10 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: [Spoilers!!] The Good Place totally-spoilerific celebration thread
Did anybody else get as excited as Chidi when we heard about Aquinas?
Comment by Tech_Philosophy at 02/02/2020 at 05:23 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
He helped turn a religion that helped people work to better themselves into a religion that formulated absolute and impractical prescriptions for morality. You can't learn anything from a philosophy that is in effect a judgemental binary operation - you can only obey, and not well.
And that's before we get to charity as a concept that benefits the wealthy by giving juuuust enough to the poor to alleviate the state from taking any action such as taxation of the wealthy.
If he wasn't excluded from the good place on those deeds alone, he should have been for driving untold multitudes away from the church after they collapsed inward on their own failed efforts to be perfect. Religions should learn from this calamity: give partial credit to people who are trying to better themselves!