Plato's dialogues vs. the Bible? Which is better/more essential?

Plato for sure. The Bible is written in an obscure Jewish idiom and (this is my personal opinion) many of the Biblical texts have not been retained in full but are missing fragments, which theologians have tried to address by truncating the narrative, which only makes them even harder to read--and I say that as a Christian.

>tfw Plato and Aristotle are never printed together like the Old/New Testament

what the fuck feel is that

What do you think is missing?

Probably nothing critical to be honest. The Bible is ultimately about the "spirit" it conveys. It should not be treated as a book of law, so the missing pieces don't matter too much since the text as a whole is largely intact. But it does make the text that much harder to read, which is why the Protestants are wrong to advocate free private interpretation of scripture.

lol, the absolute state of this board.

it's essential that you read neither. they're poison to the mind

Plato no doubt, seeing how the Patristic exegesis of the Bible is directly based and in many respects dependent on the teachings of Plato and the Neoplatonists.

What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Everything.

Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Eriugena, Aquinas, Dante, Boehme and so forth – all of these profoundly influental luminaries are in an intimate relationship with a modified Platonic philosophy.

The Sufis and Kabbalists are no different.

Many of the learned Christians treated the Bible in the same manner as the Pagan Neoplatonists treated the works of Homer – an allegorical text speaking divine truths, which ought to be interpreted through the lens of philosophy.

On a sidenote, I would add Ovid's Metamorphoses as a foundational text of Western civilization.

Listen to this user.

Both Plato and the Bible certainly have their valuable elements, in abudance at that, but both are preachers of death – self denial and worldly contempt runs rampant throughout.

Now, if one wanted to cultivate a relationship with the divine by denying the world and reside in solitude, that is their business – however, what I've seen happening far too often, especially with Eastern philosophy, is people who are allured into a half-assed asceticism. There is nothing differentiang them from the common schmuck except for this: they have no achievements in life, no embers of ambition, no personal excellence, no craft to perfect, no skills, no character, no solidity; they're airheads, all wings and no feet, justifying their misery by shrugging off the world dismissively, gestating as fetuses in the comfortbale fumes of mediocricy.

Spineless vegetables, in other words.

Your post was good until that bizarre angst-ridden diary turn it took in the second part.
>they have no achievements in life, no embers of ambition, no personal excellence, no craft to perfect, no skills, no character, no solidity
All of the men that you listed had these qualities in spades but since they don't align with iterations that you personally consider laudable you roundly ignore them and try to claim that they were ambitionless vegetables. Disregard their efforts if you'd like, but to try and slight them as though they never made any is factually incorrect.

The bible is the word of god, so what is there to argue about.

>no craft to perfect
I mean the very fact that you're trying to stone-faced say that about Dante of all people is a weird window into your biases. You do talk some shit.

whether its not for starters

>Ow it came to passe

They're both essential, brainlet. You wouldn't have fallen for this false dilemma if you had read Aristotle and Plato already.

Everyone is supposed to write their own bible

...

>not able to grasp the totality I incite

tis truly monstrous

Not really. It's on us to expand the rest of the Cosmos, God seperated us to do so.

>fiat is the sound of god brapping

My angst-ridden diary (desu) wasn't directed at those mentioned in the first part, as should be clear from actually reading my post without the blur of a hurt nerve.

Why don't you throw some more prominent Christian Platonists in to the mix to further your """argument""" – Boethius, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, amongst others.

My point was, to cut it out plainly, that there are seductive elements in the Bible and Plato that could quite well lead feeble minds to a miserable life of stagnancy.

If you want to discuss this, I'm up for a good conversation. I've laid my main point out, so the turn is yours. If you want to caricutarize my arguments and jerk off in an echochamber, make sure to hang yourself afterwards.

>preachers of death
the purpose of life is to die

Then go ahead already

no its to glorify God, heathen

There's too much of it for a practical, everyman single volume you twat. Hackett's Plato (the preferred Veeky Forums edition) is 1800 wispy, extra-thin pages, barely all bound together in one volume. Standard 2-V Oxbridge Aristotle runs to about 2500 pages. So that's three very dense volumes.

>IT SAYS YOU'RE GAY