Christian trigger words

[Brian37]

Firstly, let's establish that every Christian believes they have a soul. The soul, in fact, is their actual being. A Christian's body is just a vehicle and the soul is the driver.

But what is a soul?

A soul is a transdimensional, immortal, non-physical entity which will be placed into a new body on a "new earth."

Thomas Aquinas, who was a Christian, defined the soul as the form of the body. 

Following Aristotle, he said that every material object has both matter (hyle) and form (morphe). 

Form, in this view, is more than just shape. It includes the workings of a particular thing. So the form of the human body includes the ability to do the things that bodies do -- breath, eat, etc. A human body which couldn't do these things would in some way lack its proper form. 

Christians who follow Aquinas posit that this form is an intrinsic part of who we are. The only supernatural thing they claim about the soul is that it can be transferred after death to a different type of matter. But the form that you are, plus the matter which the form forms, is what you are. 

Therefore, the idea that a man's soul is detachable and can be transferred into a woman's body at will, or vice versa, would go against what a person's true form is. They define violence as that which opposes the flourishing of the form one has, in an effort to make it do something against that flourishing. According to them, if you are born with the form of a man, it is doing violence to yourself to attempt to change that form into something else.

There are a lot of arguments why people should be able to be trans if they want. As far as I personally am concerned, I think it's up to them.

But if we want to attack the Christian position we should attack the real position they have. I suspect that the definition you give here, and the obvious problems it presents, would not be relevant to, say, the Pope, who knows what Aquinas wrote as the official dogma of the church.

Aquinas was an idiot. He did more to stifle rational thought than anyone else of his age, by masking his crap calling it "logic".

I cannot begin to tell you over the years how many theists bring that guy up. 

It is always the same argument.

"Aquinas was a smart man".

Me, "So? Smart and having evidence for what you claim are two different things."

Theist, "So if you admit he was smart, that means my God exists, and he believed in the same God I do".

Me, "No, I did not say that. I said smart and factually correct are two different things."

The theist is doing what every religion's apologists do worldwide of every religion.

They retrofit way after the fact, to make the ignorance of the past match modern science. Aquinas had no damned clue about the things we know now, nor does it mean in any case that one god is more real than any other god claim in the world.

---

To be somewhat fair to theists here. I also think Plato got a lot of ideas right. But he also fucked up logic inadvertently in one idea. 

Plato valued the idea of questioning. But the one thing he could not have benefit of back then, was that of modern method, in our modern science of control groups. His idea of "essence" wasn't an idea of testing and falsifying like we have today. His horrible idea of "essence" was the idea that if you simply thought about something long enough, you could find that "perfect thing", IE, "essence of rabbit" or "essence of chair'.  That according to Dawkins in "The Greatest Show On Earth", gave rise to the popular chase for utopias in forms of politics and religion. 

So just like Plato, Aquinas was not basing it on any objectivity, but like Plato, was fishing for excuses to hold a position. Plato was an apologist long before Aquinas and that is not anything close to modern objective method, where you go where the evidence leads, and not fish for a path you want something to go.