Author: Ophelia Benson

Photos and news published in Iranian media describe continuous crackdowns in Iran. To “increase public security”, the regime’s Security Forces have now started clamping down on “thugs” in Tehran. The drive is a follow-up to the commonplace plan that traditionally starts in the springtime with nationwide morality crackdowns on women labelled “bad hijab” (badly veiled).

Authorities in Iran speak of a steadily increasing number of arrests and claim that “Our decisive confrontation will continue in Tehran down to the very last thug,” said the head of the capital’s metropolitan police force, Ahmad Reza Radan, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

According to different sources, pictures taken by the Fars news agency and reproduced by several moderate dailies showed a man barefoot and stripped to the waist, with two plastic watering cans round his neck, being grabbed by a police officer, while other images showed black balaclava-clad police officers beating their captives. A number of captives were forced to ride a donkey as a “warning to others”.

Some scenes of humiliation were so repulsive that IRI’s police chief had to admit that some officers had overstepped the mark, but he emphasised that the parading of suspects around neighbourhoods had been carried out with prior approval.

Since the beginning of the morality crackdowns, it is believed that thousands of people have been arbitrarily arrested mostly on a range of “phoney charges” from non-conformity to the Islamic standard dress to alleged drug trafficking. Many thousands of women and young men have been warned or forced to make a written pledge to respect Islamic standard dress. Furthermore, a number of the “culprits” have been turned over to the judicial authorities for the alleged offence of improper dressing.

The worldwide published atrocities of crackdowns against women show women harassed and surrounded by screaming female morality police draped in shroud-like black chadors. A woman with stains of blood in the face is dragged in a police car. Crackdowns on women and newly on “thugs” triggered reactions in the international community by accusing the IRI of harassing thousands of men and women in recent weeks for their allegedly immoral behaviour.

In its statement, Human Rights Watch reports that IRI’s police detained more than 80 people in a raid on a birthday party in the city of Isfahan in May. Police accused some attendees of the private gathering of wearing the clothes of the opposite sex.

Human Rights Watch said the arbitrary arrests threaten basic rights to privacy and urged the IRI to halt what it calls a nationwide crackdown on what Iranian authorities view as deviant dress and behaviour.

Following the sporadic reactions of victims in Iran and international pressure, a number of Islamic factions of the regime, in order to play down the IRI’s constitutional violence, especially against women, simply accused the government of undermining the IRI’s laws by beating and parading the suspects. The parade in the neighbourhood is however permitted with prosecutors’ approval. These suspects, not yet accused, are punished because the punishment indeed serves as a warning and intimidation to other people.

Most people in Iran believe that such accusations are mainly being used as justification for the arrest and repression of political activists and those perceived to be potential threats to the security of the IRI.

Who are these “thugs”?

It is important to mention that the word “thug” in Iran is not completely synonymous to what in the West refers to people with a schizoid relationship with violence. Thugs in Iran are not soccer hooligans, rednecks, skinheads or any similar western group of violent, furiously nationalistic, xenophobic and racist young men who enjoy destroying property and hurting people, finding “absolute completeness” in the havoc they wreak. Thugs in the West may even be employed in high-paying blue-collar jobs.

By contrast, the word “thug” in Iran refers to a group of people who are socially and economically marginalised. They are derived from poor milieus and confront all unfair aspects of their society. Because of the high rate of unemployment, poverty, widespread illiteracy, and a lack of welfare and a social protect system, they are direct victims of such a society and spontaneously revolt against the socio-economic pressures.

Bully thugs with a religious identity can be recruited in IRI’s Security Forces or are systematically used in the organised pro-regime militias called plainclothes (lebas shakhsi) to intimidate IRI’s opponents or beat anti-regime’s demonstrators up. Therefore, a number of IRI’s Security Forces, who now arrest thugs, are in fact the recruited ex-thugs. They now accuse the non-recruited thugs of violence, robbery, drugs, whereas these could be indeed applied to them too, if they were not recruited by the regime.

As seen on some published photos and footages of the crackdowns, a number of these “thugs” do not look like thugs. Some of them wear T-shirts with Latin words written on them; they are shaved and seem to be frustrated young men. Since it is easier for a man to wear the part of the rebellious teenager dress than for a woman in Iran, these urban male youth, labelled “Thugs”, are now new victims of the regime.

