“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
snip: You have apparently not read them. When people discover things no one has ever known before, that is original and independent thinking
Spirited: Not true. Additionally, I have read ‘of them’ by the light of both modern thinkers and thinkers as Augustine, Tertullian, and Ireneaus, for example.
These thinkers of great discernment have much to say about the philosophers that is well-worth knowing.
If one seeks discernment and a well-rounded picture, one must study its’ many facets.
That said, some of what the philosophers taught had virtue, much more, however, was quite peculiar, and much of that peculiarity-—superstition-— is taught as ‘scientific fact’ today. In particular, the scientifically disproved notion that life and consciousness somehow emerged from nonlife. Transmigration and metempsychosis are likewise back but dressed up as atheist-evolutionism.
‘When people discover things’—especially ‘unseen things’ such as ‘atoms colliding in a void’ ‘transmigration of souls’ ‘metempsychosis’ one must question the ‘unseen source-— the unseen ‘revelator’-— of such peculiar revelations and not simply accept them at face value.
Men have always lived by revelations from the unseen realm, and that most definitely includes the ancient philosophers, and we must never forget that fact.
The mind and its’ outworkings are not ‘material’ but immaterial; not physical but metaphysical; not a-spiritual but spiritual. Though atheist materialism claims otherwise, materialism is both a superstition whose taproot stretches back to the occult society of the Pharoahs and the fallen ‘condition of man.’
As for the Hindus, I recommend you turn to Ravi Zaccharias for better understanding of them. Born a Hindu, like you, he had no use for religion and fell into atheism and from there into nihilistic despair and thoughts of suicide. Today he ranks among the world’s most eloquent apologists for Christianity.
When Hindus speak of ‘souls’ it is not of the individual soul/mind/conscience but of a concept on the order of a nonindividual ‘spark.’