Plato at the Googleplex by Rebecca Goldstein

Author:Rebecca Goldstein [Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-90887-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

If there was a certain strain in the culture that exhorted a person to become godlike—and Plato, in his own way, endorsed such a goal—then it wasn’t in order to attract the attention of the gods. All things being equal, it’s better if they just don’t notice you. You must at once both impress your fellow mortals while also not attracting undue attention and possible resentment from the touchy gods.

It’s odd for us—whether we adhere to a particular religion or not—to consider a religion that is silent regarding issues on which religions as we now know them are loquacious. I was brought up as a child to believe that all my deeds—a nibble from a friend’s (not certified “kosher”) Hostess Twinkie, a donation from my meager allowance to a charity for orphans, a spin-doctored rendition of a quarrel with a sister—get inscribed in a heavenly book, which, come the autumnal Days of Awe, will be scrutinized, tallied, and evaluated. Terrifying, yes, but also quite effective in inducing a robust sense of human consequentiality. No less than the Lord of the Hosts himself takes note of that Hostess Twinkie.

The Abrahamic religions powerfully address the problem of human worth, as do other religions that have demonstrated their millennia-long staying power. In the case of the Hebrews, the phrase bi-tzelem elohim, meaning “in the image of God,” provides an answer to the question of human worth. The phrase is used three times in Genesis, all of them in what have come to be called the Priestly portions of the Torah, usually dated to the sixth or fifth centuries B.C.E., meaning relatively late for the Torah’s authorship. It’s in the last of the three passages (9:6) that the normative dimension of the phrase fully emerges. As the King James Version translates it: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” The implication is that God’s impressing his image on man confers worth sufficient to make the shedding of blood prohibited. The Abrahamic religions have, in their turn, so impressed themselves on ethical thought that it is sometimes hard for adherents, even now, to fathom how humans could have worth without this divine impression.

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one “comes out” as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

But if we find Greek religion odd in its reticence regarding such questions as had prompted my neighbor to twist himself into a metaphysical pretzel, it’s only because we’re forgetting that religion, as we have come to know it, provides only one possible solution to the question of human worth.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.