Salvete Piscine,
I really enjoyed your post, which was in fact a response to several other posts including mine, which you handled commendably well. (I can usually only respond to one at a time or else smoke inevitably begins to pour out of my ears.)
But anyway, I found it all very informative and have saved it locally if you don't mind, in order to refer back to it in the future.
There was, however, one small but nonetheless important area that I am unable to understand or agree with, as follows:
M Moravi Horati Piscine wrote:Platonism is also the foundation of Christian and Muslim theology. Augustine of Hippo of course used Platonism in his ideas.
I have both heard and read statements that allude to the above, and have repeatedly questioned myself as to whether or not I've been missing something fundamental all my life, as I have never been able to see how the Christians or Muslims did anything but plagiarise the works of the ancient philosophers shamelessly to achieve their own diabolical ends in a worldly sense, or to take timeless wisdom bestowed upon mankind by the divine through evolution, and then stuff it into a tiny cardboard box, which is an accurate symbolism for the manner in which they attempt to subjugate and confine any and all concepts of Infinity, Divine Energy, and Ultimate Reality into a space of about 1cm square, since that's all their tiny little minds can handle, and they then threaten with death or bodily harm any person who refuses to sacrifice their mind, soul, and common-sense and submit themselves blindly to their narrow-minded, dogmatic cult.
I tend to identify intimately with men like Porphyry, who didn't necessarily have a problem with Christ or his teachings, but rather the gross inconsistencies between him and his so-called followers, and subsequently, he thus exposed the Christians for exactly what they were then, are now, always have been, and always will be -- ignorant people and deceivers, who play the part of the helpless, victimized sheep when they have no other recourse, and then instantly transform into a pack of ravenous wolves the moment the balance of power shifts in their favor, as was evidenced from the year 312 CE onward, with the help of one sick, mentally-unstable individual named Constantinus (I refuse to call him or any other Christian "Imperator") who undoubtedly should've been strangled as an infant to spare the world what he later allowed to be unleashed upon humanity.
Obviously, this doesn't hold true for everyone, but then again, I don't think that Porphyry was necessarily including everyone in a blanket statement, but rather the upper-echelon and elite that have always operated on a different level behind the scenes to affect their own desires for absolute power and world domination.
But getting back more in-line with the subject matter, I am unable to understand what Christians like Augustine ever did except shamelessly twist and distort the original teachings of Plato and others into a warped Christian worldview and mentality. Ditto for the Muslims, who fare no better. There have always been and always will be those who copy and paste bits and pieces of philosophy together to conform to their own ignorant, narrow scope of reality, and stamp a trademark on it in favor of one particularly dangerous cult or another.
However, in response to a request made originally by Romulus (I believe), I have found several fairly-decent introductory works which, to be sure, are not much more than compilations or overviews of Platonistic thought as a whole, but are still a good point to start until you decide exactly what you're looking for.
Until next time,
*GAIVS IVLIVS CÆSAR OCTAVIANVS*
"Non scholae sed vitae discimus."
"Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur."