Life is pointless, dying is meaningless, a duty we must all attend to – sooner or later, makes no difference. No fear.
“Truly, life is only pointless if one does not believe in an afterlife. If no such afterlife existed, why would “reason” or “nature” even matter? They both are bound to death, and are hence, meaningless. Why hold importance in something that is bound to cease existing? There is no point to that, hence if there were no afterlife, life should be about fulfilling one’s desires, to whatever end, a brief moment in time wherein a laugh might be made, a pleasure moan here, a death rattle there, and then time ends. Is that what life is?
I do not believe so, I utterly refuse to believe so, for I am a Stoic and Stoics do indeed hold that there is an afterlife, albeit not as conventional as other religions hold. To live a life according to reason, they say, is to imitate the gods, and to die after living such a life, one’s soul would become part of the “logos””
No pagan stoic believed in some magical salvation that occured once your lungs and heart stopped, your brain turned to gel; most were functionally atheist, as I am. The metaphysics of Heraclitus states that there is only matter, constantly shifting, and that you are literally reincarnated (not your personality, but the atoms) as you shift into wormfood, eventually comprise greater organisms and structures again and are absorbed by plants, eaten by animals and defecated out again and again.
The stoics who were influenced by Plato literally believed in unending reincarnation of the soul into a new mortal form at death – no resting place, only eternal recurrence.
Aristotle and traditional Greek thought believed in Hades – which was a dark, depressing, cold, resting place under the surface of the earth where your ‘dust’ turned into a shade-like form of your earthly self. In Hades there is no judgment – neither reward nor punishment. It is not a place to look forward to. Hades is the place where many Greek heroes travel to in Homer’s epic poems. This plane of existence is the only one that matters – since no matter what happens everyone is going to Hades: the most vile, the most virtuous. The fate is the same.
Your fate on earth is the paste used to patch walls, or if you manage to sink lower, fossil fuel. You will cease to exist, there is nothing else, no soul and no palace in the sky. Lets assume for a moment that there is a christian salvation. How would you know that? Even if a mortal could experience that, how could that mortal convey or explain it to the rest of the tribe? There is no way, so you must live as if such things did not exist, even if they possibly could. Anything could possibly exist, believing in arbitrary things is a form of nonthinking, and its called faith.
Life only becomes meaningful when we attach meaning to it, it is inherently meaningless, and belief in imaginary gods belittles the wonder of nature and the cosmos. Existence is much more complicated than the binary, dictated and illogical world of the canon. The morality presented in the canons of the abrahamic faiths is a warped one that establishes a fierce binary world of black and white while enforcing illogical, arbitrary rules like the genocide of nonbelievers, homosexuals and fiesty women.
The virtues of temperance, fortitude, prudence and justice are important to me. They appeal in my opinion to the natural morality of humans, which have evolved from ape times into our modern incarnation. That being said, there is no inherent virtue. I have to select virtue for the sake of virtue and than persue them with dutiful resolve.
Its better to talk about temperance, prudence, fortitude and justice without bringing up unnecesary speak of ‘stoicism’ – the actual ideas are more important than the labels. Even better, let your actions speak for you and provide yourself as an example to the world.
Prudence (wisdom)
Fortitude (courage)
Temperance (self-control/moderation/’know thyself’ and ‘nothing in excess’)
Justice (righteousness/honesty/truth)
What’s more important is what is being said, not who said it.