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THE STOIC PHILOSOPHER
A quarterly eJournal published by the
Marcus Aurelius School
of the College of Stoic Philosophers
APR/MAY/JUN 2019: Issue # 30
Founding Editor: Erik Wiegardt
“Coming to Reason”
This quarter, we have essays written by two students of the College of Stoic Philosophers. Although
they have ended up on the same path of virtue, aretē, their lives began in profoundly different ways. It
is only in the intensity of their efforts to follow reason that their stories can be viewed as similar or the
same.
The first essay was written by Scott Stoddard, a Marcus Aurelius School student as partial fulfillment of
the requirements of his third term. It begins in the midst of a crisis of faith that took him away from
“The Order,” an extreme form of Mormonism, into a new world and life he had never known. The
actual essay is 18 pages in length, and after the two pages presented here there is a hyperlink for you
to click on that will take you to the complete essay located in the Scholarch's Permanent Collection.
The second is the “Know Thyself” essay written by David Lundmark, a College of Stoic Philosophers
applicant, as part of his acceptance into the School of Essential Studies. This student was born into the
heart of Upper-Middle America with intellectual opportunities and influences early in life that the first
essay writer would have never experienced or imagined. His essay in its entirety is included here.
Erik Wiegardt, Founding editor
<<<>>>
Polygamy, Faith, and Reason
by Scott Stoddard
I wanted desperately to believe in the Order. Every dream I'd ever had, every plan, every thought, had
been about the Kingdom of God, and where I fit in it. I grew up very much into the whole thing. At the
time I felt that if the Order was not true, I had nothing to live
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for, and wanted to die. At the same time
I could no longer believe. I would sit and think about what I should do. I wanted to know absolutely for
certain the truth about the Order. I used to think that I should just fast until I either starved to death,
or until God showed me the truth. This was kind of a fantasy thing because I knew I wasn't actually
going to starve myself completely to death when it came down to it.
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In June of 1980, I spent a sleepless night trying to decide what to do next. I decided that I would go up
in the mountains and fast and pray for one week. I'd experienced intense indoctrination which I knew
would cause guilt if I left the Order while I still held doubts about its truth. I decided that if God was
going to show me, one week of fasting, prayer and study should be enough, and if not, he really
couldn't expect me to put up with the injustice any longer. He would know what I was expecting, and
if he still wanted me in his kingdom, he'd know what I needed in order to stay. If I would have known it
to be right, I could have put up with nearly anything. At daylight I headed into the mountains.
The day was June 12, 1980. I had recently turned twenty-four years old. The entry in my journal from
that day reads in part:
The main reason I am up here is because my testimony of the Order is gone, and I don't even
know if I believe in God...
Anyway either God exists or he doesn't and either the Order is right or it's not. I hope to find
out.
...I hope one week of my life is not too much for the [coal] mine to spare me.
...The thing most people don't understand is that man needs something to believe in
and most people just take what's there handy. I know how it is because I need to believe in the
Order desperately and yet my mind won't really let me.
I spent a week up in the mountains with no food. I went several days without water. I went to a place
we called “Up on top.” It was sort of a high plateau with lots of roads going to the heads of many
canyons.
I had the back seat of my Blazer unbolted so it could be pulled out. At night I’d build a fire and sit on
this bench seat and stare into the flames, or up at the stars, thinking. I remember one night in
particular was
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very clear, and up at the high altitude, with no light pollution, and clear sky, the milky
way was just a brilliant blaze of light across the sky; so many stars that they couldn’t even be
individually distinguished. I thought about how what I could see was just a fraction of the stars in just
one galaxy, and that there were more galaxies in the Universe than stars in the milky way. It made me
feel infinitesimal; A speck on a speck on a speck.
I threw another log on the fire. This one had a spider living on it, and suddenly the spider had a
existential crises of its own; running around, looking for a way out. I wondered if, in the grand scheme
of things, this spider's plight had any more or less meaning than my own; Just another random,
meaningless event, in the vastness of the Universe.
Maybe this scary sense of meaninglessness is exactly why people create these belief systems. Belief
systems in which they are chosen, special, protected, and cared for by an omnipotent being. At the
same time I was aware of how amazing it was that I had consciousness and could perceive the
Universe in at least part of it’s immensity, and scariness. These and many other thoughts of like sort
swirled in my head; day after day; night after night.
I slept in the Blazer. With the rear seat out there was room to stretch out in a sleeping bag. I
remember one night I was really hungry and found an old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup candy bar
wrapper in the Blazer. There was a tiny bit of chocolate and peanut butter residue on the wrapper. Of
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course I wanted to lick this off, but that would have been a violation of my fast, so I just smelled it. It
smelled wonderful.
