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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.
Secular humanism served me well for decades, and I had the honor later on of meeting one of the leading figures of the movement in the United States, Paul Kurtz. Through Kurtz and his associates I discovered scientific skepticism, a grassroots movement devoted to the fight against pseudoscience and other kinds of nonsense. That too changed my life for the better, giving me the opportunity to to do positive for society outside of my academic research and teaching. I wrote two books on related topics, one on creationism and the other on pseudoscience more broadly. Keep this in mind, because skepticism will reappear near the end of this essay.
Then my midlife crisis came. Nothing overly out of the ordinary. My wife at the time unexpectedly asked me for a divorce. My father died of cancer. I got a new job and moved a thousand miles. Any psychologist would tell you that one of those events is stressful. When several of them happen in the span of a few months you get thrown…
