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Beyond Stoicism? An ongoing spiritual-cognitive journey
I grew up in Rome, Italy. Not far from the Vatican. Naturally, I was a Catholic by default. As the Monty Python song goes:
I’m a Roman Catholic
And have been since before I was born
And the one thing they say about Catholics is:
They’ll take you as soon as you’re warm
That lasted about 15 years, until I discovered philosophy. Since I was attending a type of school called a Scientific Lyceum, preparatory for college in the sciences, I had to take three years of philosophy. My teacher, Enrica Chiaromonte, made the subject matter truly come alive and I was hooked. As part of my own philosophical explorations I read Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, which led me to his famous Why I am Not a Christian. That was it. Already simmering doubts about the logical absurdity of concepts like the Trinity and Transubstantiation suddenly boiled over. I was out of the Church.
Yet, people — especially teenagers (and middle aged men, as we shall see below) — need some kind of guidance or framework to live their lives. Some way of thinking that helps them prioritize things and make decisions. I very quickly zoomed on the philosophy of secular humanism as my guide, in large part because one of the people I admired the most as a kid, the astronomer Carl Sagan, was a secular humanist.