Some Iranian young men have been flogged for taking drugs, drinking alcohol or simply for listening to a personal walkman while walking down the street. They react in their manner to the lack of personal freedoms. The regime calls these people “thugs”.

Urban youth in particular calls for social and political freedom. Youth is always the sector of the population which reacts most fiercely and most violently to their aspirations not being fulfilled.

Young Iranians make up an estimated 70 percent of their country’s population. More than half of the country’s population is under the age of 20. The generation born under the IRI’s reign is increasingly showing frustration with Iran’s lack of social freedoms and ongoing troubled economy. Iran’s unemployment rate is now 15 percent (11.20 percent in 2006). Youth makes up a large proportion of the unemployed.

Official figures say youth aged 15 to 19 account for 39 percent of the country’s active work force and the unemployment rate stands at about 34 percent among the age groups of 15 to 19 years old and at about 16 percent among the 25 to 29 years age group.

According to some statistics of 2003, about 20,000 teenagers live on the streets of Iran’s larger cities, but most of them reside in Tehran. The problem has been fuelled by poverty and aggravated by the economic crisis.

A report by the United Nations has found that Iran has the highest drug addiction rate in the world. “According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2005, Iran has the highest proportion of opiate addicts in the world — 2.8 percent of the population over age 15”, the report said. “With a population of about 70 million and some government agencies putting the number of regular users close to 4 million, Iran has no real competition as world leader in per capita addiction to opiates, including heroin.”

The report added that a government poll had shown that almost 80 percent of Iranians believed that there was a direct link between unemployment and drug addiction. According to Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies, 20 percent of Iran’s adult population was “somehow involved in drug abuse”.

Many Iranians describe high drug availability as evidence of a plot by the regime. “If they could create enough jobs, enough entertainment, why would people turn to drugs?” It is not only the lack of policy and management, but the interests of corrupt state mafia whose sales in Iran made up a 10 billion dollar market last year, nearly three quarters of the total revenue from Iran’s oil market during the same period.

This new repression proves that hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad’s promises of economic reform in Iran have failed to materialise into raising the standard of living for most ordinary Iranians in the 21 months since he came to power in August 2005.

The Iranian population, far behind Sri Lanka, remains below the poverty line. A member of Iran’s Majlis (parliament) confessed in Jan. 2005 that “90 percent of the population are living under the poverty line and only ten percent of the people have access to social services provided by the government”, Mohammad Abbaspour said in an interview with a hardline state-run news agency. The situation has since worsened and continues pushing an increasing number of young people below the poverty line.

In the past 27 years, we have witnessed immense pressures on different segments of Iranian society. The IRI dreams of rendering it into a total Islamic society, but people (especially youth) do not bow to an Islamic way of life in any standard. Furthermore, social poverty, homeless tramps, higher unemployment rates, and the lack of social and private freedom, lead to the rise of unsolvable ills for Iranian youth. The incompetent regime treats a majority of this frustrated youth as “thugs”.

According to Article 35 of the Chinese Constitution, Chinese citizens have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In reality this is utterly false. Consistently, China has shown total contempt for the concept of freedom of speech, and, most worryingly, it is being aided in this by major Western corporations. Throwing aside the pretence of responsible and ethical business, well known corporations including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Cisco Systems are actively assisting the Chinese government’s campaign against human rights, motivated by the promise of potentially huge financial returns.

In contemporary China, journalists, bloggers, academics, and political opponents of the Government routinely face harassment and imprisonment. A brief summary of recent developments makes for sobering reading.

2000:
Academic historian Xu Zerong was detained on spurious charges of ‘illegally providing state secrets’ (in reality, sending historical material dating from the 1950s about the Korean War to researchers outside China) and publishing banned material. This earned him a combined prison sentence of 13 years.

2001:
On July 10, China announced it will put Chinese-American academic Li Shaomin on trial for spying. On July 14, one day after China’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, Li Shaomin, an American academic, was tried for ‘espionage’. Then on July 24, Sociologist Dr. Gao Zhan was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges of ‘collecting intelligence for Taiwan’. Routinely, China imprisons academics on trumped up charges of ‘espionage’ in order to silence criticism of the regime.

