Christianity

[Jambo-Jimbo]

http://barbwire.com/2016/06/08/obama-invites-disaster-lgbt-pride-month/

 

Do some people actually agree with what this lady says!? Crazy!!

 

More to the point, do you agree with what she says?

[i8hibsh]

http://barbwire.com/2016/06/08/obama-invites-disaster-lgbt-pride-month/

 

Do some people actually agree with what this lady says!? Crazy!!

 

Why are Christians so obsessed (and I do really mean obsessed) with what consenting people do with their private parts and who they share their bed with?  They are more obsessed with sex than I am and that is saying something.  If it is not Christians being morally outraged about other people's sex lives their top clergy are running about doing abhorrent sex acts behind closed doors.  They try to tell people to not wear condoms or not have sex till marriage or don't cheat on your partner (a life sentence says the bible).  It is just one utterly vile sex crazed cult who want your money.

[i8hibsh]

As many people know on here I despise religion but Christianity and Islam really have to be the 2 most despicable evil creations of man ever and that is saying something.

[i8hibsh]

If I were to have a league table of Evil for Christianity and Islam then these would be the contenders:

 

1. The Crusades

2. Jihadism

3. The Inquisition

4. The Ku Klux Klan

5. The Holocaust

6. Armenian Genocide

7. 30 years War

8. French Wars of Religion

9. Muslim Conquests

10. Ethnic Cleansing

11. The Middle East continued bloodshed

12. 9/11

13. Systemic Child abuse

14. Thugee Murders

15. Westboro Baptist Church

16. Mistreatment of homosexuals 

17. Honour killings

18. Beheadings

19. With Hunts

20. Terrorism (pretty much exclusive to religion)

21. Anti Abortion

22. Mistreatment of women

23. Genocide - too many to mention

24. Slavery (it could be argued here that wealth and greed were the main culprits but at the root of it all it is religion)

25. Extorting money of the poor and gullible for centuries to amass unmeasurable wealth

26. Most wars (not all)

27. Child cruelty

28. Hatred (this is a natural human emotion but I strongly believe religion causes most world hatred)

 

Too many to mention, I could spend all day googling for this.

[parker]

Strong, strong league. The Holocaust must be gutted about missing out on a Champions League place.

 

You are extraordinarily simple, i8.

[i8hibsh]

Strong, strong league. The Holocaust must be gutted about missing out on a Champions League place.

 

You are extraordinarily simple, i8.

 

Apologies, I should have stated it is not in any particular order.  It would be impossible to have a number 1 in that.

[Generic Username]

The Spanish Inquisition was quite naughty too.

[i8hibsh]

19 should read 'Witch'

 

 

Just before the spelling Gustapo get in on it.

[parker]

19 should read 'Witch'

 

 

Just before the spelling Gustapo get in on it.

 

Aye. That's the bit you should be facepalming.

[i8hibsh]

Aye. That's the bit you should be facepalming.

 

 

Anything on my list you do not see as evil?

[Notbrainwashed]

Not sure a few of those are exclusive to Christianity and Islam.  Think followers of other religions have issues with child cruelty and am pretty sure another faith is involved in the Middle East conflict.  There are some examples you can argue make your point - but putting in vague stuff that can be applied to more than those two religions like 'hatred', 'some wars' kind of weakens your argument.

Also...Gestapo.  Easy mistake to make. 

[Norm]

19 should read 'Witch'

 

 

Just before the spelling Gustapo get in on it.

It's "Gestapo".

[i8hibsh]

It's "Gestapo".

 

 

Oooft

[i8hibsh]

I'd rather have a homosexual babysit my child than a Preist.

[Generic Username]

Should probably think about expanding your circle of friends if those are your only two options

[parker]

There's no way you're a real person.

[i8hibsh]

There's no way you're a real person.

 

This abuse is not very Christian Parker.  What would Jesus do?

[Norm]

Anything on my list you do not see as evil?

Beheading and the Westboro guys.

 

There's nothing intrinsically evil about chopping off someone's head. It's the why the head is being chopped off that needs questioned.

