I'm always suspicious when religious believers try to drag me into "deep philosophical discussions about whether god exists or not."
When they do that, they usually want us to ignore the plain evidence - no Pillars Of Fire or resurrections or half-god babies born in the last few thousand years, and no real evidence for their god. But if they can drag us from the "real" to the "philosophical," they can play a never-ending What-If game where anything is possible.
And no wonder Plato is their favorite philosopher. Much of his fantastical bullshit is equal to Xianity's fantastical bullshit.
I like this review of Plato's "Republic." Simon Blackburn wrote it for The Guardian in 2006:
The work is long, sprawling and meandering. Far from holding water, its arguments range from ordinarily leaky to leaky in that zany way which leaves some interpreters unable to recognise them as ever intended to hold water at all. Its apparent theory of human nature is fanciful, and might seem inconsistent. Its apparent political implications are mainly disagreeable, and often appalling.
In so far as Plato has a legacy in politics, it includes theocracy or rule by priests, militarism, nationalism, hierarchy, illiberalism, totalitarianism and complete disdain of the economic structures of society, born in his case of privileged slave-ownership. In Republic he managed to attach himself both to the most static conservatism and to the most wild-eyed utopianism. On top of all that, the book's theory of knowledge is a disaster...
We know very little about Plato, and what there is to know is not generally appealing. If he is put in historical context, we may find an archetypal grumpy old man, a disenchanted aristocrat, hating the Athenian democracy, convinced that the wrong people are in charge, with a deep fear of democracy itself, constantly sneering at artisans, farmers and indeed all productive labour, deeply contemptuous of any workers' ambition for education, and finally manifesting a hankering after the appalling military despotism of Sparta.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/05/shopping.plato
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