2002:
Wired News reported that the Chinese government ‘continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall’, blocking access to information on the Internet and employing 30,000 ‘Internet police’ to monitor its citizens. Most worryingly, it was revealed that the Internet blocking software was sold to the Chinese government by US companies.

2004:
Journalist Shi Tao warned journalists of the dangers associated with dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was arrested and later imprisoned for 10 years, for revealing a ‘State secret’. Court papers revealed that Yahoo Holdings in Hong Kong had provided details regarding Tao’s e-mail correspondence and IP address tracking, leading to his conviction.

2005:
It was revealed that Microsoft was censoring Chinese weblogs that used words such as ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘demonstration’. Microsoft’s justification for this blatant assistance with censorship was that it ‘abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates’. This same year, the Chinese government imprisoned three journalists, dismissed editors of a number of newspapers, banned dozens of newspapers, and confiscated almost one million ‘illegal’ publications. Also in 2005, a court froze the assets of two journalists who had criticised work conditions at factories run by Foxconn, a company which makes the Apple iPod.

2006:
Google agreed to censor search results in China, and set up a special government authorised search engine for China. All other Google search engines are blocked from being used. Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil’ here looks to be little more than words.

2007:
This February, U.S. Congressman Chris Smith stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that Western corporations are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, and are in fact assisting them. ‘There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America’s largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility’, he wrote.

While President George W. Bush continues to mouth platitudes about freedom and democracy, he has failed to apply these standards to China, thereby revealing the power of the economic motive in determining who is eligible for human rights and who apparently isn’t. The outrageous human rights abuses and restrictions on freedom of speech in China continue apace, aided and abetted by quiescent Western governments and Western companies willing to actively assist government censorship in return for a ‘fast buck’.

This article originally appeared in Blurb magazine and is reproduced here with permission.

Picking up this tiny book from a little-known university press, I am reminded of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and their fellow pamphleteers of revolution. Even the cover, with its pale blue and declarative font, looks like samizdat. Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore would like to think of themselves as dissident writers in a totalitarian state, but their polemics are widely available and sell by the bucketload. Moore, in particular, has added considerably to Rupert Murdoch’s fortune. But Danny Postel is the real deal.

The first half of Postel’s little book comprises a series of essays in which he attempts to answer the question: why is the Left of the rich world ignoring comrades in the poor world?

Iraq tore the Western left in two. Everyone agreed that the invasion might be catastrophic and that its motives were not the finest. Far-left sects organised massive demonstrations against it. But a large part of the Iraqi left felt that the war was a good idea for the sole reason that, whatever happened, Saddam would go. Their viewpoint was ignored by the antiwar parties but given a voice in the West by a disparate group of writers, journalists, academics, bloggers and trade unionists, who chose to stick by their comrades and, after the war, and unlike much of the antiwar movement, chose to stick by them against the fundamentalist ‘resistance’. This caused a monstrous schism that reverberates to this day.

As Postel makes clear, Iranians tend to be in favour of basic liberal values rather than radical anti-imperialist projects. There are two reasons for this. One is that, under faith-based totalitarianism, the urgent need is to get the rights of free speech, free elections and gender equality before you can embark on any ambitious economic schemes. Another is the example of the Tudeh Party, a Communist organisation that allied with Khomeini to organise the revolution only to be murdered along with thousands of their friends when they had outlived their usefulness to the theocrats. The Tudeh Party have a British equivalent in the Socialist Workers’ Party, recently allied with a reactionary Islamic organisation.

In effect, the Tudeh Party sold itself and its comrades down the river. Postel quotes the journalist Afshin Molavi:

Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents’ generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third World anti-imperalism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism. ‘We just want to be normal,’ is typical of what hundreds of students have told me. ‘We’re tired of radicalism.’

