matching tracksuits

Free will is overrated, at least as framed by Christianity. It’s not that I want to feel compelled to do this or that, but I’m willing to give up certain “freedoms” for the betterment of humanity.

Take the freedom to kill or torture children, for example. According to the Christian notion of free will, we must have the ability to do such an awful thing else we’d be robots.

This ability to torture the innocent wouldn’t really be a theological/philosophical problem were it not for the insistence that the Christian God is, among other things,

1. completely good,
2. all knowing, and
3. all powerful.

Put those three together with the world’s suffering and we have a problem. In order to explain the suffering, we have to compromise. Maybe God isn’t all knowing, and isn’t aware of the suffering. Maybe God isn’t completely benevolent and doesn’t want to do something about the suffering. Or perhaps God knows about the suffering and wants to alleviate it, but being limited, there’s nothing he can do about it.

Since none of these alternatives are acceptable to most believers, Christians explain suffering by invoking free will and saying that it couldn’t be any other way if humans are to be more than robots.

But free will doesn’t fly, especially considering the patriarchal God we see in the Bible.

God is seen, among other things, as the perfect father. “Our Father who art in heaven” pray Christians every Sunday; Jesus, in the Gospel narratives, cries out to “Abba” — “Papa” — while being crucified. God is the ultimate father.

This post was inspired by Thud’s “The Org Chart God.”

I too am a father, and if I imagine treating my child (eventually children) like the Christian God treats his children, I shudder.

A thought experiment: in the future, my wife and I have a second child. At some point, our first-born daughter gets the notion that it would be a pretty good idea to see if rocks can bounce off little brother’s head. If I’m standing by and do nothing about it, what kind of father am I? That kind of behavior would rightly be labeled child abuse.

“But, Your Honor,” I protest before the judge, “I was just giving my daughter the ability to practice her free will.”

In the real world, “free will” doesn’t cut it. We might have the Twinkie legal defense and any number of other, bizarre explanations/excuses for behavior, but I don’t know that any lawyer has ever tried the “free will” defense, and for good reason: it’s absurd.

And yet Christians use the free will defense daily to get their God acquitted.

A correlative defense is the “God’s ways are not our ways” defense. This raises just as many questions as it is supposed to answer, but suffice it to say that any being whose ways include non-intervention when children are suffering is not a being I have much respect for.

The bottom line is that there really is no adequate answer for the problem of evil. Indeed, some of the more traditional answers seem quite outdated, as John Hagee discovered recently when he suggested that God allowed, even directed, the Holocaust through Hitler. Yet this was nothing new. Jewish theologians have been saying similar things for centuries.

Pastor Hagee’s view that an omnipotent God must sanction the evil in our world actually has deep roots in Jewish thought. To cite just one example, the Talmud teaches us that the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed because of “sinat hinam,” or baseless hatred. In other words, our own Talmud teaches that God used the Romans to perpetrate the greatest tragedy in the history of the Jewish people (until the Holocaust) because of Jewish sins. (haaretz.com)

The defense of God’s actions — or apparent lack thereof — is a distasteful activity to begin with, so it’s not surprising that we can so mangle ideas that they come out sounding offensive to casual listeners. Then again, why should finite humans get stuck defending an infinite being?

The problem of evil is what ultimately led me away from theism, but that’s somewhat surprising considering how theists frame the question in relation to their faith: there is no answer, but I have faith that there is a reason, that it will all make sense. Yet it seldom does make sense during our Earthly lives.

I now fully understand why plumbers charge the fees they do. I mean, if you had to go into strangers’ homes and deal with this stuff, wouldn’t you?

And this drain was only for our kitchen sink, dishwasher, and washing machine. Forty years’ of grime — not to mention what appears to be straight-out mud.

How do drains get this nasty?

Suffice it to say, it’s a good thing there is no way to digitize odors, because ladies and gentlemen, you would almost literally be up a particular creek…

We’re in the midst of re-doing (I hesitate to use the term “remodeling” since it’s such a small job) our closet.

Before:
After:

After — well, sort of after. The door frame width is a wonderfully-irregular 40 1/8 inches, so we’ll have to buy custom doors for it.

Forty and an eighth?! Where do they come up with sizes like that?

The Book of Mormon opens with something called “The First Book of Nephi.” I sit down to begin reading, and I feel I’m reading Tolkien: I’m wondering when all these names will be explained. People? Places? Creatures? If only Gandolf were here to explain.

Nephi is, obviously enough, the author, and he begins his book by explaining his lineage:

• “born of goodly parents”
• “taught the learning of [his] father”
• lived a life filled with its fair share of trouble but still close to God, and
• “having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God.”

He is something of a Gandolf: keeper of long-lost knowledge.

Nephi goes on to explain that his chronicle, written in “the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians,” is true: “I make it with mine own hand; and I make it according to my knowledge.” Evidently it has never cross Nephi’s mind that his knowledge could be flawed.

It’s a strange statement, though, because this is supposed to be a book divinely inspired. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to argue that the book is true because it comes from God? I suppose he’s simply stating here that this is firsthand knowledge, but we immediately see it’s not, for he starts talking about his father’s experiences:

For it came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah, (my father, Lehi, having dwelt at Jerusalem in all his days); and in that same year there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed.

Finally, we get a known name: Zedekiah. Zedekiah was the successor to Jehoiachin, and the prophet Jeremiah was his adviser.

2 Kings 24.18 explains, “Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother’s name was Hamutal daughter of Jeremiah; she was from Libnah.”

In Jeremiah we read

He did evil in the eyes of the LORD, just as Jehoiakim had done. It was because of the LORD’s anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end he thrust them from his presence. Now Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon.

Zedekiah basically stood up to Nebuchadnezzar, who then came down to Jerusalem and destroyed it. With this mention of Zedekiah, we get more than a known name; we get a possible date: between 597 and 586 BCE. This means we get a time frame for the events of the Book of Mormon, a time frame we could use to get archaeological verification.

The first chapter concludes with Lehi, Nephi’s father, getting a visit from God, in the familiar pillar of fire. God warns Lehi what’s coming by giving him a book of prophecy. There is an obvious parallel with Smith here, and if the Book of Mormon is not of divine origin, it’s a smart stroke on Smith’s part to start legitimizing his book within the book itself.

Suddenly, Nephi stops discussing his father’s story:

And now I, Nephi, do not make a full account of the things which my father hath written, for he hath written many things which he saw in visions and in dreams; and he also hath written many things which he prophesied and spake unto his children, of which I shall not make a full account.

It seems like more legitimizing: “this is not the first time we’ve seen books that are critical aspects of God’s revelation to humanity simply disappear,” Smith can argue.

The first chapter concludes by explaining that, after God’s revelations, Lehi did what Smith himself would do later: prophecy. And the result was the same:

And when the Jews heard these things they were angry with him; yea, even as with the prophets of old, whom they had cast out, and stoned, and slain; and they also sought his life, that they might take it away. But behold, I, Nephi, will show unto you that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance.

A cliffhanger! Brilliant — I can’t wait to see how Lehi got out of this pickle…