 

And the Westboro guys, I'd say they're just intolerant arseholes. As much as I disagree with what they do, I'm of the opinion that they're perfectly entitled to tell people gay folk are bad. They're just expressing their freedom of thought, albeit in a crass and insensitive way.

[Norm]

Should probably think about expanding your circle of friends if those are your only two options

[i8hibsh]

Beheading and the Westboro guys.

 

There's nothing intrinsically evil about chopping off someone's head. It's the why the head is being chopped off that needs questioned.

 

And the Westboro guys, I'd say they're just intolerant arseholes. As much as I disagree with what they do, I'm of the opinion that they're perfectly entitled to tell people gay folk are bad. They're just expressing their freedom of thought, albeit in a crass and insensitive way.

 

It is a house of hate that teaches hate - to me that is evil.

 

Beheadings are barbaric and evil. Especially in the way it is practiced in Islam.  It tends to not be child rapists or serial killers that get beheaded but decent people who's biggest crime is speaking out against Allah.   Even the way they kill their animals (Halal) is barbaric.  A truly evil evil ideology.

[elvoys]

If I were to have a league table of Evil for Christianity and Islam then these would be the contenders:

 

1. The Crusades

2. Jihadism

3. The Inquisition

4. The Ku Klux Klan

5. The Holocaust

6. Armenian Genocide

7. 30 years War

8. French Wars of Religion

9. Muslim Conquests

10. Ethnic Cleansing

11. The Middle East continued bloodshed

12. 9/11

13. Systemic Child abuse

14. Thugee Murders

15. Westboro Baptist Church

16. Mistreatment of homosexuals 

17. Honour killings

18. Beheadings

19. With Hunts

20. Terrorism (pretty much exclusive to religion)

21. Anti Abortion

22. Mistreatment of women

23. Genocide - too many to mention

24. Slavery (it could be argued here that wealth and greed were the main culprits but at the root of it all it is religion)

25. Extorting money of the poor and gullible for centuries to amass unmeasurable wealth

26. Most wars (not all)

27. Child cruelty

28. Hatred (this is a natural human emotion but I strongly believe religion causes most world hatred)

 

Too many to mention, I could spend all day googling for this.

 

1 was a direct response from Rome to 9's three hundred years which saw the Asian Minor churches being practically wiped out (e.g see Anatolia).

 

And the origins and relationship to power aren't the same. One was a little known collection of folk tales about a guy who could have been one of hundreds of martyred hippies, appropriated by a weakening empire and thereafter institutionalised throughout Europe leading to all its power based horrors in the following millennia.

 

The other was from from a middle aged merchant existing  in the full light of history who after thirteen years had 150 followers and was exiled to a Jewish town called Yathrib. Only when the doctrine of 2 on your list was ingeniously added did it manage to squash other faiths in the  Peninsula (in ten years) and shortly thereafter half of the known world. So the reason we see what is going on today is because conquest and subjugation has always been at its very core and this central narrative of the first five leaders is equivalent to Exodus or the Crucifixion/Resurrection. Therefore, such a broad and mass appealing, direct scriptural  inspiration is pretty much impossible to achieve with the  world's bible bashers.

 

This is what the devout/ militant know and have revitalised in response to today's globalised world yet the history illiterate in the conceited liberal, political classes of the  west  bizarrely claim to know the true nature of this all encompassing social/political/religious system.

 

I would also remove 15 from your list. Completely irrelevant and relatively harmless freak show which the laughable left try to grasp for when looking for  extremist equivalents to justify their apologism.

[i8hibsh]

1 was a direct response from Rome to 9's three hundred years which saw the Asian Minor churches being practically wiped out (e.g see Anatolia).

 

And the origins and relationship to power aren't the same. One was a little known collection of folk tales about a guy who could have been one of hundreds of martyred hippies, appropriated by a weakening empire and thereafter institutionalised throughout Europe leading to all its power based horrors in the following millennia.