Yet hardly anyone on the planet, aside from a few crazed neoconservatives, is in favour of an attack on Iran. Surely we can agree on that? And Postel gives some fairly convincing reasons it probably won’t happen:

The rhetoric of looming showdowns and enemies at the gate is pumped up by and serves the interest of both regimes. Posturing aside, Bush and Ahmadinejad are in fact involved in a symbiotic dance, a game of Schmittian shadowboxing, if you will, in which each needs the other as an enemy and feeds on the other’s rhetoric.

I’d go with that, and would add another reason: liberal internationalism is dead. Derided by both the right and the left (in my country, the conservative press takes the same line as its liberal counterpart: that Iraq is a waste of our time and money) no leader will be able to get elected by advocating war. Already the tide is turning. Kissinger has been visiting the White House, and Bush’s recent talks (read ‘deals’) with the Iranian regime signifies that we are back to the old Cold War routine of selling weapons to dictators rather than overthrowing them. And this is a sad thing, I think.

Yet most of the Western left still sees the world through what Postel calls ‘the prism of American imperialism, which is no less an American prism for being critical, as opposed to uncritical, of US foreign policy’. Whatever America is against, it will defend. Throw in a puritan instinct to defend faith-based regimes, and a creepy servility towards foreign tyrants, and that is the majority Left position in a nutshell: and one that doesn’t seem to realise its parochialism in putting its own domestic political preferences over the lives of the oppressed.

In a way this book is like an easy introduction to where the Left has gone wrong over the past few years. Postel discusses the great betrayal of Michel Foucault, who went to Iran after the revolution and praised its ‘different regime of truth,’; the pernicious idea that freedom of speech and separation of church and state and the right to vote comprise some kind of imperialist conspiracy; the silence from Western leftists at the regime’s executions, torture, imprisonment and beatings of Iranian feminists and trade unionists and its crackdown on student demonstrations. Antiwar activists claim to speak for the Iranian people, but cannot name a single Iranian dissident – let alone the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, a former political prisoner who gives an interview to Postel in the latter half of this book.

All this can be summed up in a single anecdote, which is worth extensive quotation:

[Shirin Ebadi, Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer] went on a speaking tour in the spring of 2006 to discuss her recently-published autobiography, Iran Awakening. As someone who every day of every week defends the victims of the regime’s brutal abuses – indeed as someone who has done jail time for engaging in that work – the issue of the Islamic Republic’s human rights practices tends to figure centrally in her scheme of things. Which is not to say that it’s the only issue on her agenda, or that it in any way blunts her criticisms of the United States and its foreign policy – quite the contrary. She has spoken out in no uncertain terms against the Iraq War, the detainee base at Guantánamo, and the torture inflicted by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib – and has made it utterly clear that she opposes any US intervention in Iran. And yet, at a public event for her book in London, an antiwar activist instructed her that she should not denounce Iran’s human rights record – indeed not discuss it at all – explaining that doing so only plays into the hands of the warmongers, and fuels the fires of imperialism.

Emphasis is of course mine. This was Ebadi’s reply:

Leaning over the lectern and waving her finger at the activist, she made plain that any antiwar movement that advocates silence in the face of tyranny, for whatever reason, can count her out.

We should be able to unite on opposition to war with Iran. But, as Postel explains, opposition is not enough. We know what we’re against: what exactly are we for? If you can’t answer that, you can count yourself out of any serious debate about the future of the Iranian people.

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran, Danny Postel, Prickly Paradigm 2006

I have often complained of the shallowness, triviality, and anaemia of current theism/atheism discussions. In the following contribution (hopefully to be followed by others) I mean to infuse some lifeblood into the discussion. If, on whichever side of the discussion you may be, you still find much in what I say with which you strongly disagree, which indeed irritates you, that will be all the better. I mean to stir stagnant waters, inject turbulence into placid intellectual positions.

The idea of a creator or of creation is metaphysically bankrupt. It is a silly notion that breeds more riddles than it solves. In fact it solves nothing. If we ask: Why should there be anything rather than nothing?, we see immediately that there can be no answer. To advance the idea of a creator to resolve the mystery of being does nothing but confound and complicate the issue. In the first place, the ultimate mystery remains where it was. For why should there be that creator or first being rather than not? There is no answer. Moreover we have the riddle of why the creator took it into its head to produce something where there was nothing. Being is the ultimate mystery and there is no way to make it yield to our questioning. We have to accept it on its own terms.

