/lit/ - Literature

>>17084239
Probably Late Stoicism probably fits the bill best, especially the works of Musonius Rufus. It has some religious overtones but not much at all. Also, you might want to read Alasdair MacIntyre's book After Virtue and the subsequent books in that series. He's Catholic but he goes about analyzing virtue ethics from a rational, biological standpoint.

>>15775895
> when in reality it was clearly strongly influence by Plato if not the ultimate culmination of Greek philosophy

That's the way a lot of the Church Fathers thought about the relation between Christianity and the eudaimonic teleological schools of Greek Philosophy (Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism chiefly): they all were pointing to God in some way but they lacked the Revelation of Jesus Christ's Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, so while they came up with a decently accurate picture of God, they could never truly know Him be reason alone. St. Basil the Great wrote a book on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_to_Young_Men_on_Greek_Literature

>>15681181
>having more committed or non-committed sexual partners does not affect someone's ability to participate in society.
Yeah they can still participate in society, but it does hamper their ability to actually contribute meaningfully to it. You can't really contribute to society all that well if you are focused mostly on your own pleasure (sexual, gastrointestinal, etc.) and not on at least realizing that in order to preserve society for the long run, there will be some suffering and hence you have to give up some pleasures for a time in order to make sure the relationships you DO have are worthwhile and (even if they end) rewarding in terms of character.

>you take sex this seriously speaks volume about your unhealthy relationship with sex and indicates that you have a lot of maturing to do.
It fucking is a big deal. That's how more people are made and then you will have to either take care of those children or make sure they have a proper place to survive and grow as a person themselves if you can't do it at the time. The fact that you are taking sex so lightly is actually kinda weird to me since it's really just indicative of how separated the procreative aspect of sex and the unitive aspect of it are in the mind of your average modern person. You can have romantic relationships but unless you are willing to lay down your life for a woman (or man if you are a girl) and start training the next generation of people to roam the Earth, why would you even think of doing something which has the purpose of creating more people? Like, it's a big deal which is why I'm know I'm not ready for it yet. Honestly, only a person who is ignorant of the true purpose and power behind the erotic impulse are immature and given to their irrational impulses, since they cannot discern through reason why it is not a good idea to make light of something that sustains the world's population throughout the entirety of man's existence and tend to cheapen it to a tool of hedonistic pleasure. You don't make light of something that has such a fundamental and basic purpose for a machine to function because if it malfunctions, then the entire factory will break down piece by piece, why would you do the same to sex or eating or rally anything necessary for human existence? There's a difference between trying to extinguish an instinct, trying to exorbitantly indulge oneself in it and to engage it in a rational fashion, which we as humans have the ability and the duty to do in all things.