Piety as we have discovered in the Euthyphro has less to do with faithful religiosity and more to do with asserting power over others; Euthyphro is revealed to have an ignorant conception of piety through the investigations of Socrates and rather than admit his ignorance and refrain from judging his father on its attributes he yields to the seduction of authority. What then is piety but a vessel for concealing a tyrant? We, as it must have been with the Athenians, are far too eager to justify the irrational and murderous because we perceive an individual to be devout. This I think is the implication of Socrates’ investigation: the importance of challenging the supposedly pious and to pierce through with our reason the thin gilding of the priest robe, to judge arguments on their merits rather than on the merits of social prestige, to judge a word in itself rather than by the tongue which spoke it. We should not, as is customary, blindly accept what comes from the mouth of supposedly religious people, as we find in observing more closely, they commonly speak out of ignorance of the virtues they espouse, a realization created hastily upon interrogation.

Socrates is also implying that all human beings have equal footing in their ability to judge arguments, a revolutionary concept for his era. While the faux-pious Euthyphro flees at the end of his discussion with the gadfly rather than come to the stark realization that he is a phony, we all can have the confidence in our own reasoning to stand our ground and judge on the merits of evidence and cogent argumentation. Socrates implies that we should judge what is being said by itself, without considering the title of the person speaking, disregarding the Tyrian purple and holding wisdom and truth above wealth and esteem. Socrates argues that we must hold the same standards of evidence which we apply to everyday conversation to that of religious claims; that no argument is outside the reach of inquiry. Why are no thoughts sacred, none protected, none privileged? When irrational thinking infests a people, they, as Euthyphro did, murder men without having a true knowledge of why, and compound human misery unnecessarily by virtue of their power-drunk self-righteous judgment. Euthypro’s father was charged for offending the gods by his son, a pretender who lacks a true knowledge of piety – thus it was an unjust charge, and a man was executed for no offense made, other than as wrongly perceived in the tightly insulated and delusional mind of the priest. So we see that those who claim to be pious must be scrutinized, lest the power they are granted through society be wielded to unjust ends.