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by inference. The God they believed in was the One that the neo Platonist Plotinus wrote about six or seven hundred years later. Plato developed the complex idea of the realm of forms, and other people writing that I have read have pointed out that Parmenides is credited with starting the thought paradigms that Plato later developed as the metaphysical aspects of the realm of forms that was again more fully developed by Plotinus. Parmenides was a pre-Socratic philosopher worth checking out with a Google search.

Socrates was accused of corrupting youth by instructing them in philosophical method and critical thinking about politics and everything else regarding opinion, or theory of knowledge (epistemology). He had the option to leave Athens and live in exile but choose not to but instead to perish saying that the state had nurtured him and he would accept their judgment. The Athenian state compared to the modern state in America was a very simple democracy. There had been an oligarchy that did not trust the demos or populus. Today in the U.S.A. trans-national corporate interests and over influence nationally by a globally owned broadcast media have corrupted and obfuscated the democracy in the United States and brought it close to the corporate collectivism envisioned by Mussolini, helped in by Henry Ford and Adolph Hitler, admired as a fulfillment of Marxist worldly economic dialects and an ephemeral, stagnating uncreative entity that morphs too easily into decline and fall, war, chaos and autocratic rule even by a special central committee.

Plato and Socrates had it easy comparatively in contemplating the ideal state. Today Americans must decide for themselves if a nation is worth having, if capitalism is pure or corrupted by mob control, if capitalism is the highest possible progress in economic actualization for individual interests or if new economic systems supported by federal policy could be invented and so forth. The founders were for national interests before transnational interests, and even Plato wrote about the Republic as one state-the Romans did well with that until they became a trans-national empire too diverse for coherence as subverted by a plethora of problems and pleasures.

Learn more about this author, Gary C. Gibson.
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