Dear Socrates

Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Having traveled from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First Century A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Dear Socrates,

Once [in Issue 63] I asked why religion had become your hobbyhorse. Since then you seem to have been riding another one, indeed, a real horse: our mistreatment of animals. Is there a connection?

Yours truly,

Still Curious

Dear Curious,

At first I didn’t think so, but of late I have indeed become convinced that the way humans treat other animals does have a great deal to do with religion. You know that I have been resident in the United States for some time since my return, and here it is impossible not to notice the sharp divide between theists and atheists. A significant proportion of the population holds to a claimed ‘literal interpretation’ of the Bible.

…