snip: especially the philosophers
spirited: Though they may appear to you to be individual thinkers, all of their thinking began from a common source: irrational nature. Recall that Paul tells us that there are only two sources for all religions. He defines them like this:
either man will worship and serve the (living, rational) Creator of creation or he will worship and serve (irrational) creation.
Again, the idea that man is an individual, which means that he has an individual soul, mind, conscience, and will is uniquely Christian. The ancients knew of no such thing. And how could they when they believed that their destiny, even their thoughts, had been ‘written’ long before their birth by the sun, moon, stars, and planets? While they spoke of their fate, doom, and luck, today’s naturalists speak of determinism, cause, genes, and memes.
While Plato had some advanced ideas, they were nevertheless predicated on nature, fate, doom, and luck. It was in the hands of Christian Scholastics and other monotheistic thinkers of that time that Plato’s ideas were refined.
Plato(who received instruction from Socrates) was alive about the same era that Bhuddha received “his enlightenment” and when Confucious also began his teachings.
The Talmud and Mishna writing began to be seriously developed.
In fact the period from about the end of the 6th century BC until the 250 bc was a period in which many teachers and ethicists ‘seemingly’ sprout up spontaneously in parts of the inhabited world but not necessarily in communication with each other. Often many of these teachings and religious traditions were similar in scope and ethics.
Remember what Paul said,
<< Acts 17 >>
American King James Version
We are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like to gold, or silver, or stone, graven by are and man’s device. 30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commands all men every where to repent: 31 Because he has appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he has ordained; whereof he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead.”
I think there was a move of God affoot in the 400 “silent” years before Christ or so to quicken men’s hearts and to prep history for the coming of the messiah...to whisper into the hearts of spiritually thirsty men and women, to stir the hearts of kings....
The rise of these great gentile philosophers all at once in history and in disparate places suggests that God was not so silent after all.
“Though they may appear to you to be individual thinkers...”
No, they do not “appear” to be individual thinkers, they were. You have apparently not read them. When people discover things no one has ever known before, that is original and independent thinking.
Here is a recent article of mine on Anaximander, Thales, and Anaximenes that demonstrates, in spite of their mistakes, their originality and individuality, especially Thales.
http://usabig.com/iindv/articles_stand/phil_base/Intro_temp.php
“Recall that Paul tells us that there are only two sources for all religions. He defines them like this: either man will worship and serve the (living, rational) Creator of creation or he will worship and serve (irrational) creation.”
I personally have no use for any religion, so that point is meaningless to me. Truth is all that matters to me, and humans have only one faculty for discovering the truth—reason. Everything else is “unreasonable.”
“Again, the idea that man is an individual, which means that he has an individual soul, mind, conscience, and will is uniquely Christian. The ancients knew of no such thing.”
That’s absurd. The Hindus, for example, believed all those things at least a thousand years before the advent of Christianity. Their beliefs are fantastic and mystic, but they certainly believed in individual souls with minds and conscience and will, else they would not have been able to transmigrate. Apparently you never heard of the Vedas.
“Plato had some advanced ideas”
Except for Hume and Kant, Plato was perhaps the worst philosopher in history infecting it with very bad ideas that plague it to this day. Aristotle corrected some of those problems, but they were all reintroduced by Hume and Kant.
I do not know where your ideas come from, but they are not from an understanding of the history of philosophy. The things you point out as errors, “today’s naturalists speak of determinism, cause, genes, and memes,” are true enough, but it is not philosophy that is at fault, but all the anti-reason concepts that were introduced into philosophy by the likes of Hume, Berkley, and Kant, all good Roman Catholics, that is, Christians. If you do not like the philosophy dominating society today, as I do not like it, understand where it came from.
Hank