God Squad Review CXXII (Missing Mass)
February 28, 2005 | 38 Comments
An excellent, well-behaved student no longer wants to go to Mass because he finds that eating Christ’s flesh and blood is “boring and repetitive.” So his mom asks the Squad whether she should force him to participate in the cannibalism ritual. They pull out the old eagle/pinball analogy to show that the consequences of missing Mass (attention all Jews) are rather dire:
Eagles perch on cliffs to keep their eggs safe from predators, but doing this makes the eagle chicks vulnerable when they try to fly. Young eagles are taught to fly by being kicked out of the nest when they’re ready. They flap their wings frantically as they plummet toward earth.
Then, just as they’re about to hit the rocks and die, the mother or father eagle swoops down and catches the little eagles on their large pinion feathers, and like a flipper hitting a pin ball, the parents whack the little buzzards back into the air, where they again try to fly on their own. Finally, they get the hang of flying, and the task is done.
You must know when it’s time to whack your son into church and when it’s time to let him find his own way through God’s good heavens to the place where we all know our souls take flight.
The last time someone asked this question the Squad merely suggested bribing the child. Nowadays, you apparently have to throw the kid off the roof a few times before he’ll join in the bloody orgy. Wouldn’t it be easier to just throw a few more crunchy bones into the Christ feast to make things more interesting?
* * *
In their answer to a second letter, the Squad explains that God made evil in the world so that we could enjoy the higher good of free will. At least I think that’s the point they’re making:
Having free will doesn’t mean you can choose to do anything you want. It means you can choose to do anything it is possible for you to do.
A poor way to start off making their point: from this assertion, it’s obvious that God does make it impossible for us to do some things that we want to do. So our freedom is curtailed at least in that respect. My inability to fly or turn acorns into elephants or make myself invisible isn’t seen as a significant limitation on my free will. Why not just make it impossible for me to hurt anyone on Earth, in the same way that’s it’s impossible for me to wipe out the population of the planet Zebnar by blinking my eyes?
God could indeed have created us incapable of choosing evil, but would that really be a better world?
Yes, if the words “good,” “evil” and “better” have any meaning. It would also be “better” if we were not plagued by earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, things which have nothing to do with the exercise of our wills.
Were you a more developed, mature and self-actualized person when you were an infant? We don’t think so.
What’s the point here: that infants are worse off because they (allegedly) can’t choose evil? I agree that it’s good to be a mature person, but having a long history of evil isn’t all that necessary to it. People who do have that kind of record are general known as “criminals,” and they’re quite unnecessary to my moral development. And often they do not mature or self-actualize; it would be a “better” world if God made their heads explode just before they did really bad things to others. That wouldn’t really result in a net loss of free will; even though the serial killer would lose his free will, his potential victims would retain theirs.
Maturity brings with it a deeper understanding of the world, ourselves and God. This is what we call wisdom, and it comes from exercising your free will and learning from the consequences of your actions.
Making the little mistakes that lead to maturity isn’t really the same as doing evil. And presumably a person who is about to do an evil thing already knows what the consequences are, or he wouldn’t be in a position to judge that it was bad in the first place. So going ahead and doing it isn’t actually necessary to the learning process.
The exercise of this freedom is a prerequisite to being able to love another person or God. Without freedom of the will, we cannot love. Even though this power of free choice carries with it the possibility of perversion into evil purposes, it’s still better we have it because it alone allows us to love, and all the evil in the world cannot justify the elimination of our capacity to love.
I suspect I’d have the capacity to feel pain, pleasure, love, hate and a wide variety of other emotions whether I had free will or not. And I’m sure there are a lot of people who never experience suicidal depression or homicidal rage, and yet still have free will despite their inability to feel such things.
What they meant by that last clause I’m not sure. I think they meant to say that ridding the world of evil wouldn’t be good, if it eliminated our capacity to love (which it wouldn’t).
