From: Richard Ridge (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Wed Mar 13 2002 - 07:26:55 MST
Reprise: Jane forwarded a nice little document with links to a first chapter.
Comments: The chapter is a cogent enough summary, even if the author appears to work for Lunn Poly-technic (British in-joke, don\'t worry about it).
However, while I am not especially keen on Plato* I think the summary of Christianity and Platonism is incomplete. Consider the arguments made by the Roman author Celsus in his diatribe, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, where he complains about:
\"the religion of Egypt... [where] the animals were symbols of invisible idea and not objects of worship in themselves. The religion of the Christians is not directed at an idea, but at the crucified Jesus\"
To Celsus, Christianity lacks (to corrupt TS Eliot\'s term) an adequate objective correlative for such concepts as truth and good. Indeed, he asserts that the very idea of representing such ineffable concepts is little more than image worship (a tendency which has never been fully extirpated from Christianity in spite of the prohibition of graven images in Mosaic law; although if man is made in the image of the Lord such a prohibition seems risible at best). It is unclear whether the christian god is synonymous with those concepts; and instead we are told that the ways of god are mysterious.
In Euthyphro Plato had demonstrated that we cannot depend upon the moral fiats of a deity. Plato asked if the commandments of a god were \"good\" simply because a god had commanded them or because the god recognized what was good and commanded the action accordingly. If something is good simply because a god has commanded it, anything could be considered good. There could be no way of predicting what in particular the god might desire next, and it would be entirely meaningless to assert that God is identical to goodness. Conversely, if a god\'s commandments are based on a knowledge of the inherent goodness of an act, we are faced with the realization that there is a standard of goodness independent of the god and we must admit that he cannot be the source of morality. As such, to Celsus most of the best features of Christianity are far from being specific to that sect, even observing that both Plato and the Bible state that morality and wealth are incompatible; it is merely that Plato states this more lucidl
y.
* (since my views are more sophistic - I tend to think that when considers morality in objective, absolute terms, one is usually putting the philosophical cart before the horse and statting that such a thing really should exist, therefore it does. Though, as Roger Scruton says how can one \'objectively\' state there to be no objective truth)
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