 

The other was from from a middle aged merchant existing  in the full light of history who after thirteen years had 150 followers and was exiled to a Jewish town called Yathrib. Only when the doctrine of 2 on your list was ingeniously added did it manage to squash other faiths in the  Peninsula (in ten years) and shortly thereafter half of the known world. So the reason we see what is going on today is because conquest and subjugation has always been at its very core and this central narrative of the first five leaders is equivalent to Exodus or the Crucifixion/Resurrection. Therefore, such a broad and mass appealing, direct scriptural  inspiration is pretty much impossible to achieve with the  world's bible bashers.

 

This is what the devout/ militant know and have revitalised in response to today's globalised world yet the history illiterate in the conceited liberal, political classes of the  west  bizarrely claim to know the true nature of this all encompassing social/political/religious system.

 

I would also remove 15 from your list. Completely irrelevant and relatively harmless freak show which the laughable left try to grasp for when looking for  extremist equivalents to justify their apologism.

 

 

I think 15 is important as although I single it out (purely as it is the most well known), these little hate houses are spread all over the Bible belt.

[Grumpy]

until Aquinas came along and, after helping to invent modern science,

 

???

Got me puzzled with that one. Everyone's got different opinions but surely Aristotle, al-Haytham or even Richard Bacon have much, much stronger claims on establishing scientific principles in the west.

[Norm]

Is there something wrong with homosexuals that make them poor baby sitters?

 

I get the second point - you think all Priests are paedophiles, does this mean that homosexuals are too?

 

Or is your child female?

I think his point is "**** you church, I'd rather have one of these guys that you hate so much look after my kids, than anyone of you frock wearing weirdos."

[i8hibsh]

Is there something wrong with homosexuals that make them poor baby sitters?

 

I get the second point - you think all Priests are paedophiles, does this mean that homosexuals are too?

 

Or is your child female?

You really did not get my post did you?

[Grumpy]

Strong, strong league. The Holocaust must be gutted about missing out on a Champions League place.

 

You are extraordinarily simple, i8.

The Holocaust was a Nazi attrocity - not a direct Christianity or Islam thing - i8 is incorrect in listing it imo.

[i8hibsh]

The Holocaust was a Nazi attrocity - not a direct Christianity or Islam thing - i8 is incorrect in listing it imo.

 

 

This has been debated till the cows come home.  If it was not for religion the Holocaust would never have happened. do you at least agree with that?  You can pretty much trace most deep root causes of most wars and atrocities to religion in my opinion, perhaps not directly but most definitely there will be a deep deep root in there somewhere.

[Grumpy]

This has been debated till the cows come home. If it was not for religion the Holocaust would never have happened. do you at least agree with that? You can pretty much trace most deep root causes of most wars and atrocities to religion in my opinion, perhaps not directly but most definitely there will be a deep deep root in there somewhere.

I said it wasn't directly related. I'm no religious apologist but do think criticism needs to be fair. In this case I think you've missed the mark.

[Sidelight]

This has been debated till the cows come home.  If it was not for religion the Holocaust would never have happened. do you at least agree with that?  You can pretty much trace most deep root causes of most wars and atrocities to religion in my opinion, perhaps not directly but most definitely there will be a deep deep root in there somewhere.

 

 

There is no excuse for violence and oppression committed in the name of Christianity.

It should be addressed again and again.

Jesus himself was critical of legalistic religion where extremism and fanaticism mostly leads to injustice and oppression.

In the 20^th century alone the Communist Russian, Chinese and Cambodian regimes all rejected traditional religion and all belief in God. Those societies were responsible for an abundance of grotesque violence against their own people - Without the influence of religion.

So from our history of the 20 th century we see that violence and war have been inspired as much by secularism as by moral absolutism.

The hatred and violence rooted in the human psyche expresses its self regardless of the beliefs of a particular society.

It?s deep rooted in the heart of mankind whether religious or irreligious.

[Sidelight]

This has been debated till the cows come home.  If it was not for religion the Holocaust would never have happened. do you at least agree with that?  You can pretty much trace most deep root causes of most wars and atrocities to religion in my opinion, perhaps not directly but most definitely there will be a deep deep root in there somewhere.

 

 

There is no excuse for violence and oppression committed in the name of Christianity.