February 28th, 2005 @ 11:50 am
About that head-exploding thing. I know the victim gets to survive… but wouldn’t having someone’s head explode in front of one do some pretty serious traumatizing of its own?
February 28th, 2005 @ 11:54 am
Not if it happens on a daily basis I guess. Same thing applies to pretty much all “evil” deeds.
February 28th, 2005 @ 2:17 pm
When you are bad, shit happens.
Shit happens.
Therefore you are bad.
It’s bad logic, but it fills the pews!
February 28th, 2005 @ 5:11 pm
June, in that almost Haiku, you have stated in the most eloquent way possible, the banality of religion.
February 28th, 2005 @ 5:25 pm
Just as”the problem with being a good sport is you have to lose to prove it”,
the only way to exercise free will is to deliberately sin. If you managed to
avoid all sin, you would be indistinguishable from the “perfect robot” without free will
that everyone says god doesn’t want. This also happens to imply that there is
a whole lot of sinning going on in heaven (or will be depending on your
interpretation). Otherwise god could have simply cut out the middle men
and only created heaven completely populated.
February 28th, 2005 @ 6:06 pm
Upon visiting the “God Squad” web site, (actually http://www.newsday.com/) to see their complete pronouncements on the wayward, mass-hating son, I found that “faith” is a tab under “entertainment” just as “horoscopes” and “comics” are. Even better, on the comics tab we find “Faith Calendar” and “Faith on the Web” (http://www.praythenews.com) right next to “Garfield”. It looks like Newsday has at least some of its priorities right.
February 28th, 2005 @ 7:35 pm
OH MY CRAP. The Squad has sunk beyond their normal depths of dishonesty and cowardice with their printing of “C’s” letter.
I am “C,” and what they printed was a PORTION of a letter i submitted to them. Visit zombiedeathkoala.blogspot.com to find the complete letter, and please feel free to laugh out loud as you count up the points that the Squad deliberately eliminated when they printed my letter.
March 1st, 2005 @ 7:46 am
I will be checkin’ it out Zombiedeathkoala. This should be good!
First though, I need to let TRA know that Free Will has nothing to do with why it is impossible for him to wipe out the population of the planet Zebnar by blinking eyes:
Been there. Done that.
Sorry dude. I’d no idea anyone else hated the Zebnarian scum as much as me!
March 1st, 2005 @ 8:34 am
“Making the little mistakes that lead to maturity isn
March 1st, 2005 @ 8:42 am
I still contend that free will doesn’t exist for Christians since the promise of Heaven for choosing one path vs. Hell for choosing the other actually makes it coercion.
It’s why we don’t allow the police to offer “confess or be beaten” to a suspect.
But, then again, Christians have been using threats to win “converts” for centuries.
Shouldn’t one get to choose God for for who He is?
Oh yeah, I forgot, He really is a nasty bastard that wouldn’t engender love unless He demanded it.
And, don’t forget, 1/3 of the angels rebelled along with God’s star pupil (Satan).
Heaven must be some lousy place if even the angels get fed up with God’s crap after a while.
March 1st, 2005 @ 9:49 am
Based on Zombiedeathkoala’s experiment (see #7), it’s just possible that the “squad” consists of exactly one junior reporter who is ordered to write the horoscope, advice to teenagers, tarot card, and GodSquad columns once a week.
Would the GS please step forward, so we can pelt them with waste?
March 1st, 2005 @ 9:55 am
DamnRight — for someone who doesn’t believe God exists you sure seem to be pissed at Him…but that’s another topic.
On the matter of free will: There is no such thing. Our will is necessarily bound to our desires. When we exercise our freedom to choose it is always tied to our strongest desire at the time. Why do you choose to eat? Because the biological urge hits you. You exercised your freedom to choose to eat but that choice was bound to your desire to satisfy your biological urge to survive. Does that mean that you were coerced by nature?
According to the Bible, when God makes a person aware of his or her sin and the punishment it deserves then that person has new information on which to base their choices. They still exercise their freedom to choose but, like all choices, it is based on their strongest desire in light of what they now know.
