Plato’s Republic is what it is. Can you give me a thorough description of Jesus’ Kingdom of Heaven that most other Christians will agree with?
I imagine people would be as solicitous of their neighbours’ welfare as their own, be relatively uninterested in material possessions, put adherence to the letter of the law below actually doing good (something akin to the “Don’t be a jerk” rule) and have a strong tendency to forgive wrongdoing. Those who made personal sacrifices to help others would be more highly regarded than those who amassed personal wealth. There’d be quite a lot of loving God too, of course.
(Also, I’m not sure that “most other Christians will agree with” is the right criterion, as opposed to “is consistent with the Gospels”. For example, many people who think that Plato is the last word in human intellectual achievment don’t realise he advocated an entrenched elite practising eugenics on an deliberately un-informed populace. Nevertheless, that is what he advocated, whether most, many, all or some people agree he did or not.)
Jesus was not, of course, trying to create a political entity in the city- or nation-state sense, so questions about e.g. tax policy, government hierarchies etc. aren’t really germane to what you might term the “Jesus Project”. I asked the question because (if we’re going to have a deathmatch, and I would suggest that we don’t) I thought it was the best grounds for comparison between the two men: how did they think people should live?
Actually, the right criterion would be “what most Christians will agree is consistant with the Gospels.”
Most people are not philosophers. If you think of Jesus as divine and the Son of God, then according to the Bible he was a relational human being. He related to us on all sorts of levels (beside actually committing a sin according to the bible) Why would he want to go over our heads by vomiting out a bunch of philosophical ideas we wouldn’t understand.
“Rather, Jesus sounds like just another preacher telling us to love god, sometimes claiming to be god, and sometimes claiming not to be. Sometimes saying to follow the OT law and sometimes saying you don’t have to, telling parables that sometimes make sense and sometimes don’t.”
Jesus did claim to be the Son of God but he NEVER went back and contridicted that. (I’m at school and I usually don’t carry a Bible around with me, otherwise i’d be copying down some verses;) )And It’s your fault if you can’t understand the parables. BUT I do agree with you on the confusion of the Old and New Testament and which one we are to follow. I think we need to use our brains and common sense, like in Leviticus it says women are to never cut their hair and men can never shave their beards. that might have been appropriate more than 2,000 years ago but we live in a completely different time now.
"He saved a woman from being stoned but seems to have condemned most of humanity to hellfire. I really don’t see anything that would lead me to think it likely he had godly intelligence. "
Also, who are any of us to say what godly intelligence is? If he was divine and the son of God I think he would know what he was talking about. Would we actually know it if it hit us right in the face?
Also in my opinion, he does not CONDEMN people to hell. It is a choice for people here on earth where to go when they die (whether they know it or not) He does not send people there.
I wish i had the time to read all these replies.
This pretty much sums up your post and exactly what I was talking about. Yes, of course, it’s possible to argue that godly intelligence and compassion and so forth are whatever you want them to be. The problem is that I could make the same argument for, say, Hannibal Lecter. It’s a completely self-sealing argument: you simply decide right off the bat that whatever he did or said was the best way to say or do it, and since God is so mysterious and all, how can we possibly argue otherwise?
Seems pretty empty as an argument.
Hence, the arguments I made, which were then, of course, largely ignored. 
Or maybe just “most people who have read the Gospels agree etc.”? I’m an atheist, for example, but I don’t think that prevents me judging whether a given set of statements are consistent with an other given set.
In any case, neither you nor I are about to survey the world’s Christians (I’m a little rushed just now, otherwise I’d jump at the opportunity, obviously) so why not go with people’s own interpretation? If you accept that it’s a sensible way of comparing Jesus and Plato (and I’ll admit I’m not sure such a thing is possible), there’s no reason we can’t say: “Based on your own interpretation of the relevant sources, would you rather live in the world as Plato thought it should be, or the world as Jesus thought it should be?” I think that’s at least better than: “Plato was better with metaphors”, or “Jesus had the edge in crowd psychology” or various other otiose comparisons.
Which ones were “wrong”. Jesus spoke in parables, so pretty much everything he said is open to interpretation.
And yet this “ho-hum” teacher inspired the creation of the largest religion in the world today, against quite a few odds, too. Yoiu seem to be arguing that Jesus’ teachings shouldn’t have inspired a Great Religion-- and yet they did. So you must be making an incorrect assumption somewhere.
Seems like a giant waste of time and avoidance of the subject to me. I’d rather live in Chuckee Cheeses magical Cheese land rather than Deathklok’s Mordland, but what the holy heck does that have to do with anything?
Absolutely nothing. So why did you waste electrons posting it? The OP is comparing Jesus and Plato. Amrussell is suggesting that if we’re going to compare them, we compare something we actually can examine and that is pertinent to both.
She or he cherry picked something that is not very telling or very interesting and ignored all the rest. Just like you in insisting that the focus be purely on whether or not Jesus informed people about sperm and ova. I wasted electrons to point that sort of rhetorical perfidy out.
That’s just balls-on crazy. Nothing could be more interesting or pertinent than comparing what they taught about souls and governments. At least with that, we have something to compare. We can compare the kingdom of philosophers with the kingdom of God. Get it? Kingdom <-> Kingdom. Compare.
Except it’s apples to oranges in the same way you are always complaining about. A mortal socio-political reality laid out in specific detail vs. a barely even mentioned, much less logistically laid out quasi-supernatural heaven onto which you can project anything you want?
What we have to compare that I suggested are Jesus’ teachings vs., say, any random person’s opinion on love and morality that we pick off the streets today at random. I’d say that Jesus in most cases comes out a big loser on that score: even if the person we pick just thinks they are restating what they believe Jesus said. And against some of the great thinkers and artists treatments of morality and love, Jesus doesn’t even come close.
