Doubt killed Socrates
In a sense, religious doubt began with the ancient Greeks, the first to robustly question the concept of divinity.
The death of seminal Greek philosopher Socrates in 399 B.C. was a harbinger of how the consequences of religious skepticism would play out in ensuing millennia. While questioning the consensus “truth” of just about everything in his day, Socrates, fatally it turned out, also publicly doubted the existence of Greece’s many-splendored godly pantheon that included mighty Zeus, prophetic Apollo and calm Athena.
When notorious gadfly Socrates was charged with the offenses that ultimately led to his execution, among them was that he was an atheist who disrespected the Greek gods and the local deities of his city-state, Athens. So, among other things—teaching youth heterodox ideas, being an apologist for arch-rival Sparta and showing contempt for the Athenian elite—he was targeted for religious heresy. “Heresy” can be defined as not fully accepting the religious dogma of a particular time and place, and, more alarming to authorities, promoting deviant alternative spiritual ideas.
After the reported crucifixion of Christ and gradual birth and evolution of the religion that adopted his name, heresy steadily gained credence over centuries as perhaps the worst crime a person could commit. It was a crime so heinous, authorities often decreed, it required a punishment of death. And not just any death. Punishments for heresy, particularly for wayward Christians and particularly in the Middle Ages, including burning at a stake, hanging and being beaten to pulp while stretched on a wagon wheel. Or, if the heretic was especially loathsome, he (or she) might have their tongue burned and torn off, and their belly disemboweled before being torched while chained to a stake. Jan Hus, a pious Czech priest who fairly criticized the hedonistic excesses of Catholic Church leaders, had his beard “salted” with gunpowder before his burning, to assure a particularly spectacular finale. Later, German cleric Martin Luther kicked off the Protestant Reformation with a list of grievances against the church very similar to Hus’.
But many centuries prior, the Greeks treated their heretics, like Socrates, with far more civilly. The legendary Greek sage’s punishment, common at the time, was to drink a concoction laced with poisonous hemlock. As his young disciples wept—not including Plato, who sadly missed the event—Socrates reportedly accepted the deadly cup cheerfully from an equally inconsolable guard. The guard advised the philosopher to walk around until his legs felt heavy and then lie down to let the poison do its work, which he did. Persecutions for heresy in history—for unbelief in different gods at different times—makes the practice seem oddly arbitrary when it should be absolute. The reason, too often, was simply the politics of ruling self-interest. As Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger once reportedly said, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” Or, as Napoleon Bonaparte opined, “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.”
In the end, the tragedy and irony of sainted Socrates’ demise is that he died for rejecting a provincial religion and its gods, all of which ultimately went extinct. Likewise, more and more people in the modern world are turning away from the dreamy realms of supernatural religion toward more rational explanations, as traditional hypotheses for invisible beings and places fail to convince. “Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence,” wrote British philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russel. “It will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”
But with three-quarters of Americans today still self-identifying as God-believing Christians, the fade, practically speaking, promises to be long—and possibly even endless.