It should be addressed again and again.

Jesus himself was critical of legalistic religion where extremism and fanaticism mostly leads to injustice and oppression.

In the 20^th century alone the Communist Russian, Chinese and Cambodian regimes all rejected traditional religion and all belief in God. Those societies were responsible for an abundance of grotesque violence against their own people - Without the influence of religion.

So from our history of the 20^th century we see that violence and war have been inspired as much by secularism as by moral absolutism.

The hatred and violence rooted in the human psyche expresses its self regardless of the beliefs of a particular society.

It?s deep rooted in the heart of mankind whether religious or irreligious.

 

 

 

[i8hibsh]

 

There is no excuse for violence and oppression committed in the name of Christianity.

It should be addressed again and again.

Jesus himself was critical of legalistic religion where extremism and fanaticism mostly leads to injustice and oppression.

In the 20^th century alone the Communist Russian, Chinese and Cambodian regimes all rejected traditional religion and all belief in God. Those societies were responsible for an abundance of grotesque violence against their own people - Without the influence of religion.

So from our history of the 20 th century we see that violence and war have been inspired as much by secularism as by moral absolutism.

The hatred and violence rooted in the human psyche expresses its self regardless of the beliefs of a particular society.

It?s deep rooted in the heart of mankind whether religious or irreligious.

 

 

The whole 'look at these non religious countries and see the atrocities they did' does not wash with me.  These countries do not try to convince people they are a beacon of morality and goodness tho.

[Sidelight]

The whole 'look at these non religious countries and see the atrocities they did' does not wash with me.  These countries do not try to convince people they are a beacon of morality and goodness tho.

 

Christianity is not a club for people who see themselves as good and morally superior.

But really rather the opposite.

[i8hibsh]

 

Christianity is not a club for people who see themselves as good and morally superior.

But really rather the opposite.

 

 

 

It absolutely IS a club for those that see themselves as morally superior.  How many of them start a sentence with "As a Christian..."? I mean what does that shit even mean.   Those that feel they have some kind of warped personal relationship with Jesus and God wear it as some sort of badge of niceness.  In the States criminals even get paroled as they have 'found Jesus'.  It is utterly disgusting.

[Sidelight]

The whole 'look at these non religious countries and see the atrocities they did' does not wash with me.  These countries do not try to convince people they are a beacon of morality and goodness tho.

 

 

I see, you only condemn violence and oppression when committed in the name of Christianity.

[Sidelight]

It absolutely IS a club for those that see themselves as morally superior.  How many of them start a sentence with "As a Christian..."? I mean what does that shit even mean.   Those that feel they have some kind of warped personal relationship with Jesus and God wear it as some sort of badge of niceness.  In the States criminals even get paroled as they have 'found Jesus'.  It is utterly disgusting.

 

I am a sinful and disgraceful person.

Morally superior and with a righteousness of my own. No.

Salvation is not because of what we do or who we are, but because of what Christ has done for us.

 

[i8hibsh]

 

I am a sinful and disgraceful person.

Morally superior and with a righteousness of my own. No.

Salvation is not because of what we do or who we are, but because of what Christ has done for us.

Why talk about the good Christ did? 5 billion people live in abject misery evey day.

 

Worship your parents mate as I assure you they have done more for you than that fraud ever did.

[Riddley Walker]

 

I am a sinful and disgraceful person.

Morally superior and with a righteousness of my own. No.

Salvation is not because of what we do or who we are, but because of what Christ has done for us.

It is truly sad that Christianity has made you believe you are sinful and disgraceful. How old are you? If you don't mind me asking.

[i8hibsh]

It is truly sad that Christianity has made you believe you are sinful and disgraceful. How old are you? If you don't mind me asking.

 

 

And it is what they class as a sin. Feck me 99% of their sins are the equivalent of a child taking a biscuit form the biscuit tin.

[Norm]

And it is what they class as a sin. Feck me 99% of their sins are the equivalent of a child taking a biscuit form the biscuit tin.

To be fair, if one of my kids nicked the last chocolate Hob Nob, I'd probably burn them for eternity too.