Then you haven’t read Plato. We can compare the fate of Plato’s souls and his views on a transcendent God with those of Jesus, and whether Christians have misinterpreted Jesus’ teachings about the grounding of moral goodness. (I believe they are more in line with Plato’s, that goodness is good in se.) Plato’s political philosphy was not restricted to mortal man.
Interesting that you’d draw your conclusion before the first random person is even interviewed. In any case, it’s a whacked idea that hijacks the OP. Let’s just stick with Jesus and Plato.
You were the one who brought up the kingdom of the philosophers directly against the kingdom of heaven. Now lambasting me because I didn’t include something else in Plato is incoherent at best, and simply disingenuous of you at worst.
And they are still apples to oranges anyway, because asking what what you think about who’s differing thoughts on what is would be nicer to have be real is hardly a relevant comparison. By that light, someone who believed that sticking your hand in a meat grinder would be a wonderful pleasurable experience would be “better” than someone who noted that it would probably hurt like a mofo.
Well, yes: that’s because what I’m saying seems so irrefutable that I have a high level of confidence in it. I’d take your theology over Jesus’ any day, for instance.
You simply are flat out not being honest here.
Here is the OP: “So, was Jesus as smart as Plato, or Socrates if you prefer, or Aristotle, Epicurus or a bunch of philosophers that predated him (some) by centuries? Is he as smart as a lot of philosophers that postdated him (Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Hume, or Russell)? Is there any reason to think him smarter or more profound than most dopers?”
I think the OP’s comparing apples to oranges. Jesus’s parables were aimed at the common man; Plato’s discourses at the educated philosopher. Perhaps a better comparison would be between Jesus and Aesop? Both are masters of telling stories which teach.
Not necessarily: he may argue that the people who got inspired to create a Great Religion around the figurehead of Jesus were the ones who made the incorrect assumptions about what he was all about.
After all, your initial assumptions will influence your chances of success or failure, but not all of them can be said to guarantee it either way.
My theology is directly deduced from His. It is simply another way of framing what He had already taught.
Disagreement with you does not constitute dishonesty. The OP is a known baiter who posed a ridiculously flawed question. If you want to assess honesty, why not ask the OP why he ignores me and will not engage me in debate? Search, and you will find that he has never — without exception whatsoever — responded to any rebuttal I’ve ever posted. Not once. Why would a man interested in honest debate pretend that he cannot see or hear the one defender of Jesus that you and others have said defends Him best?
Alternatively, you could say: “he picked something out that he thought was both interesting and telling. I however disagree because…” The advantage of doing that is that you don’t then have to try and justify the phrase “rhetorical perfidy”, which sounds like a straightforward accusation of dishonesty.
The problem is, posthumously comparing how smart two very different historical characters is more or less a fool’s errand. No-one’s at all clear on what “being smart” means in this case, still less where we should look for evidence of smartness. What I think most philosophers have in common is that at some point they’ve described their view of the best way for man to live. In fact, never mind philosophers - we’ve all got an opinion on this. My suggestion is to see how well the dead guys’ views accord with ours, and use this as a benchmark. It doesn’t seem that dissimilar from your idea:
The “problem” with both of these approaches is that they show that this debate is nothing more than IMHO. If someone thinks that Aristotle knew less about morality and love than Kant, or both of them knew less than Joe Random, you can’t tell them they’re wrong until we’ve established an objective morality, ethics and political philosophy. That might take a little while.
And in any case, so what? Let’s say we get a consensus that Jesus was less smart than Plato, Kant, Hegel, Hume, my idiot brother and your neighbour’s dog. Does one of us have to break it gently to the Pope? Will people renounce Christianity and start sniffing each other’s backsides instead? There are interesting questions buried in this discussion, but as long as it’s framed in terms of a dead men’s IQ test, we’re not going to come near them.
In my opinion, that is not the case. I don’t think there is not enough information in what he taught to directly deduce anything in particular, and I don’t see any basis for recognizing your particular interpretation as more “true” than others.
That really is neither here nor there. You accused me of a hijack because I didn’t “stick with Jesus and Plato.” But that was not the only question raised in the OP, so the accusation is based on a falsehood.
Ok, though this does seem like something of a digression: OP why won’t you engage someone in a debate that you started? Ignoring a respondent is in bad faith.
I don’t think you defend Jesus best. I think you have your own theology derived from a particular interpretation that is not in any way reducible to the Gospels alone. You are willing to make any number of moral statements found nowhere in the Bible that require far more specific insight into the human condition than anyone ever displays in the Bible.
Your comparison has the meat grinder element I noted before. How nice it would be to live in a explicitly laid out and at least somewhat logistically thought out socio-political concept of government isn’t comparable to a extremely vague fantasy that we can imagine anything we want into has very little of interest to tell us about how insightful a contribution is.
Maybe, but I’m willing to bet that this agreement is a lot easier than you suggest. I’m guessing that we are all willing to condemn slavery in no uncertain terms, which is a lot more than anyone in the Bible is willing to do, and you would think they would have an obligation to do so given that the Scripture that is routinely cited as God’s will explicitly allows and regulates it. There’s also the issue of insight that is more than just answers, that is: people who have displayed a lot more savvy in developing questions, identifying tough spots in moral questions, grappling with social issues in a heck of a lot more depth regardless of what you think of their particular answers to the questions they raise.
As I noted straight from the very start, the straight up IQ question really ISN’T very interesting or useful, and I agree with you that it isn’t. That’s why I’m not discussing it in particular.