(September 18, 2012 at 3:51 pm)Darkstar Wrote: Is anyone here familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave? We discussed it in english class the other day, and I found it to be strikingly applicable to religion. You can find an overview here: Allegory of the Cave.
It appears to explain everything at first, but then comes a puzzling discontinuity. If the cave (and the lack of undrestanding associated with it) are what breed the 'goddidit' notion, then why are so many people still there, even after we've discovered that Zeus doesn't cause lightning, Posiedon isn't responsible for tsunamis, and that the earth isn't flat? They keep forgetting that the difference between the bible and mythology is that the latter has been acknowledged to be a bunch of morally and scientifically outdated fictional stories, whereas the former hasn't. They took Zeus pretty seriously back then, and yet modern theists can dismiss their claims immediatly, because a lot of people will agree with them. I used to think "wow, Zeus and Posiedon, etc. kill so many people for not worshipping them, and turn people into animals and bugs when they say something out of line. I'm sure glad Yahweh doesn't do stuff like that." ...right
I think the point Plato was trying to make is that the allegory of cave is applicable to religion, but not in the way you reasoned. I don't think that it is particularly applicable to religion or atheism.
Plato's point was that all of us humans are the people living in that cave. The things we perceive as real i.e. literally everything around us - even the ideas in our minds, are not actually real but are simply shadows of the real things. The real "perfect" forms exist in some other higher plane - that is the crux of Platonic Idealism. The problem with that is, within the allegory, the bound person has no knowledge of this real 3-d world. In fact, he doesn't even have any inclination that what he sees is a shadow. And yet Plato, who to all intents and purposes is also bound looking at the shadows, has somehow divined not only that this 3-d world exists but also what's in it?
This theme is found in a lot of religions. Like in Christianity, the perfect higher plane is replaced by heaven or god who is perfect and everything else is an imperfect reflection. The motivation behind preaching this is easy to understand. If you want someone to swallow your bullshit, you have to first negate what they know. And the easiest way to do that is by invalidating their only source of knowledge - the world around them. Once you have convinced them that they are looking at the shadows, they'd accept anything you tell them about the 3-d world.
I disagree with your interpretation of the allegory - namely that the religious doctrine is the shadow and atheists are the people who have seen the real world - for a completely different reason. Basically, I don't see that there is anything chaining the people and forcing them to look only at the doctrine. They are free to look away, free to see the real world and yet they don't.
