I enjoyed this lecture quite a bit and would encourage readers to view it, keeping in mind that Molyneux’s atheistic bent is not the reflection of Aristotle’s view—as best it can be determined—but wishful thinking on the part of a philosophy teacher who has neglected the salient lesson that one should not project modern values on ancient minds.

1. Molyneux claims that Aristotle was against slavery [secretly at least], despite The Philosopher’s strong argument that some men are suited for freedom and most for enslavement—which history has recently demonstrated is very possibly truer than we would like to believe.

2. The claim that Aristotle was an atheist is patently false. He may have been a hopeful agnostic, but seems to have been a deist—indeed, is counted by some philosophers as the deistic proto-man. Aristotle was sentenced to death by the Athenian Assembly for making a sacrifice [a grossly religious act] to his departed teacher, Plato. He also openly mused in his writings of the possibility of God, in the terms “The Unmoved Mover” and “The Cause Uncaused.”He also stated that the civic gods that he and Socrates did not take seriously were for the good as they gave the idiot masses something to believe in. Again, he seemed right on this account, as it has become obvious in the past century that pure materialism and an atheistic ethos leads to massive social disfunctions such as communism and drug addiction.

On the final metaphysical point, I agree with Molyneux that religions have been used primarily as a way to hold the masses of humanity in bondage to mortal masters. However, to then declare spirituality to be nothing but an artificially imposed construct, misses the point that Man was spiritual—proto-religious—before governments and priesthoods and therefore such mass mind control models would logically seem to represent a hijacking of Man’s natural transcendent yearning, turned against him for materialistic purposes. Ignorance of this natural inclination has resulted in atheists deifying themselves in the abstract by blindly adhering to ideological orthodoxies which are as much the product of Man’s mind as anything printed in the Koran, in a way that would scream religion and priest-craft to a man such as Aristotle.

And we stumble dumbly on—I do highly recommend this spirited talk, despite my two basic disagreements with the speaker.

I do suspect that Aristotle’s lethal ‘stomach ailment, coming so closely on the heels of the Athenian death sentence, and bearing such a gastrointestinal resemblance to both the passing of Alexander and Socrates, may have been murder, and make my case in the time-travel novel Beyond the Sunset Veil, linked at the bottom of the page.