Socrates on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Socrates on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Author: Doug Van Scyoc

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2007-09-01

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 159752865X

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A nuclear Israel waits for its Messiah, a nuclear America eagerly anticipates the second coming of Christ, and a nuclear Iran believes it can expedite the return of the hidden or twelfth imam. Are apocalyptic expectations, like all other ideologies, simply evolutionÕs way of keeping the human population in check? Is religion true? Does God exist? What happens to us when we die? What should the afterlife mean for us while we are alive? Are these the greatest of all questions, and if so, why? After thousands of years and countless religious traditions, why does the world continue to hunger for spiritual truth? Why are religious lives so often filled with doubt, worry, and dark nights of the soul? Do you believe in pregnant virgins? Do you believe in the incarnation of an immutable God? Do you believe that an eternal God died? Do you believe Jesus redeemed an Israel that has totally rejected him? Do you believe a loving Jesus will return to bring the world to a tragic end? Do you believe that contradictions canÕt both be true? Do you believe the human anatomy is designed for meditation or mobility? If God had indeed chosen the prophet Muhammad to warn the people, why didnÕt Muhammad warn Muslims not to split Islam into Sunni and Shiite? It has been said that if we donÕt challenge our beliefs, our beliefs will eventually challenge us. Disillusionment with religion, not to mention global crises, is forcing believers to question the basis of their faith. Socrates on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam addresses those who are unsatisfied with the belief systems they encountered in orthodox religions. This book will assist searchers as they embark on their solitary quest for spiritual discovery.

Socrates and the Jews
Socrates and the Jews

Author: Miriam Leonard

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-06-15

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0226472477

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Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, this book explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism.

Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Sharing and Hiding Religious Knowledge in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Author: Mladen Popović

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 3110593661

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Few studies focus on the modes of knowledge transmission (or concealment), or the trends of continuity or change from the Ancient to the Late Antique worlds. In Antiquity, knowledge was cherished as a scarce good, cultivated through the close teacher-student relationship and often preserved in the closed circle of the initated. From Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform texts to a Shi'ite Islamic tradition, this volume explores how and why knowledge was shared or concealed by diverse communities in a range of Ancient and Late Antique cultural contexts. From caves by the Dead Sea to Alexandria, both normative and heterodox approaches to knowledge in Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities are explored. Biblical and qur'anic passages, as well as gnostic, rabbinic and esoteric Islamic approaches are discussed. In this volume, a range of scholars from Assyrian studies to Jewish, Christian and Islamic studies examine diverse approaches to, and modes of, knowledge transmission and concealment, shedding new light on both the interconnectedness, as well as the unique aspects, of the monotheistic faiths, and their relationship to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent.

The Bleak Political Implications of Socratic Religion
The Bleak Political Implications of Socratic Religion

Author: Shadia B. Drury

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-19

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 331954442X

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This book poses a radical challenge to the legend of Socrates bequeathed by Plato and echoed by scholars through the ages: that Socrates was an innocent sage convicted and sentenced to death by the democratic mob, for merely questioning the political and religious ideas of his time. This legend conceals an enigma: How could a sage who was pious and good be so closely associated with the treasonous Alcibiades, who betrayed Athens in the Peloponnesian war? How could Critias and Charmides, who launched a reign of terror in Athens after her defeat, have been among his students and closest associates? The book makes the case for the prosecution, denouncing the religion of Socrates for inciting a radical politics of absolutism and monism that continues to plague Western civilization. It is time to recognize that Socrates was no liberator of the mind, but quite the contrary—he was the architect of a frightful authoritarianism, which continues to manifest itself, not only in Islamic terror, but also in liberal foreign policy. Defending Homer and the tragic poets, the book concludes that the West has imbibed from the wrong Greeks.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation, Volume III
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation, Volume III

Author: F. E. Peters

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0691187509

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Invoking a concept as simple as it is brilliant, F. E. Peters has taken the basic texts of the three related--and competitive--religious systems we call Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and has juxtaposed them in a topical and parallel arrangement according to the issues that most concerned all these "children of Abraham." Through these extensive passages, and the author's skillful connective commentary, the three traditions are shown with their similarities sometimes startlingly underlined and their well-known differences now more profoundly exposed. What emerges from this unique and ambitious work is a panorama of belief, practice, and sensibility that will broaden our understanding of our religious and political roots in a past that is, by these communities' definition, still the present. The hardcover edition of the work is bound in one volume, and in the paperback version the identical material is broken down into three smaller but self-contained books. The third, "The Works of the Spirit," focuses on spirituality and worship and contains material on monasticism, theology, mysticism, and the "End Time." Throughout the work we hear an amazing variety of voices, some familiar, some not, all of them central to the primary and secondary canons of their own tradition: alongside the Scriptural voice of God are the words of theologians, priests, visionaries, lawyers, rulers and the ruled. The work ends, as does the same author's now classic Children of Abraham, in what Peters calls the "classical period," that is, before the great movements of modernism and reform that were to transform Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Aristotle on Religion
Aristotle on Religion

Author: Mor Segev

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1108415253

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Provides a comprehensive account of the socio-political role Aristotle attributes to traditional religion, despite rejecting its content.

Socrates, or on Human Knowledge
Socrates, or on Human Knowledge

Author: Simone Luzzatto

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-08-19

Total Pages: 580

ISBN-13: 3110557606

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Socrates, Or On Human Knowledge, published in Venice in 1651, is the only work written by a Jew that contains so far the promise of a genuinely sceptical investigation into the validity of human certainties. Simone Luzzatto masterly developed this book as a pièce of theatre where Socrates, as main actor, has the task to demonstrate the limits and weaknesses of the human capacity to acquire knowledge without being guided by revelation. He achieved this goal by offering an overview of the various and contradictory gnosiological opinions disseminated since ancient times: the divergence of views, to which he addressed the most attention, prevented him from giving a fixed definition of the nature of the cognitive process. This obliged him to come to the audacious conclusion of neither affirming nor denying anything concerning human knowledge, and finally of suspending his judgement altogether. This work unfortunately had little success in Luzzatto’s lifetime, and was subsequently almost forgotten. The absence of substantial evidence from his contemporaries and that of his epistolary have thus increased the difficulty of tracing not only its legacy in the history of philosophical though, but also of understanding the circumstances surrounding the writing of his Socrates. The present edition will be a preliminary study aiming to shed some light on the philosophical and historical value of this work’s translation, indeed it will provide a broader readership with the opportunity to access this immensely complicated work and also to grasp some aspects of the composite intellectual framework and admirable modernity of Venetian Jewish culture in the ghetto.

Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato
Jewish Socratic Questions in an Age without Plato

Author: Yehuda Halper

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9004468765

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Winner of the 2022 Goldstein-Goren Book Award from the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Yehuda Halper examines Jewish depictions of Socrates and Socratic questioning of the divine among European and North African Jews of the 12th-15th centuries. Without direct access to Plato, their understanding of Socrates is indirect, based on legendary material, on fragmentary quotations from Plato, or on Aristotle. Out of these sources, Jewish authors of this period formed two distinct views of Socrates: one as a wise, ascetic, monotheist, and the other as a vocal skeptic. The latter view has its roots in Plato's Apology where Socrates describes his divine mandate to question all knowledge, including knowledge of the divine. After exploring how this and similar questions arise in the works of Judah Halevi and the Hebrew Averroes, Halper traces how such open-questioning of the divine arises in the works of Maimonides, Jacob Anatoli, Gersonides, and Abraham Bibago.

Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity
Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity

Author: George H. van Kooten

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 900441150X

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In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.