March 1st, 2005 @ 10:27 am
Frank,
I’m pissed that I wasted 40+ years of my life in the Christian cult.
You suggest that we are all “coerced by nature”? Get real. You’re suggesting that nature has a motive behind our instincts.
Nature doesn’t “care” how we choose.
The God of the BIBle however, seems to have some very personal, selfish motives behind His famous “plan”.
March 1st, 2005 @ 10:40 am
DamnRight — I did not suggest that we are all coerced by nature. I merely asked if YOU thought we were, based on your statement that a decision offered to us about heaven or hell amounted to coercion. If the nature analogy doesn’t work for you how ’bout this one …
A lifelong smoker is informed by his doctor that if he does not stop smoking he will die in the next month. The doctor is merely pointing out the consequences of the smoker’s actions. The smoker’s freedom to choose is bound to which desire is stronger… his desire for a nicotine rush or his desire to live. He will make a choice based on one of these two. In this way, even though he has the autonomy to choose, his will is not free. It is bound to his desires. Is the doctor guilty of coercion?
March 1st, 2005 @ 10:53 am
Nope but the doctor isn’t omnipotent, and he sure as hell didn’t create cancer.
March 1st, 2005 @ 12:05 pm
… saying “eat your veggies or I’ll whip you”, it’s not the same as saying “eat your veggies, they’re good for you”…
March 1st, 2005 @ 12:07 pm
… let’s try the dictionary definition…
co
March 1st, 2005 @ 4:45 pm
You have free will when you are free to choose without being punished for choosing.
Frank confuses the natural consequences of an act with supernatural punishment FOR the act. If you eat extra deserts, you put on extra weight; but Mother Nature does not condemn you to hell for gluttony. All actions have consequences; we are not talking about that; we’re talking about being punished for making a specific choice.
March 1st, 2005 @ 5:07 pm
No June, hell is the consequence of sin. We have all sinned and all stand deserving of hell. God has provided a way out… through faith in Jesus Christ. Now, we have the freedom to choose either to exercise faith in Christ or not. But we are not punished for the specific choice to refuse Christ. We are punished for our sin. We have to opportunity to escape judgement by making a specific choice, but refusing that choice does not condemn us because we are condemned (by our sin) already.
March 1st, 2005 @ 5:20 pm
Frank, infinite love is NOT when you rule your subjects with a brutal carrot/stick approach and then make your distribution of rewards and punishments based on your subjects’ stroking of your own ego.
Thats the way a Mob Boss rules, and a Mob Bosses subordinates dont love him. They fear him. Kinda goes along with the term “God Fearing” doesnt it?
Frank, infinite love is NOT when you design a system that gives inheirent guilt to all creations before they even take a first breath and then make ETERNAL HELLFIRE the default destination upon death, where a special circumstance (the stroking of Jesus’ ego), the only way to escape such a fate.
Frank, if sin is inherent to all humans, then humans are not “guilty” of it. God put it there, not humans. You can say that Eve put guilt there by biting the apple, but still its Gods fault cause he put an evil apple tree in a supposedly perfect garden. God invented the concept of evil and he decided that it would be inherent to all humans. Eve merely fulfilled the destiny that God laid out for her.
Frank, your God is nonexistant. If he did exist, he would be EVIL INCARNATE. God designed a world in which he had to sacrific himself to himself in order to circumvent a law he made himself that requires all his purposefully flawed creations to be sent to a hell that he created himself.
Your imagined God is totally fucking evil Frank. Its a good thing he doesnt exist!
March 1st, 2005 @ 5:26 pm
so, frank………are you saying i can get into heaven???????
YIP-PEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
(’cause i don’t sin, you know…..)
March 1st, 2005 @ 7:12 pm
“We have all sinned and all stand deserving of hell”
There you have it: the christian version of the fear of death.
The core thought, the mindless mantra around which religion is built.
Eternal atonement for human weakness and inferiority.
