A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

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Aquinas on Sex



What did he say? That he likes to give women orgasms, oh my!

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Aquinas is one of the most important theological thinkers in coming up with the justifications for why European Christians were so weird about sex for the next several hundred years. Essentially, God designed our bodies to have sex in order to produce children, so any use of sex that wasn't with the intent to produce children was a "sin against nature", for going against God's divine plan for us to have boring sex forever. Things like gay sex, masturbation, oral, etc, were strictly forbidden. In fact, sins against nature were categorically higher than sins against your fellow man, so masturbation would have to be considered worse than things like rape or murder. Some priests even told married couples not to take off their clothes entirely during sex, because they would be at risk of enjoying it too much, and even enjoying it while making kids was pretty suspect.

For Sartre, there was no such thing as "human nature". God, if He exists, abandon us without instruction, so it is up to us alone to define what things are "for". Sex is a creative act, like everything else in life, and we define its meaning. This of course led to a libertine attitude, with people like de Beauvoir even giving some defense of people like the Marquis de Sade, claiming he was living an ethical life, according to his own ethics (pure egoism). His only real mistake was the failure to recognize that he is embedded with others, and dealing with that in his theories (i.e. maybe get consent first).

At some point later in his life Aquinas had some kind of mystical experience that caused him to say all his writing was "like straw", and he wrote nothing more after that.

Philosophers in this comic: Thomas Aquinas, Jean Paul Sartre
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