[Sidelight]

It is truly sad that Christianity has made you believe you are sinful and disgraceful. How old are you? If you don't mind me asking.

 

 

Let me respond this way.

The cross is an offence for many, it seems to most here because it demands a new life style from/in all of us.

From the bible, Christians believe that sin is a disease of the heart, it affects the mind, our emotions, every fibre of our being, our relationship with all.

How can we break this bondage and how can we be set free?

And this is the good news the gospel, the Christian message if you like - God helps us break those chains, the bible says that: if any man be in Christ he is a new creation, old things pass away and everything becomes new.

A new creation in Christ and it starts with repentance.

And that?s a message most don?t want to hear.

 

 

[i8hibsh]

Working on a Sunday is a sin ffs. Someone tell that to the single mother who has to work any shift given to her. The 10 commandments truly are the most ridiculous things ever written. Not only does it show God's ego in full light but it shows Christianity up for what it is. I mean seriously, who has to be told not to murder ffs.

[Norm]

Working on a Sunday is a sin ffs. Someone tell that to the single mother who has to work any shift given to her. The 10 commandments truly are the most ridiculous things ever written. Not only does it show God's ego in full light but it shows Christianity up for what it is. I mean seriously, who has to be told not to murder ffs.

I think the 10 commandments are more of a Jewish thing. As I understand it, they're there more as a kind of moral guideline for Christians. The main thing in Christianity is accepting JC as your saviour.

 

Kind of a personality cult in a way.

[Generic Username]

To be fair, if folk struggled with the complexities of the command "don't eat they apples", it's probably an idea to drill into them that murder is bad. Just to be safe.

[i8hibsh]

I think the 10 commandments are more of a Jewish thing. As I understand it, they're there more as a kind of moral guideline for Christians. The main thing in Christianity is accepting JC as your saviour.

 

Kind of a personality cult in a way.

 

 

It is the fact that they require moral guidance.  To me it is inbuilt.  You also feel that they do it to impress.  They spend their lives  trying to do good, but unlike me who does good acts as it is natural to me, they try to impress the joker in the sky.

[parker]

???

Got me puzzled with that one. Everyone's got different opinions but surely Aristotle, al-Haytham or even Richard Bacon have much, much stronger claims on establishing scientific principles in the west.

 

You mean Francis Bacon, right?

[Grumpy]

You mean Francis Bacon, right?

Oops, Actually meant Roger Bacon (Doctor Mirabilis) but Francis would also be a good candidate.

[Watt-Zeefuik]

If I were to have a league table of Evil for Christianity and Islam then these would be the contenders:

 

1. The Crusades

2. Jihadism

3. The Inquisition

4. The Ku Klux Klan

5. The Holocaust

6. Armenian Genocide

7. 30 years War

8. French Wars of Religion

9. Muslim Conquests

10. Ethnic Cleansing

11. The Middle East continued bloodshed

12. 9/11

13. Systemic Child abuse

14. Thugee Murders

15. Westboro Baptist Church

16. Mistreatment of homosexuals 

17. Honour killings

18. Beheadings

19. With Hunts

20. Terrorism (pretty much exclusive to religion)

21. Anti Abortion

22. Mistreatment of women

23. Genocide - too many to mention

24. Slavery (it could be argued here that wealth and greed were the main culprits but at the root of it all it is religion)

25. Extorting money of the poor and gullible for centuries to amass unmeasurable wealth

26. Most wars (not all)

27. Child cruelty

28. Hatred (this is a natural human emotion but I strongly believe religion causes most world hatred)

 

Too many to mention, I could spend all day googling for this.

 

Okay, lot to pick apart here.

 

Some of these are legitimately fair.  Unlike elvoys, I'm fully in favor of including the Crusades.  They were effectively colonial power and land grabs from Europe that got wrapped up in religious language, but the religious zealotry undoubtedly fueled some of the atrocities perpetuated.  (And saying that the horrors of the Crusades were justifiable because of the persecution of the church is the exact same argument as justifying Islamist terrorism because of the West's support for regressive Arabic states.  Exactly the same argument.)  The Inquisition is another horrible one.

