Aristotle was the one that brought the concepts of virtue and thereby right and wrong to the fore.
It was Alexander the Great, (who was probably Aristotle’s best-known student) who gave those concepts practical application.
Now while those concepts as Aristotle laid out came very close to the truth, the trouble was, he never had anything to hang those concepts of right and wrong on. Aristotle had no concept of a higher power in his philosophies. He understood that anything created by man can be and usually is, destroyed by man.
And since in his philosophy there was no God, it ended up being that there was no morality, either. Certain men began to be perceived as Gods. Great cities were built. Great accomplishments, great power….but you have no morality, no right and wrong, eventually you end up with no great cities, no great culture, because metaphorically there was no Foundation under the building.
It was the Hebrews who brought the idea of a higher power forward. A lawgiver. The concept that there was a being more powerful than men.
Those those two concepts are at the basis of Western Society, Western culture, and that melding of philosophies resulted in America.
I have stated several times over the years in these spaces that an America simply could not be created without those two philosophies being at the root of it.
Can you, for example, imagine in America created with Islam as its philosophical root? I certainly cannot. Any of the pantheistic cultures? We both know better. Atheism? No. The fact is we would never have lasted as long as we have absent the judeo Christian ethic.
Now, which party [1] was it that booed [2] God at their political convention, again? Which party is it that struggles to remove the influence of the judeo Christian model, from our society, from our culture, and even indirect moral assumptions in our government?
I have a friend who takes great pride in fighting for freedom. He is inherently suspicious of government… He’s a very Freedom minded individual. I have great respect for him, particularly for his thought processes.
He points out however that of themselves those things, the Constitution, the concepts of Freedom, the Bill of Rights and so on are fragile… that anything that is written by men can be erased by men. In this he includes the Constitution the Bill of Rights and the concept undergirding them. And he’s quite correct, so far as he goes.
What he refuses to reckon with however is that the concepts invoked in those documents and which are at the basis of our culture, are inspired by the judeo-christian ethic, and only functional within that environment…. the concept that there is a power higher than man. Because he is an atheist, he has never identified why we hold “these truths to be self-evident”. That entire concept was based on the judeo Christian way of thinking about morality. Remove that foundation and the building will fall.
And who can look around us today and tell me that’s not precisely what’s been happening?