RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
July 31, 2019 at 1:07 am
(This post was last modified: July 31, 2019 at 1:09 am by Fake Messiah.)
(July 30, 2019 at 9:01 pm)Grandizer Wrote: Anyhow if I ever have time, I'll give Aquinas a read and see what hes really saying.
Aquinas was a dumb fuck like Ken Ham: he believed in the instantaneous creation of species and of Adam and Eve as humanity’s ancestors, as well as in a young Earth (less than six thousand years old) and the literal existence of Noah and his great flood.
Also Aquinas was obsessed with angels. Not only did he see them as real but devoted a large section of the Summa Theologica ("Treatise on the Angels") to their existence, number, nature, how they move, what they know, and what they want.
Religion hasn't obviously come closer to understanding the divine. From the ancient Hebrew sages through Aquinas to Kierkegaard, we still have no idea whether gods exist; whether there is only one god or many; whether any existing god is deistic, and largely absent, or theistic, interacting with the world; what the nature of any god is (is it apathetic, kindly, or evil?); whether that God is, as process theology claims, affected and changed by the world or unchangeable; how God wants us to live; and whether there is an afterlife, and, if so, what it is like. What has happened is that new theologies and religions have simply appeared alongside the old ones.
Fundamentalists, who see almost the entire Bible as literal truth, coexist with apophatic theologians who claim that nothing can be said about God, and yet write many books on the topic, so you can see that theology is not progressive but additive.
Compare this with science, where consensus views have evolved in every field--views that may change with time, but always lead to a deeper understanding of the universe, one that expands our abilities and makes our predictions more accurate.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"