 

There's some other problems up here though.  For one, the Thugees were Hindu followers of Kali, not Muslims.

 

But like we got into with the "religious wars" debate, the line between what's motivated strictly by religion (like the Inquisition, for one) versus something that has lots of origins, like the Nazi party or the KKK, both of which appropriated Christian imagery but were far more motivated by a notion of racial purity, supported by really bad interpretations of 19th century understandings of evolutionary theory.  Centuries of Christian anti-Semitic activity that preceded it is much more to blame, but Hitler's ideology drew upon modernist and scientific language far, far more than it drew upon Christian imagery, and abandoned Christian imagery more and more as time went by and churches became more and more resistant to Nazi rule.  The KKK puts crosses on a lot of things, but they also bombed and burned black churches as much as they did anything else.  Many of those attacks were on people who were in the same small religious denominations as their victims. 

 

Ultimately, though, #28 is where we just completely disagree.  One of the reasons celibate monastic orders emerged in pre-Constantine Rome was that the government was passing laws requiring women to get married and have children whether they wanted to or not, so obsessions with sex and mistreatment of women are hardly unique to Christian or Muslim ares.  Slavery is at least as old as the pyramids -- its widespread presence and mention in the Bible were used as obtuse justifications, but here in Richmond the architecture, imagery, and symbolism from the Confederacy is all Greek revival and ancient Greek goddesses, because the combined use of slavery in ancient Athens and its perceived nobility were held up as the model to emulate.  (The church largely went along for the ride, of course -- the founding pastor of the church my wife serves was supposedly in France to get "bibles" but it's widely supposed that he was actually running guns for the Confederacy.)

 

As I posted in the other thread, the hard truth to my eye is that humans, quite like all of the species we're very closely related to, have a strong tendency to be awful, murderous dicks at times.  Certainly, if one believes that Christianity inherently makes people good, one has a hard time explaining the Inquisition or the Crusades or the church child abuse scandals.  At the same time, though, if one believes that the removal of religion would mean the end of atrocities, then one has a very hard time explaining Mao's Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge's killing fields or Stalin's gulags or Tojo's death camps.

 

We, as humans, sin.  We fall short.  We miss the mark.  I don't believe this to be religious dogma, I believe it to be irrefutable empirical fact. Christianity, like other religions, isn't a declaration of that.  It's a response to it.

[Watt-Zeefuik]

???

Got me puzzled with that one. Everyone's got different opinions but surely Aristotle, al-Haytham or even Richard Bacon have much, much stronger claims on establishing scientific principles in the west.

 

I don't give the credit to any one person, and would include all of the people you state (including, as was later discussed, both Francis and Roger Bacon, with whom I happen to share a last name as it happens), and would also bring in Spinoza and Kepler and dozens of other people.  

 

Aristotle is an interesting one, as Aquinas was one of the first Western scholars to really engage with the works of Aristotle that got brought in through engagement with the Islamic world.  The core of Aquinas's theology is that God's law is expressed in "natural law" -- that there are these laws or rules that order our lives.  He was inspired heavily by Aristotle's philosophy, but he took it considerably further than Aristotle, who saw the state of the world as divinely fixed rather than the product of dynamic processes.  The laws of the world to Aquinas were both part of the revelation of God's will and instruction for our lives (and as such Aquinas embraced Aristotle's empiricism over the Platonic rationalism that had dominated the Middle Ages).   Aquinas used his method to try to figure out both physical and moral phenomena. This had huge implications in the west, but two in particular always strike me as having a big impact now.  

 

First, discovering the laws of the universe was more than an esoteric past time for the elite, but rather a moral calling for better understanding of the divine.  It was, then, a noble calling to take these pagan (Greek) and heretical (Arabic) texts and use them to help us discover things about the world.  This was originally considered almost heretical in the church but rapidly gained support, with the monastic universities of Europe increasingly turning their scholarship to the physical world.  And rather than simply looking to describe the world, Aquinas pushed to discover the laws of the world. And it's not all that surprising, then, that it was a fan of Aquinas, Johannes Kepler, who first laid down the "Laws of Motion," which as far as I know is the first Western use of "law" to describe a scientific phenomenon.

