(May 16, 2024 at 1:00 pm)h311inac311 Wrote: Mara Bar Samrion, "What advantage did the Athenians gain from putting Socrates to death? Famine and plague came upon them as a judgment for their crime. Wat advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise King? It was just after that their Kingdom was abolished. God justly avenged these three wise men: the Athenians died of hunger; the Samians were overwhelmed by the sea; the Jews, ruined and driven from their land, live in complete dispersion. But Socrates did not die for good; he lived on in the teaching of Plato. Pythagoras did not die for good; he lived on in the statue of Hera. Nor did the wise King die for good; He lived on in the teaching which He had given."
What the hell is he talking about? Athens didn’t suffer any famine or pestilence after Socrates’ death. Pythagoras was never burned by the people of Samos; he left it in 530 B.C.E. and had a long life afterwards in the Greek colonies of Croton and Metapontum in what is now Italy. Likewise, the island of Samos was never “covered with sand” or “with the sea” - in an hour or otherwise. And what does he mean when he says Pythagoras did not die “because of the statue of Hera”? None of the “facts” given in this passage are correct, and some are completely baffling!
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"