IF YOU READ A LOT of the commentary on Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, you'll find one scholar after another after another who draws parallels between this saying or that one or the principle on which it's supposed to lie and Christian moral teachings. I mentioned that having those who hold Christianity in such disdain, as does, in fact, Katha Pollitt, holdup a book the entirety of which we know of and have any text of due to the copying of it by Christian religious - monks, bishops, etc. - you have to wonder how it escaped all of the same criticisms heaped on the Gospels and Epistles, the discrediting of the text and its contents their supposed "inauthenticity" or falseness because their existence, now, is through those same agencies so suspected of dishonesty and their eagerness to corrupt texts like the Gospels or near contemporary authors such as Josephus.
It could be that all of the virtue in the text was due to the Christianization of it by monks copying it, any coherence found there the product of the kind of tampering to obtain internal harmony that is not infrequently speculated to have been done in the case of Christian Scripture.
There are other problems with holding up the "Meditations" in the way Pollitt did, one of those things atheists hold up to diminish and so discredit the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, along with other things they haven't really read like the Analects of Confucius or the Code of Hammurabi. I will assert that there is no way to derive any notions of virtue, such as are contained in the assertions of the text from the materialism the Stoics are said to have had as the basis for their philosophy, there simply is no means of even distinguishing something as being better than something else in materialism, things just are as they are in themselves, that's as far as materialism can get you.
But, then, there is just about no system of materialism that is consistent with the logical necesssities of their basis in the claim that the material stuff of the universe is the only thing there is. There isn't even, really, any way to deduce the truth of that claim in the claim, itself, as it demotes the mind that would have to deduce such a truth to the status of inconsequential motion of physical objects by forces that would create an illusion of that truth in some cases and some other illusion of the opposite truth in other cases, leaving no way to judge the difference between them that wasn't, as well, the mere actions of the particular atoms or molecules that just happened to have come together by random chance only to dissolve back into the physical universe. There was certainly nothing in materialism that would give Marcus Aurelius anything like a "right" to be the Emperor of Rome or for any of the moral positions that a Katha Pollitt and I might agree on. In my case, believing in the God of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the Prophets, including Moses and Israel and Abraham, I've got a basis for holding the rightness of those positions true based on the belief that God so created things. Materialism has no such basis and holds any such beliefs in opposition to their central holding which, if they wanted to be consistent, they couldn't call the truth.
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