Occult.. it's true power source?Praise the LordI wonder where you are getting some of your information. Thomas Aquinas lived in the 13th century or 11 centuries after men like Justin Martyr, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, and Augustine appealed to Greek philosophy as well as Greek paganism to interpret the Hebrew Scriptures. Clement and Origen were influenced by Gnosticism and neoplatonism while Aristotle not Aquinas introduced Aristotelian philosophy into the Catholic/Orthodox churches. Origen of Alexandria is considered one of the greatest of all Christian theologians. As a philosopher, he is famous for composing the seminal work of Christian Neoplatonism, his treatise On First Principles.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/origen.htm
Neo-Platonism is not only important because it was the philosophy which deeply influenced the first great theological system, that of Origen, but it was also the philosophy which influenced (through Dionysius the Areopagite, of whom we shall hear more later) all forms of Christian mysticism and most forms of classical Christian theology, especially with respect to the doctrine of God, world, and soul. Therefore it is impossible to understand the development of Christian theology without knowing something about this last great attempt of paganism to express itself in terms of a philosophical theology, or theological philosophy, which was both science and life for the ancient mind.
http://www.religion-online.org/showchap ... 310&C=2315
Aquinas was not the first theologian to be influenced by Aristotle. You acknowledged that Aquinas expanded on Augustine’s Aristotelian concept of Eudemonia, by ignoring that Augustine depended on Aristotle. Aristotle didn't even believe in the gods, and neither did Plato, though they never truly contested their existence because they would've been trialled, and perhaps killed, much like Socrates.
This is only partially true, since both Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy include: f you are looking for Plato's "religion", I think you should mostly look at book X of the Laws, and at the Timæus (as a whole, I would add). But this is only part of the answer. I think Plato knew perfectly well that on such matters, it is impossible to give complete answers with human words. Thus, he tried to approach the question from different angles and give partial complementary (and not contradictory) answers, both negative (what gods are not, what we should not believe) and positive (what we may safely believe about gods and the divine, and questions of "origins" and "ends").
In that respect, the answers he gives in the Timæus have to be "qualified" by the purpose of this dialogue: it purports to show man how he should look at the kosmos, that is "theorize" it (from theorein, which means in Greek "contemplate"), to find in it traces of an organizing "intelligence" and use it as a model for our organizing work as builders of lawfull cities as "just" men endowed with logos that is, a divine parcel in our own souls. And you must keep in mind that Plato himself repeats times and again that he does not states definite truths but tells only "likely myths".
http://plato-dialogues.org/email/960211_1.htm
From his considerations of the nature of motion in Physics, in Book 8, Aristotle concludes that there must be a logically first unmoved mover in order to explain all other motion.
http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Phi ... stotle.htm
While both Plato and Aristotle did not believe in “God”, both believed in an initial power or transcendent “intelligence”.
The Christian concepts of an eternal soul, eternal torment in hell, the Trinity, and etc. are not found in the Bible. Your concept of Satan is more Zoroastrian (or Hindu) than Christian. Satan who is a created being who has free will does not equate to God being the author of evil any more that you can prove that Nobel is the author of evil because he invented dynamite or physicists are the author of evil because physics led to the development of nuclear weapons.
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