It would be easy to see the idea of a creator producing the world as the understandably crude attempt by human beings in the infancy of humanity to resolve the riddle. The answer would easily suggest itself to them on the analogy of their own production of things.

Why do so many humans today accept that answer and believe it to be reasonable and obvious? The answer again is simple. Traditional cultures inculcate it in them. If you ask, Why should we accept those traditions as true?, the traditional answer is that that answer was revealed by that creator itself. Who says that? That same tradition. We have to believe the traditional doctrine because the tradition tells us it was revealed by the creator and we have to believe that it was revealed by the creator because the tradition tells us that.

I say it would be easy to see the fatuity of all that, if only we could bring ourselves to think for ourselves. Unfortunately, most of us do not think for ourselves. It is so much more comfortable to have others think for us and to receive our mass-produced thought finely packaged, home delivered, user-friendly, and with promises of alluring rewards thrown into the bargain.

Let us ask again: Why should we believe our traditional teachings? Because they come from God. Well, let us close our eyes to the circularity of the answer. Let us look at the credentials of that God as that tradition itself presents him. Let us try for a while to put aside the reverence and awe instilled in us by our traditional upbringing and look at the God of the Pentateuch, the God of Paul, the God of the Book of Revelation, the God of the Koran. Let us judge him by the common moral standards that we now accept in decent, civilized society. We find him a liar, a despot, a capricious, vengeful, cruel creature. True, we will find in the Torah, in the Gospels, and in the Koran, many fine sentiments and ideals. But we find similar and even finer ones in cultures either with no gods or with gods we no longer take seriously, which should show us that those sentiments and ideals which we rightly value are independent of belief in our monotheistic God.

So much for the cosmological argument for the existence of God. Let us move on to ontology.

The question Does God exist? is inane. The existence of the existent does not need proof. You go to a primitive tribesman and ask him: ‘Does God exist?’ He answers: ‘Of course. Come, I’ll show you.’ He takes you into his cave or his hut and shows you the effigy he worships saying, ‘Here is God.’ What proof better than that can you ask for? On the other hand, how would you go about proving the non-existence of God? To try to prove logically the non-existence of an unknown nothing is the height of absurdity, the worst kind of eristic juggling.

The sensible thing then is not to ask: ‘Does God exist?’ but to ask: ‘What do we mean by God?’ Throughout the history of humankind, humans have had many differing ideas of God. Many of the old conceptions are no longer taken seriously by present-day members of the human race, so we can leave those to anthropologists. What about extant ideas within the established religions? Then, you may argue that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is revolting, the God of the New Testament is replete with contradictions equally with the Allah of the Koran. So what? There is no logical impossibility in the idea of a being mighty and clever enough to make the universe and run it in accordance with its whims and who may yet be as imperfect and as unaccountable as Yahweh or God or Allah.

A. N. Whitehead’s final answer to the question, What is God? is summed up in the final paragraph of chapter III of his Religion in the Making (1926). I will quote this beautiful paragraph in full:

“The order of the world is no accident. There is nothing actual which could be actual without some measure of order. The religious insight is the grasp of this truth: That the order of the world, the depth of reality of the world, the value of the world in its whole and in its parts, the beauty of the world, the zest of life, the peace of life, and the mastery of evil, are all bound together—not accidentally, but by reason of this truth: that the universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but that this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God.”(1)

Does this prove the existence of God? The question is, strictly speaking, meaningless. What Whitehead gives us is a way of looking at the world, a vision of the world, in which the world exhibits meaningfulness and value. And the gist of that outlook is that, if we are to find meaning and value in the universe, we must see order, coherence, intelligence, and goodness as ultimate characters of reality. This is what I mean when I say that to be is to be good, when I maintain that ultimate reality must be intelligent and good, when I describe ultimate reality as Creative Eternity and say that Creative Eternity is Love.(2)