 

So, awesome, right?  Except that God's law, as discovered by science, was also moral to Aquinas.  So he looked at how people reproduce, decided that the only thing that sex was good for was reproduction because that was the law of God's creation, and then went diving into scripture to find support for this.  It was Aquinas, as far as anything reputable I've ever read indicates, who read the very, very weird story of Sodom and decided that rather than being about hospitality, as it had been previously interpreted, it was telling people that reproductive sex (even getting your father drunk and raping him in his sleep so you can get pregnant) was good, but sex between men was bad (nevermind that the mob in Genesis is wanting to commit gang rape) because it wasn't reproductive and hence perverted God's law, and further that "spilling your seed on the ground" like Onan did was a sin too.  And so we have to deal with sermons about "sodomy" to this day.

[Grumpy]

I don't give the credit to any one person, and would include all of the people you state (including, as was later discussed, both Francis and Roger Bacon, with whom I happen to share a last name as it happens), and would also bring in Spinoza and Kepler and dozens of other people.

 

Aristotle is an interesting one, as Aquinas was one of the first Western scholars to really engage with the works of Aristotle that got brought in through engagement with the Islamic world. The core of Aquinas's theology is that God's law is expressed in "natural law" -- that there are these laws or rules that order our lives. He was inspired heavily by Aristotle's philosophy, but he took it considerably further than Aristotle, who saw the state of the world as divinely fixed rather than the product of dynamic processes. The laws of the world to Aquinas were both part of the revelation of God's will and instruction for our lives (and as such Aquinas embraced Aristotle's empiricism over the Platonic rationalism that had dominated the Middle Ages). Aquinas used his method to try to figure out both physical and moral phenomena. This had huge implications in the west, but two in particular always strike me as having a big impact now.

 

First, discovering the laws of the universe was more than an esoteric past time for the elite, but rather a moral calling for better understanding of the divine. It was, then, a noble calling to take these pagan (Greek) and heretical (Arabic) texts and use them to help us discover things about the world. This was originally considered almost heretical in the church but rapidly gained support, with the monastic universities of Europe increasingly turning their scholarship to the physical world. And rather than simply looking to describe the world, Aquinas pushed to discover the laws of the world. And it's not all that surprising, then, that it was a fan of Aquinas, Johannes Kepler, who first laid down the "Laws of Motion," which as far as I know is the first Western use of "law" to describe a scientific phenomenon.

 

So, awesome, right? Except that God's law, as discovered by science, was also moral to Aquinas. So he looked at how people reproduce, decided that the only thing that sex was good for was reproduction because that was the law of God's creation, and then went diving into scripture to find support for this. It was Aquinas, as far as anything reputable I've ever read indicates, who read the very, very weird story of Sodom and decided that rather than being about hospitality, as it had been previously interpreted, it was telling people that reproductive sex (even getting your father drunk and raping him in his sleep so you can get pregnant) was good, but sex between men was bad (nevermind that the mob in Genesis is wanting to commit gang rape) because it wasn't reproductive and hence perverted God's law, and further that "spilling your seed on the ground" like Onan did was a sin too. And so we have to deal with sermons about "sodomy" to this day.

Trying to keep it concise, maybe I was just overthinking things but I thought your comment on Aquinas inventing science to be a bit misleading - as you say many contributed (not just the ones named) and there's no denying that Aquinas was one of many significant contributors, but not the only one. Having said that, I can see why you brought his name into the discussion given the context.

[Watt-Zeefuik]

Trying to keep it concise, maybe I was just overthinking things but I thought your comment on Aquinas inventing science to be a bit misleading - as you say many contributed (not just the ones named) and there's no denying that Aquinas was one of many significant contributors, but not the only one. Having said that, I can see why you brought his name into the discussion given the context.

 

The post in question said, "helping to invent modern science."  I think he helped.  He certainly wasn't in the top five, but I think he helped.