Welcome!

Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure.
(The Four Part Cure)

Welcome to the Church of Epicurus, friend!

This website is dedicated to spreading knowledge about the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) and his ethical and moral views and the tradition to which he belongs (including such thinkers as Democritus).

The teachings of Epicurus are a total philosophy of life, death, religion, science, ethics, and culture and his philosophy promises liberation from the obstacles that stand in the way of our happiness. [Footnote 1] Freedom from pain, fear, anxiety, and a state of joy, happiness, and tranquility, all this is within your own grasp. Epicurus taught a philosophy which, even today, is a powerful living system of thought which delivers what it claims.

Reading Epicurus is like coming face-to-face with Buddhism… if it was Greek!

Epicurus’ views were even more remarkable for his insistence that:

• the gods or God, if they do exist, do not intervene in the world in any way whatsoever;
• there is no afterlife, no heaven or hell, and our soul dies with the body which it is intimately knitted to;
• ethical and moral views derive from a correct knowledge of science and the nature of the world, and it is necessary to understand the natural world in order to live a blessed life, and only morality derived from the true working of the natural world, as shown to us by scientific thought, is truly moral: science and morality are not and cannot be separated.

It is impossible for someone ignorant about the nature of the universe but still suspicious about the subjects of the myths to dissolve his feelings of fear about the most important matters. So it is impossible to receive unmixed pleasures without knowing natural science.
Epicurus, Vatican Saying XII

And his scientific views themselves are truly remarkable; if any religious book held such views, atheists would have a genuinely hard time explaining away such advanced knowledge written so long ago. He even helped invent the theory which claims the universe is made up of atoms that combine variously to make all we see. This view was ultimately rejected by Christian civilisation, like much of the rest of Epicurus’ breath-taking scientific views, yet it turned out to be ultimately true.

This website has two main kinds of thing on it: (1) the words of Epicurus, Democritus, and other thinkers in the same philosophical tradition; (2) my personal take on the relevant issues.

So friend, read on if you are curious what this ancient sage thought, read on if you wish to live a blessedly happy life free from fear and disturbance.

© 2014 Bryan A. J. Parry

Footnotes

[Footnote 1] This sentence partially adapted from the blurb to The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia edited by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (1994) Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.