the cave of ignorance

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Those familiar with the above story, what can you say about it? if no one stil chained up in the cave believes the guy who escaped, does that mean he imagined the sun, sky, and trees?
Why are we so skeptical of people who claim God talks to them personally?

At least provide a link so we can educate ourselves as to what you're saying.

Plato's Cave of Ignorance, the parable.

Google it!

Well, that's easily explained:

What if, in the cave, there's a demon wandering around that they can't percieve?
The demon walks around, and when he strikes one of the men, they start seeing false things at first, then act irrationally, and finally they strangle themselves with their own fetters.
When the demon contaminates one of the men, the afflicted men try to afflict their brothers too, also making them kill themselves. Obviously, this has happened before and they are quite used to this happening.

How could they tell apart the demon's victim from the enlightened one? Are they not right to kill their demon-afflicted peers, if it will save the innocent lives of the others?

No. People might invent some mental illness to label him with.




See above.

When it comes to judging what is true, it is better to be wrong for the right reasons, then right for the wrong reasons.

i.e. it is right to find a guilty man innocent because there is no evidence at all to prove his guilt.
And it is wrong to find a guilty man guilty just because you do not like his face.

Those chained in the cave are wrong when they do not believe the enlightened one.
However, they are right not to blindly believe someone when no possible experience or application of rationality can prove him to be right.

They are wrong for the right reasons.

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However! this is only the case if it truly is the case that no possible experience or application of rationality can prove him to be right. this is a poor reading of Plato's cave as Plato clearly believes that everyone can slip from his chains and walk out of the cave. They do not do so because they believe that their world is already as enlightened as it can be. this is where Plato's cave starts to collapse. Now you just have two groups, each claiming to be enlightened and claiming the other group is wrong and no way of telling which is right. Enter Hegelian dialectics!

It is interesting that the "world of forms" that Plato's unchained man sees in the sun out side of the cave has largely been criticised and mostly abandoned for a very long time in philosophy. Perhaps he just wandered in to another cave and mistook some new shadows for the truth.

In fact, it turns out that those chained up where right for the right reasons!

Because hearing voices is a good sign that a person is crazy. There is no objective reason to believe that those people are actually getting messages from an imaginary supernatural Big Daddy.

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