Relatively intelligent people I have met on-line ranging from writers, professors, and debaters like the late Christopher Hitchens seem to see what they call a dialectic according to Socrates as a kind of religion or thing to live by. Question everything, look higher to the elevated consciousness. Get your head out of the mud of daily diving, cares, needs and desires, and just think. On one hand, thinking is indeed something we could stand to do more of, and still, Plato's cave analogy serves as a convenient image to denigrate everything that there actually is, and has been created good, and promote the something or other higher (so-called). They will even say that it is a "satanic" activity in the Biblical sense, the legitimate questioning of everything.
It really is the "fall upwards". You can be like God. How could God forbid you something? How could he withhold knowledge of evil from you? Go for it. You will be like God. Look inside for all the knowledge you need. Nothing is really forbidden, or shameful.
The Satan of the Bible asks Adam and Eve to search for something more than what they have been given--paradise on earth, love, goodness, bodies that reproduce, food, nurture. But Satan does not care. Satan offers a pretend light. It is not a light. It is death, that he offers.
And so even Socrates, when elevated to religious figure, a prophet, is Satan.
I cried at the account of Socrates' death. He was brave and good in many ways. But Plato was into eugenics and control. So, also, the Socratic dialogue tends to swerve into the nightmare, downhill, rather than upward. His society thought Socrates a demagogue, and maybe he was one.
Better watch out.
Mohammed, also, tries to teach that God can have nothing to do with the physical. The results are also disastrous.
Christian Science wants to say that illness is an illusion. But illness is not an illusion. It is real and scientific pursuits and medicine have offered relief and need acceptance. Buddhism wants us to ignore all the suffering in the world. Give up caring, altogether.
The Bible teaches us to value what we have in the physical realm. The spiritual and higher realm is attached and integrated into this physical realm. It cannot be pried apart. When it is attempted the results are not elevating. It is a mirage, a temptation, a false road.
There is only one good road and it is narrow: Christ, God in the flesh. Love incarnate.
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