unsaintly saints

A lot of saints are awful people by today’s standards. Some would be shocked to find out how “evil” these people are yet are venerated and are claimed to intercede on our behalf. This post will go into some of the ideas and behaviors of saints. Saints =/= Good.

St. Thomas Aquinas  ?/1225-03/07/1274

This guy is touted as one of the most influential philosophers in Christendom. He provides some of the weakest arguments I have ever heard on the existence of God. He also believed in capital punishment. So much for being pro-life I guess. He believed that heretics should be killed.

St. Augustine of Hippo 11/13/0354-08/28/0430

This numb-nuts was a proponent of the concept of Original Sin, predestination and concluded that unbaptized babies go to hell. He also came up with the idea of a “Just war.” This one confounds me as I don’t quite understand why such a person would be canonized. He has been described as egotistical piece of garbage. Really!?…Unbaptized babies go to hell? What a psychopath.

Cyril of Alexander 376-444

Best known for killing off his betters or at least having a hand in it. Hypatia was a philosopher and… (gasp)… female. Here’s how she was murdered.

A mob of Christians gathered, led by a reader (i.e., a minor cleric) named Peter, whom Scholasticus calls a fanatic. They kidnapped Hypatia on her way home and took her to the “Church called Caesareum. They then completely stripped her, and then murdered her with tiles.” Socrates Scholasticus was hence interpreted as saying that, while she was still alive, Hypatia’s flesh was torn off using oyster shells (tiles; the Greek word is ostrakois, which literally means “with or by oystershells”^[29] but the word was also used for brick tiles on the roofs of houses and for pottery sherds). Afterward, the men proceeded to mutilate her and, finally, burn her limbs. News of Hypatia’s murder provoked great public denouncement, not only against Cyril, but against the whole Alexandrian Christian community. Scholasticus closes with a lament: “Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.”

Please note that this douche is considered a “church father.”