My Philosophy

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Plato's Dualism

 

The way everything is set up – schools, religion, government, and morality, it seems as if it is all based on Plato’s concept of dualism. When I speak to my family about morality or friends about religion, there is always two underlying sides to things – good and bad or right and wrong. I always catch myself thinking: “Why can’t there be three sides? Or four?” These things are so complex that we can’t just say what is right and what is wrong because there are always many more factors involved; including people with different perspectives. Now of course, it is wrong to kill another person, but when the whole nation agrees that it was actually right to execute Bin Laden, then that throws everything off. Placing certain subjects in either the good group or the bad group is too simplistic, too easy. The world is much more complex than that and if we can expand our way of thinking, we can probably work much better together with a better sense of understanding.

 

If I were to say that all criminals are either guilty or innocent, I would be wrong; but what about when we talk about religious belief?  If Plato only lived around 2400 years ago, and our basis of society is based on his teachings, then what about all the other underlying perspectives of civilizations before him? Scientists say that humans, or Homo sapiens, have been around for about 200,000 years. If that is true then there has to have been many more ways of thinking about religion. Before Jesus Christ, there were people with different outlooks on life. These different outlooks have been changing for about 198,000 years. How can we be so sure that a heaven and hell actually exists? With good deeds or sins defying our home for eternity after we die. I’m not saying that this is wrong, I am just implying that we can’t be so sure because, just like dualism, it is only about 2,000 years old. Going back to about 8,000 years, to the ancient Egyptians, there were people who had lived their lives for a greater purpose that they could not even understand and had multiple Gods that they gave praise to. It wasn’t just one mad ruler with thousands of slaves like high school taught us, there were people, rulers, in tune with the universe, and based their society off of the inner workings of it. I feel like opening up to civilizations like so, without too much feelings, and realizing that the world is not as simple as we take it to be, then we will start to understand each other and the world a lot better. Enslaving our minds to this concept of dualism isn’t going to get us much further. If we can open our minds to all types of different perspectives and pick and choose whichever ones work best for ourselves, our world and race would grow exponentially.

[[Di...]]

I think there are many sides to everything. Nothing is ever black or white. Life is very complex and there are many shades of grey with everything.