Blackie, Plato's Republic is full of egalitarianism, feminism and humanitarianism. It's Aristotle who watered down the notions of setting slaves free and equalizing women. Aristotelian logic was then acquired by the Church as a sound philosophical basis for a Christian worldview. I'm not bashing religion, but notions of humanitarianism are equally the province of philosophy. Especially when you consider that in Greece, philosophers assumed a role almost identical to the roles of wandering rabbis in ancient Israel. There is very little, when one dissects it, that Jesus was teaching that was not taught another way by Socrates. The difference is in their social worldview: Jesus saw the world through Jewish eyes, all according to the notion of how the law was to be fulfilled. Plato saw the world through Greek eyes: how does this relate to the polis? But the ideas boil down to the same thing from different approaches, surely.Blacksword wrote: But my basic point is that several essential humanitarian concepts are historically tied to religion, and arise well before the advent of modern atheism. Nor do they appear in the non-theistic strands of Greek philosophy that I'm familiar with. Or at all in Greek philosophy, which in terms of social policy was focused on the overall good of the polis - and this overall good meant marginalizing some groups like women, foreigners and slaves - rather than obligations to specific marginalized groups in society.
As a matter of fact, no matter how proto-feminist Jesus and Mohammed were, (and both were remarkably so for their times) Plato was far more, for insisting that women be given complete rights in society rather than throwing them a few bones such as right of divorce.
And this board has made me think quite a bit about religion, which leads me to believe I should have spent less time here...