If we replace ‘the soul’ by ‘God’ in the famous proof of the immortality of the soul in Plato’s Phaedrus (3), we have an exquisite ‘proof’ of the eternity of God. But what would the ‘proof’ prove after all? Nothing. It would neither prove the existence of God nor tell us anything about what God is. What it does is to establish the ideal reality of our idea of eternity, in the same way as Plato’s ‘proof’ both in the Phaedrus and the Laws and his arguments in the Phaedo establish the reality of the ideals of autonomy and integrity embedded in the Socratic-Platonic concept of the soul.(4)

But while some of the philosophers I admire most speak of God and though I could without qualm declare that I believe in God in a very real and profound sense, yet I think it advisable to avoid using the term ‘God’ in philosophical discussion, since a philosopher using the term will find it necessary to spend as much time explaining what s/he does not mean as expressing what s/he does mean. The same holds for the term ‘faith’. I could readily affirm that without a core of faith philosophy would be vacuous and valueless. But this word ‘faith’ is laden with untoward associations with the ideas of revelation and dogma. While therefore I maintain that reason is not only compatible with, but is in fact meaningless without, a certain something that could be called faith, yet in general I try to keep clear of this suspect word.

Because this sounds so complicated, let me put it in a different way. Faith as commonly understood is, in my view, a mockery of reason and an insult to human intelligence, and the usual attempts to reconcile faith and reason turn out to be no more than word jugglery or self-deception. But on the other hand, through mere reason we cannot find our way to any reality or any value. Kant had to support and supplement pure reason with practical reason. Kant’s followers restored Reason to the Whole to rescue it from its sterile purity. Whitehead put reality and value back into the world by insisting on the integrity of experience. These were all insightful moves. To preserve our dignity and our worth as human beings, we must have unfettered Reason, but it must be Reason with a throbbing heart. I hold that the one way to achieve that object is to find all reality and all value within ourselves. The self-evidence of the reality and value within us is the Faith we need, is the God the believers craved and the unbelievers sacrificed.

William Ernest Hocking expresses this elusive idea well in the following words: “The birth of the idea of God in the mind – the judgment ‘Reality is living, divine, a God exists’ – is so subtle, like the faintest breath of the spirit upon the face of the waters, that no look within can tell whether God is here revealing himself to man, or man creating God.”(5)

If I have not irritated you enough already, dear Reader, let me tease you with some mystic-mongering:

god is real
therefore god does not exist
for reality is opposed to existence
the circumference of a circle is not in the circle
the circumference is not outside the circle
the circumference does not exist
it is an idea
it is a reality
it does not exist
but without it no circle exists
there may be round things in the world
but without that reality that does not exist
no round thing is a circle
nor is it even round
god is an idea
god is real
god does not exist
but without that real god that does not exist
no thing in the world has meaning
no thing in the world has value
no thing in the world has reality
no thing in the world has existence
the idea that constitutes my world is my idea
it springs from my mind
my idea encompasses my world
whose idea constitutes the world encompassing me?
what mind gives it birth?
that is a question no one can answer
neither science nor pure reason can tell
that is a question about which we can only mythologize
and mythologize we must
without mythologizing our world rots
but when we forget that our myths are myths
the mind that created the myths
rots
rots and dies and petrifies
with the death of the mind
god dies
god then exists
but is no longer real
that dead existing god is the god of religion

Maximus of Tyre in the second century of the Christian era wrote winged words in his beautiful “defence of idols” with which I like to close this essay: “Let men know what is divine (to theion genos), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Pheidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire — I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them remember.”(6)

Footnotes:

(1)Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making, 1926, pp.119-20.

(2)See my Let Us Philosophize, 1998, Book Two “Reality”.

(3)Plato, Phaedrus, 245c-246a.

(4)See my Plato: An Interpretation, 2005, especially chapters 5, 7, and 12.

(5)William Ernest Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, 1912, “The Will as a Maker of Truth”, reproduced in Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion, 1954, ed. Daniel J. Bronstein and Harold M. Schulweis, p.20.

(6)Maximus of Tyre, quoted by Gilbert Murray in Five Stages of Greek Religion, 1935, p.77, n.1.

D. R. Khashaba is an independent philosopher. His books include Socrates’ Prison Journal and Hypatia’s Lover. He lives in his home country, Egypt, and has a website at Back to Socrates as well as a blog.