Socrates Jokes

Three men die: A Physicist, a Philosopher and a Local town idiot. They stand before the gates of heaven. Between them and the gates stands St. Peter. St. Peter tells the three men "Sorry boys, but it seems heaven is getting jam-packed. To let you in, you have to beat me intellectually, either through a form of a question or a challenge." The first to come forward is the Physicist, and he tells St. Peter with great confidence "Show me the entire mathematical markup of the Higgs Boson." To which St. Peter merely snaps his finger and produces a dozen large whiteboards and proceeds to write up the whole markup from memory. After careful examination, the Physicist reluctantly agrees that he is correct, and with one snap of the finger, St. Peter sends him to the fiery gates of hell. The next to come forward is the Philosopher. Thinking that the Physicist made a grave mistake of challenging St. Peter with an empirical question, he decides to give a less-than-empirical challenge of his own. He tells St. Peter "Show me all of the works of Socrates." he says with a smirk, knowing Socrates never wrote down his teachings, St. Peter would be hard pressed on producing an answer. But despite this, St. Peter produces a stack of papers, and the Philosopher reads it with great criticism. There are things there he had never even heard of, and questioned the paper's authenticity, to which St. Peter remarked "Me and Socrates have chatted a lot ever since he got here." And with a snap of a finger, the Philosopher was gone. Last to come forward is the Local town idiot. The idiot asks St. Peter, "Could I give you a riddle instead?" and St. Peter replies "Of course! I love riddles!" and the idiot proceeds. "What comes up a hill with six legs and comes down with four, comes back up with two legs and back down with no more?" St. Peter ponders it for a good five minutes and arrives at no answer, and tells the idiot "Well, congratulations, you have left me dumbfounded." and with a snap of a finger, the gates of heaven opens up. The idiot proceeds to enter heaven, but right before he does so, he feels St. Peter tapping on his shoulder, he turns around. "So," St. Peter asks "What's the answer to your riddle?" The Idiot shrugs his shoulders and says "How the heck should I know?"

In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem. One day, an acquaintance ran up to the great philosopher and said, "Socrates, do you know what I just heard about your friend?" "Hold on a minute," Socrates replied. "Before telling me anything I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test." "Triple filter?" "That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?" "No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it..." "All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?" "No, on the contrary..." "So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him, but you're not certain it's true. You may still pass the test though because there's one filter left: the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be something I can use to benefit the world?" "No, not really." "Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?" The man stared at him, and without a word turned around and left, dejected. This is why Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem. It also explains why he never found out his best friend was sleeping with his wife.