A little place for people to chat about the Socratics, Pre-Socratics, and all of our favorite Fathers of Western Thought.

By - (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

According to Plato, it was ridiculous to think of God as being able to shape-shift. Because God is totally good, in fact, perfect (the same thing to Plato, anyway) he would never deceive us. If he did, he would be showing himself as untrue, as a lie. Any appearance other than his true form would make him less than perfect, and why would God do that?

Plato went further, however. He decided that all stories that displayed the gods as murderous or deceitful MUST be mere fancy, untrue, since we know that gods must be perfectly good. He wanted to censure these stories for future generations and restore them by removing any such references to any evil deeds whatsoever. He did not believe that the children would be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, and because the children would one day grow into leaders of the Republic, they should not grow up with erroneous beliefs about the gods... indeed, one who believes the gods to be malacious and deceitful would grow too complacent with his own shortcomings.