Skip to main content

Gods and Clouds


Aristophanes, Greek playwright, was a contemporary of Socrates, the philosopher.  In his play, The Clouds, a philosopher named Socrates operates a ‘Thinkery’ which dismisses the gods. Socrates is questioned by his neighbour, a farmer.

“Who makes it rain if there is no Zeus?” asks the farmer.

“The clouds,” answers Socrates.  “If it were Zeus who made the rain, the clouds would not be required at all.  Zeus could make the rain from a clear sky too.”

“It must be Zeus who moves the clouds to the sky,” insists the farmer.

“No, you idiot,” says the impatient Socrates, “it’s the Convection-principle.”

“Convection!” the farmer wonders whether that’s a new god.  “So Zeus is out and convection is in.  Tch, tch!”  He thinks awhile and asks, “What about the lightning?  It must be Zeus who sends the lightning to kill liars.”

“It’s Zeus’s own temples that are frequently struck down by lightning,” mocks Socrates.  The philosopher goes on to demonstrate a large model of the universe and the function of the convection-principle in it.  The farmer is convinced.

A few days pass.  The farmer is unhappy that he lost his gods.  Socrates is responsible for the loss of his gods.  He gathers a few people who value gods.  The people march to Socrates’ house and sets it on fire.  The philosopher and his followers are burnt alive.

This drama was written when Socrates was still alive.  In reality Socrates was poisoned to death.




Labels:

Comments

  1. Roohi BhatnagarApril 7, 2015 at 4:26 PM

    Radicals were there then and radicals we have now.. The only thing that has changed, we have now the power of internet :) :P :D

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 7, 2015 at 7:12 PM

    there has nothing changed since then till today, thanks for sharing..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 7, 2015 at 7:42 PM

      Exactly, Shweta, it's amazing how little progress we have made as a species in two and a half millennia

      Delete
  3. UnknownApril 8, 2015 at 12:12 PM

    Alarming that things are still the same today :S :|

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 8, 2015 at 12:29 PM

      History can teach us very interesting lessons, Sreesha.

      Delete
  4. D.NambiarApril 8, 2015 at 5:59 PM

    That was a nice read.

    My favourite part -- “The clouds,” answers Socrates. “If it were Zeus who made the rain, the clouds would not be required at all. Zeus could make the rain from a clear sky too.”

    :)

    I wonder why the playwright decided to skip the Hemlock part.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 8, 2015 at 10:38 PM

      Hemlock came later. The play was written when Socrates was still alive.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more