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Socrates Beliefs

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2. Socrates and religious beliefs

Introduction
In Phaedo, Socrates makes a number of claims regarding the existence and nature of the afterlife and the immortality and reincarnation of the soul. I will be contrasting and comparing Socrates beliefs with those of the Jewish faith.

Phaedo – the existence and nature of the afterlife and the immortality and reincarnation of the soul
Phaedo revolves around Socrates discussion of the existence and nature of the afterlife. One of the overarching themes in Phaedo is the soul’s immorality. The dialogue between Socrates and his friends/philosophers discusses four arguments for the immortality of the soul to illustrate the concept of the afterlife where the soul supposedly goes after we die. The four …show more content…

There is clear evidence in the Torah of belief in the existence of the afterlife. The Torah indicates in several places that the righteous and good will be reunited with their loved ones in the afterlife, while the wicked will be excluded from this reunion. The Torah speaks of several noteworthy people being "gathered to their people” which means that they are being reunited with their loved ones. For example, it is stated in the Torah that, ‘Isaac breathed his last and died and was gathered to his people, an old man of ripe age; and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him’. This ‘gathering’ is described as a separate event from the physical death of the body or the burial. Certain sins are punished by the sinner being "cut off from his people." See, for example, "an uncircumcised male who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant." This punishment is referred to as kareit which means that the soul loses its portion in the …show more content…

The second blessing of the Shemoneh Esrei prayer (Jewish prayer which is recited three times daily) contains several references to resurrection. The resurrection of the dead will occur in the messianic age, a time referred to in Hebrew as the Olam Ha-Ba (the World to Come), which is the term used to refer to the afterlife. When the messiah comes to initiate the perfect world of peace and prosperity, the righteous dead will be brought back to life and given the opportunity to experience the perfected world that their righteousness helped to create. The wicked dead will not be

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