Reinventing God

Euthyphro responds that he himself has been accused of being "unholy" because he is prosecuting his own father for a capital offense. But he insists that his action is demonstrably holy, and that his father’s crime of causing the death of a servant was unholy. To justify prosecuting his own father he cites the common knowledge that Zeus, "the most excellent and just among the gods," shackled his own father, Cronos, for swallowing his sons, and that Cronos earlier had exiled his own father, Uranus.

Socrates says that whenever people tell such stories about the gods, he is prone to take it ill. He pursues the question of what is or is not holy, and as to Zeus and Cronos, asks Euthyphro point blank, "Tell me: Do you actually believe that these things happen so?-- Do you actually believe that war occurred among the gods, and there were dreadful hatreds, battles, and all sorts of fearful things like that? Do we say that these things are true?"

Euthyphro replies, "Yes, Socrates, and things even more amazing."

As in so many of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates begins systematically to dissect Euthyphro’s position, asserted with such firm conviction. He subtly leads his friend into a series of admissions, and finally entangles him into a position obviously completely contradictory of what he had started out with.

But despite Socrates’ logic, Euthyphro does not revise his original assertion, and apparently has no trouble in simultaneously entertaining two contradictory beliefs. As they are about to depart, Socrates says, " So tell me, peerless Euthyphro, exactly what is holy and what is not, and do not hide from me what you judge it to be."

"Another time, Socrates," says Euthyphro, "for I am in a hurry and must be off this minute."

Plato wrote Euthyphro some four hundred years before Christ, more than 2,400 years before today. But if he were to challenge any one of us as he did Euthyphro, about our religious beliefs and philosophic mindset, what are the chances that the replies would show any appreciable advance, in logic and reasoned belief, over those of Euthyphro? I submit and shall herein demonstrate that a dispassionate view of the West’s religious mindset is long overdue, and is now imperative if civilization is not to self-destruct.

Confining myself to Judeo-Christian world views (but not necessarily excluding others), my prescription is that all shades of our religious doctrine are so overlaid with fears, superstitions, mystic impenetrability, revelatory delusions, wishful thinking, and even purposeful deceptions as to be almost impervious to analytic unpacking. And since that unpacking is a sine qua non of this treatise, the first demand here upon the reader is to agree, for the duration of the presentation, to approach the argument with complete objectivity. Especially required is holding in abeyance any outrage when matters of cherished faith are laid open to question.

The request of the author is a simple one: Hear me out! Let our rules of discourse also be simple. A challenge will only be valid if it can be shown that the reasoning from a premise to a conclusion is false, or if a premise is arguably false or unwarranted. If a premise is advanced that goes against all previously held religious convictions, the premise is not to be outlawed on the basis of repugnance alone. To make an objection to the argument stick, either the premise or the chain of reasoning must be outlawed on unchallengeable logical grounds.