During the day I drove around exploring. I had a hang glider at the time, and I’d taken it with me, but I
didn’t use it, partly because I didn’t find a good place, and partly because after a few days, I was too
weak from lack of food. I drove to the head of Trail canyon one day. Trail canyon is where the people
from Co-op mine lived. I looked down and could see all the houses. They looked like little ant houses. I
was thinking about how all those people were talking about me, wondering where I was. I wondered
what is was going to be like going back.
For the first three days I went without water. On the fourth day I got rather ill, and started dry heaving.
Almost nothing came up except a tiny bit of really vile nastiness. I’d located a spring which had a cattle
watering trough. I went there, rinsed out my mouth, drank some water, washed up a little, after that I
drank water.
There was one night in particular that I couldn’t sleep, got really depressed, and nearly gave up and
went home. I thought that if I did, however, I’d never know if I would have gotten an answer.
I spent a lot of time reading, writing, praying, and thinking. Nobody knew where I was. There were no
miracles. It was probably the longest week of my life. After I came back down I never again seriously
considered that the Order might be right . . . .
[Scott's essay continues in the Scholarch's Permanent Collection of the College of Stoic Philosophers
library. Click Here to read the full essay]
ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΌΝ
School of Essential Studies
Autobiographical Essay
by David Lundmark
I was born on March 4, 1985, in Phoenix, Arizona. My father was, and is, an attorney, and my
mother left
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work after I was born to devote herself full time to caring for me and, later, my sister. My
schooling and upbringing were ordinary. I learned to read early, got in lots of trouble as a student in
grade school, enrolled in advanced classes, and generally got good grades.
Religion played a powerful role in my childhood and youth. My family attended a conservative
“nondenominational Bible church” that had a terrific youth program, in which I participated eagerly
until I was in my late teens. I was fortunate in the leadership of this church. The senior pastor had his
[Doctor of Divinity degree] from Cambridge and was bookish, intellectual, and charismatic. He, as well
as the youth pastor, always encouraged us to ask questions of our faith, even and especially very
difficult ones. After all, if what we believed was true, there would be an answer to even the most
difficult questions. Truth should fear nothing.
That questioning nature took deep root in me, and as a child and teenager I devoured
literature with abandon. Well, that may be an overstatement: in addition to the Bible, I read works on
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Christian apologetics and, especially, lots and lots of science fiction, which taught me wonder. One of
the most influential books I read as a teenager was Ursula K. le Guin's The Dispossessed. About a
physicist on an anarchist world, it set me to thinking about politics, society, and economics in a way I
never considered before. I started delving into literature on anarchism (the classical, communist kind)
and was soon convinced that anarchism was in full accord with Christian ethics, as I understood them:
the principles of caring for the poor, of resisting injustice, of not dominating others resonated
powerfully with me.
This interest in anarchism was bound to raise eyebrows among my peers at church, as I was not
then very shy about expressing what I thought. This led to a conversation, which, although simple,
stands with me to this day as an example of intellectual friendship and charity. While on retreat with
my youth group, my senior pastor approached me in a private moment to ask me, in short, what was
going on with all the anarchism stuff. I explained as best I could what I thought about it and how it fit
with the Christian faith, invoking Tolstoy and whatever other examples came to mind. He listened
patiently, asking a few questions. At the end, he smiled and thanked me for explaining it to him, and
then suggested that I do some reading on Calvinism and its relationship with capitalism. There was no
condemnation, only listening and nudging in the direction he thought I should pursue. (To my
discredit, I never followed his suggestions: I was too sure I already had the truth.)
Calvinism. That word ultimately spelled the doom of my youthful Christian faith. Somehow, my
youth group had become infected with a long-running debate between Calvinist
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doublepredestination and an Arminianism which allowed free will. This seemed to be a question of no small
importance to me, as the Calvinist position struck me as cruel and monstrous. What kind of God
would create a man with the sole purpose of damning him? Surely that had to be false, and
Arminianism correct. But I knew that, just because one alternative was more attractive, it was not
thereby true. So, I agonized for months over this question, studying the Bible, talking with pastors,
reading other books. Even when I tried to put the question aside, it kept coming back: predestination
or free will? Cruelty or kindness?
The more I read, the more I became convinced that the Calvinists had the better of the
argument. Finally, during one conversation with friends from church, the topic came up, and I made
my decision: “Predestination is a doctrine of hate. It is also the biblically justified doctrine. I will
choose love.” My apostasy sounded grand in my head, although I'm not sure anyone else around me
even noticed.