No grasp of the human condition, just merciless blather without respect for the struggle for existence.
March 2nd, 2005 @ 8:29 am
DamnRight said:
… saying “eat your veggies or I’ll whip you”, it’s not the same as saying “eat your veggies, they’re good for you”…
You Nailed it dude!
Seriously Frank. Another incredibly important point you always seem to miss (& to smooth this out – I actually read yer posts cuz you are generally a cordial contributor) is that DR’s Doctor isn’t a mythological character. All gods are. That xtian god of yers is amongst the most Evil of all human creations. Its nice side not-with-standing.
I’ll even go so far as to disagree with June that Ma Nature doesn’t “condemn” us to hell. Sin is such a loaded word but Hell is a state of mind & being. If we do something (eat extra deserts) even though we hate the Extra consequences (intended – tastes great; extra – Obesity) we are consciously putting ourselves through hell.
Is that a little simple? It can be as complex as you want to make it. And it doesn’t negate the fact that we sometimes experience hell without Ever having done anything for it to occur. Did those tsunami survivors ask for their loved ones, property, lives as they knew and loved them, to all be washed away?
Bottom line: Theism is bogus philosophy trying to explain the currently inexplicable. Let it go dude. Most everything ALL current mythologies try to explain has already been resolved. What hasn’t inevitably will be.
March 2nd, 2005 @ 11:06 am
The tectonic plate on which India rests has been moving north for millions of years, colliding with the Asian plate in extremely slow motion. You can see the colossal wreckage of this continental collision on any map: we call it the Himalayas. Last December, the plate moved again, and in the process lifted the floor of the Indian Ocean about 30 feet along 750 miles off Sumatra. That motion caused a huge wave of water, which spread around the globe.
When the tsunami hit the Hawaiian islands, I was sitting on a west-facing beach on Maui. I saw nothing, because by the time it reached Maui, it was about 12 inches high. But change the parameters a little, and I might have vacationed in Sumatra, or the quake might have been off Japan, and I would not be here at this moment. Should I now elaborately thank Nature for sparing my life? What absolute nonsense!
We say the tsunami killed 250,000 people, but it is more correct to say that 250,000 people happened to be in its way. When analyzing existence, it helps to avoid ascribing intent to natural events. It helps to realize that your miserable little ass is not important enough for Nature to plan your life or death, even if Nature had a plan. It also helps to realize that your brain often connects dots where there is no connection.
The only place where Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, Angels and Demons, Good and Evil exists is in our minds.
March 2nd, 2005 @ 11:56 am
The only place where Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, Angels and Demons, Good and Evil exists is in our minds.
Yep. Thats what I said.
March 2nd, 2005 @ 3:35 pm
LOL!!!!!!!! G-R-E-A-T- POST, KEEP WRITING!!!!
March 3rd, 2005 @ 4:13 pm
“We have all sinned and all stand deserving of hell”
… this (from the Bible) raises more questions than it answers… questions like…
… at what point does one become a sinner & so is condemned to Hell?… conception, birth, 1 yr old, 2 yrs old, 1st lie, hears about God & rejects Him?…
… why are we held accountable for Adam’s/Eve’s sin?…
… if it’s just for God to “impute” sin to us all because of Adam’s sin, isn’t it just as just to impute righteousnessto us all because of JC’s death… why must I “accept” JC’s sacrifice when I never “accepted” Adam’s sin…
… supposedly, the “law” was never able to save… so why did God wait for so many years after so many had perished, before sending his “salvation”?…
… I know, we cannot understand God’s ways… it’s all in His plan… blah blah blah…
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 5th, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Eternal Life: Can the gift be given back?
I had dinner with a friend that I recently met through our small group. He openly expressed he is seeking out what Christianity is all about and hasn
March 12th, 2005 @ 2:57 pm
Free will and the problem of evil
The God Squad, via >The Raving Atheist: “Having free will doesn’t mean you can choose to do anything you want. It means you can choose to do anything it is possible for you to do.” I suggest reading The Raving…