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be destroyed with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed." — 2 Peter 3:10

Also from Seneca's Consolation of Marcia, though it doesn't represent a standard Stoic view:

"It is merely the outward semblance of your son that has perished, his likeness, and that not a very good one; he himself is immortal, and is now in a far better state, set free from the burden of all that was not his own, and left simply by himself: all this apparatus which you see about us of bones and sinews, this covering of skin, this face, these our servants the hands, and all the rest of our environment, are but chains and darkness to the soul: they overwhelm it, choke it, corrupt it, fill it with false ideas, and keep it at a distance from its own true sphere: it has to struggle continually against this burden of the flesh, lest it be dragged down and sunk by it. It ever strives to rise up again to the place from whence it was sent down on earth: there eternal rest awaits it, there it will behold what is pure and clear, in place of what is foul and turbid."