dian-and-epicurus-gods
馃悧
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Dian | He/they | 21 y/o | Sideblog for Epicurean theology
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dian-and-epicurus-gods 1 month ago
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Praise to Epicurus
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"For if we must speak as the acknowledged grandeur of the things itself demands, a god he was, a god, most noble Memmius, who first found out that plan of life which is now termed wisdom, and who by trained skill rescued life from such great billows and such thick darkness and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so brilliant a light.
13 Compare the godlike discoveries of others in old times: Ceres is famed to have pointed out to mortals corn, and Liber the vine-born juice of the grape; though life might well have subsisted without these things, as we are told some nations even now live without them.
18 But a happy life was not possible without a clean breast; wherefore with more reason this man is deemed by us a god, from whom come those sweet solaces of existence which even now are distributed over great nations and gently soothe men鈥檚 minds.
But unless the breast is cleared, what battles and dangers must then find their way into us in our own despite! What poignant cares inspired by lust then rend the distressful man, and then also what mighty fears! And pride, filthy lust and wantonness? What disasters they occasion! And luxury and all sorts of sloth?
49 He therefore who shall have subdued all these and banished them from the mind by words, not arms, shall he not have a just title to be ranked among the gods?
52 And all the more so that he was wont to deliver many precepts in beautiful and god-like phrase about the immortal gods themselves and to open up by his teachings all the nature of things."
From Book V of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
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dian-and-epicurus-gods 2 months ago
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I truly consider that so long as one doesn't fear the gods and is free from harmful superstition (basically that their relationship to their divine is fully anxiety-free) then they are following the first cure of Epicurus fully, even if they believe the gods intervene or what not
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dian-and-epicurus-gods 2 months ago
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Praise to Venus Physica
"MOTHER of the Aeneadae, darling of men and gods, increase-giving Venus, who beneath the gliding signs of heaven fillest with thy presence the ship-carrying sea, the corn-bearing lands, since through thee every kind of living things is conceived, rises up and beholds the light of the sun."
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book I
(and a pic of Venus taken by me ;))
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dian-and-epicurus-gods 2 months ago
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"First of all, believe that a god is an incorruptible and happy being, as the common opinion of the world dictates; and attach to your theology nothing which is inconsistent with incorruptibility or with happiness; and think that a deity is invested with everything which is able to preserve this happiness, in conjunction with incorruptibility. For there are gods; for our knowledge of them is distinct. But they are not of the character which people in general attribute to them; for they do not pay a respect to them which accords with the ideas that they entertain of them. And that man is not impious who discards the gods believed in by the many, but he who applies to the gods the opinions entertained of them by the many. For the assertions of the many about the gods are not anticipations, but false opinions. And in consequence of these, the greatest evils which befall wicked men, and the benefits which are conferred on the good, are all attributed to the gods; for they connect all their ideas of them with a comparison of human virtues, and everything which is different from human qualities, they regard as incompatible with the divine nature."
- Epicurus, Letter to Menoikeus
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