Unfortunately for me, the choice of love over hate (at least as I understood it at age 16 or 17)
created rather more problems. After all, I still believed that the Bible was the Word of God and was,
therefore, infallibly true. I just wanted no part of it. Thus, I lived in a strange kind of limbo, where I
lived in opposition to what I believed to be true, because what I believed to be true I found abhorrent.
Sometimes I wonder if my departure from my youthful Christianity owed less to these grand
intellectual and theological controversies and more to my cultivation of an immoral lifestyle. After all,
in high school I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol, and I entered a disastrous sexual
relationship with a girl. Could those moral choices have
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occasioned my departure from the faith? I am
strongly inclined to say no. I was perfectly willing to accept that something could be true, no matter
how much I didn't want it to be. I was interested in truth for its own sake, and not for the sake of
justifying the life I wanted to lead.
That said, it is hard to maintain a contradiction for long, and with time, my “believing unbelief”
transformed into a general agnostic theism. I could not imagine that there was no God: the
philosophical proofs were just too good! But it came to seem less important that God be identified
with the God of the Bible, with whom I had grown up.
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My political engagement continued unabated during this period, and I suppose I found in
anarchism a surrogate religious faith. With the decline of my native faith, however, the replacement
grew increasingly bitter. I came to reject my initial Tolstoyan pacifism and adopted a generalized
advocacy of insurrectionary violence along with a skepticism toward most forms of “activism,” which
struck me as privileged, narcissistic, and ineffectual.
After high school, I attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. College saw some
radical shifts in my life, both intellectually and morally. Morally, I became a wreck: my vices increased
in number and frequency, I became increasingly unsociable, and I felt like I lost much of what had
made me a happy, outgoing person in my younger years. Intellectually, however, college was a gamechanger. I became an avowed atheist almost out the gate: a friend loaned me a book by Richard
Dawkins, and I was swept away by his withering rebukes of “bronze-age gods.” Empirical science had
done away with the need for God, I believed, and, besides, all those arguments I thought proved the
existence of God turned out not to hold much water, anyway.
On entering college, I intended to study history, which had been my favorite subject in high
school. This, happily, was not to be. My second semester at school, I enrolled in an extremely lousy
history class and in an extremely interesting course in Ancient Philosophy. I was immediately hooked.
There was something compelling about the ethical writings of Plato and, especially, Aristotle: a recipe
for ethics and goodness that rested on reason and not on religious faith. More than this: it was not
simply a recipe for good behavior, but rather for eudaimonia, for a flourishing human life. I devoted
the rest
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of my college career to studying philosophy, with a focus on ancient Greek philosophy and
Aristotle's ethics in particular. Virtue ethics seemed more fully human to me than its deontological or
consequentialist competitors. I was convinced that Aristotle had captured a truth that was necessary
to my happiness.
One great consequence of studying philosophy was that I was almost completely depoliticized.
I retreated into a realm of abstract arguments and did not make much time for my anarchist
convictions. By the time I graduated, after various experiences, none important here, I had renounced
my surrogate religion, too. My time was better spent translating Greek and Latin literature and
pondering the nuances of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Of course, my own shabby personal moral life meant that I did not reap many fruits from my
philosophical studies. I struggled powerfully with the existential angst of youth, and I was haunted by
the absence of the God who had once been the source of all meaning in my life. I am unsure if I really
wanted God to exist - it probably depended on the day. But I was convinced he could not. As the years
went by, especially after I graduated and lost the structure of student life (to fast forward briefly), I
especially mourned the lack of a center in my life, the lack of a motive to overcome my moral torpor
and become a functional, virtuous adult. I thought that if I had a God, I could do anything. After all, if
an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being exists, why wouldn't you do anything you could for Him? I
never read anything by Sartre, but I stumbled upon a quote from him that succinctly summarized my
own view at the time: “God doesn't exist. The bastard.”
My reflexive and arrogant atheism suffered some knocks, however. The most significant was
from a
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professor in a course on Jewish Mysticism, which friends had encouraged me to take. After
reading the material for the first week, I became frustrated with the repeated references to God. I was
convinced that “God” was an absurdity, a contradiction in terms, something that could not only not
exist but could not even be coherently thought. So, I approached my professor after class and told her
I was having trouble making sense of all the God talk. The word “God,” I explained, seemed to be
merely a placeholder word because the writer didn't know what he was talking about. The professor
looked at me with much greater patience than I deserved. “Yes,” she explained, “'God' is a placeholder.