Does atheist stoicism exists?

Then I'm stumped.

Without God you can't have objective morality and there's no point to acting stoic.

Yes. It becomes mindfulness and CBT, all normie tier forms of spirituality

Wow, what a terrible thread.

No, because from a naturalist perspective you can't not act according to 'nature' so all the Stoics do is spook themselves according to some arbitrary meme.

You have to believe in some form of divine order that can be moved away from, which is a ridiculous idea.

Epicureans were more intelligent.

>le spook
>this whole post
Die, autist. Cancerous fucking retards, all of you.

He is right though. If you don't believe in some higher order, how can you live according to one? Stoicism is far more than just: "This is fine".

Wew, you need to work on that apatheia.

spooky

What is it about Stoicism in particular that compels retards who don't understand it at all to give their opinions on it?

When they ambitiously aimed to improve their life they read book one of meditations and want to show off their knowledge

You mean the people why try to sneak their reddit atheism into the togaboy lifestyle?

>their reddit atheism
Only reddipol is ashamed of atheism. For non redditors reddit isn't part of the equation you overcompensating redditor

I mean people like this:

It has little to do with shame, but trying to turn Greek pantheism into atheism is silly.

Stoicism relies on it for its foundation.

I was just trying to be helpful by going off the closest possible thing I could think of. No need to be arrogant.

True. I didn't mean to defend this stoics were atheists shit.

You can be an atheist and still follow stoic virtues.

Philiophiclly, taking god from the equation would cause issues in stoicism. That isn't to say an atheist can't be stoic. They'd just have to ponder why their stoic lifestyle is good, and develop have more secular ideas than the original stoics.

Buddhism
Confucianism
Branches of hinduism
They had, and it evolved, into more supernatural stuff, but those motherfuckers were woke in 1,000 BC.

The Stoic virtues are virtues because they are in accordance with some sort of divine order.

If you take away that order they become arbitrary. So the justification for certain Stoic-like practises would need an entirely different foundation from a secular perspective.

How would you do that?

>You can be an atheist and still follow stoic virtues.
Thanks for that great insight.

Modern Stoicism is an absolute joke. I joined the movement early on when I was becoming a Classicist in my undergraduate. As I learned Greek and Latin, I spent more time with the ancients and less time with the moderns. As such, it became ever apparent how the modern movement soiled an actual and robust philosophic movement. The Stoics must be read in tandem with their contemporaries, especially in opposition to the Epicureans.

Aside, Lady Philosophy speaks about why her robes are torn:
>And when, one after the other, the Epicurean herd, the Stoic, and the rest, each of them as far as in them lay, went about to seize the heritage he left, and were dragging me off protesting and resisting, as their booty, they tore in pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands, and, clutching the torn pieces, went off, believing that the whole of me had passed into their possession.
>Boethius, Consolations of Philosophy

Ultimately, the answer to your question is this:
Or close enough:
The main issue with modern Stoicism is that it seeks to reestablish a tradition by scripture alone. Sound familiar? Regardless, one needs to understand the Stoic arguments for God, and what that God is, and how that God interplays with their ethics and logic. The Stoics thought that theology, the study of god, was the crown of the study of physics, i.e. know how nature and the cosmos work so you can know the very movements of God. What atheistic Stoicism does is remove the physics and logic from their ethical system, making it unsupported axioms.

Nietzsche's critique remains the best one:
>Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be "in accordance with the Stoa," and you'd like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it -- as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of Stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you're no long capable of seeing nature as anything else...
>Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

What Nietzsche asks of the Stoics is too look at Nature honestly and then interpret philosophy. Yet, here we are in a self-proclaimed scientifically driven society (plagued by Scientism), but rejecting any ethic it could suppose (See Hume; Is-Ought). On the flip, there are the Stoics who are living life according to the Stoa, and then interpreting Nature after that ethic. The divinity of Nature bridges the gap between Is and Ought, but then the Atheist Stoic blows that bridge and then maintains the gap, but leaps across it any way.

See, user, the vapid-ass worldviews of the west leave one unable to divorce ethics from spiritual voodoo. It makes eastern philosophies (especially ones which outright describe themselves as atheist or consider any deities they endorse as purely metaphysical devices as a means to an end) quite bizarre when you learn about them.

For example, confucianism was a reaction to the sort of nihilistic religion of taoism, which held that men are phenomena of the Universe made out of the five elemental flavors of Chi, there is no good and evil, etc. This made for aloof hermits and an unordered populace. In China, order was easy to accomplish given the geography (vs. in the Balkanized west), and it had strong advantages. Confucianism held that social harmony is the ultimate good. It used concepts of "heaven", but it deprecated any exploration of heaven or deities there. Confucius said that observing religious rituals was important not because what they were about is real or relevant but because the order they bring to civil life is important. It was similar to stoicism in that the cultivation of discipline and skills is indicated over the fulfillment of desire, which isn't a durable basis for well-being or even happiness (and here it borrows heavily from buddhism). Instead, one must be selfless for the sake of society so that society may function more efficiently (don't think this Orwellianism was just the advent of communism; it's ancient in China). If one doesn't contribute to a better-functioning self ad society, it's not that they'll go to hell -- for all intents and purposes, when one dies, nothing happens. Rather, their lives and their societies won't work as well, which is an ill in and of itself completely within the domain of the secular.

Good post.

I think Epicureanism would be way more suitable for a modern practice because the 'feels good man' foundation holds up well in a secular world. But I guess Epicureanism doesn't speak to the imagination as much and is ultimately a rather boring thing to posture with and less easily romanticised.

>not being Camusian
>not embracing the absurd
>not being happy like Sissyphus

Absurdism is just a less intelligent form of scepticism desu.

Start with the Greeks.

Sorry man, you're right. I am just a little upset that Stoicism is always so unfairly treated on this board and elsewhere.

I tried it and it doesn't work. Stoicism alone is not very far from Christianity so I took those steps. Feels a lot better to be staid when you know there's a purpose for it. However I will say that atheist stoicism is a lot better than atheist nihilism or hedonism.

>not having read Camus
>commenting on him
>not embracing the absurd
>not being happy like Sissyphus

But a consequentialist justification of stoicism as serving social stability would be directly opposed to Stoic ethics themselves.

I've read him, I found nothing interesting there that was in any way original.

His novels are comfy though, he should've stuck to those.

I'm a nihilist from an "objective" perspective. Like, of course none of this means anything, senpai. Subjectively, which is how I actually live moment by moment, I have ethics and opinions, consciously contrived or subconsciously conditioned. A sort of "stoicism" arises out of those. I like doing what's healthy because it's the most rational choice. I like doing things efficiently. I like to feel useful. I like to improve myself. All that shit.

But that's just because I'm a social ape with some conscientious autism; none of it will matter in the end.

Fantastic post.

Read Beyond Good and Evil and stop calling yourself a stoicist you fucking piece of shit. Words have meaning.

>I like doing what's healthy because it's the most rational choice.
Nonsense.

I will believe you because I don't know nearly as much as you guys seem to about Greek philosophies. When I think "stoic", I just think "ascetic".
As far as asceticism goes, you can do little better than buddhism. The half-lives of positive emotions are as fleeting and disruptive to greater virtue as negative emotions',
there is no self, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta
existence is suffering, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha
cutting the knot by rejecting worldly pleasure, etc.
Particularly, the (waning) more secular branches of buddhism (e.g., Hinayana) serve as examples of such "stoicism" with the absence of "divinity", which is why I brought it up.

I agree, there's much more interesting stuff going on in the Buddhists traditions than what Stoics have to offer.