Sausage Party, the Movie: Food Having Sex & Religious Tolerance

True confession: I dig Seth Rogan movies. And when I heard that Sausage Party ends with computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts, I thought, "How could this not be great?"

Turns out, the movie is pretty much entirely about religious belief versus non-religious belief. That and swearing. And computer-animated food engaging in explicit sex acts.

[Um ... spoiler alert? But if you really need a spoiler alert after reading the title and getting this far, you're pretty much a dumbass.]

Sausage Party is about food that lives in a grocery store. A system of beliefs is held (pretty much) unquestioningly by all the groceries, specifically the belief that wonderful joy and bliss await them once they are purchased and leave the store. But this commonly-held belief gets challenged when a bottle of honey mustard is purchased then returned. The mustard is pretty effed up -- has some PTSD-like problems from the horrible things he saw in the "great beyond," so much so that he commits suicide by jumping out of a shopping cart, creating a cleanup on aisle two.

Later in the movie a hotdog named Barry also returns from the great beyond, confirming all food's horrific fate and the falsehood of the store's beliefs.

The movie's main hotdog, Frank, finds a cookbook which proves to him that the humans will inevitably torture and consume any food that leaves the store. But when he confronts the rest of the groceries with this evidence, they are unable/unwilling to accept it.

Later Frank realizes that you can't just shit on other food's beliefs and expect them to listen to you. So he changes his message. "Look," he says, "I'm sorry. I wasn't respectful of your beliefs, and I acted like I had all the answers. But I don't. Nobody knows everything."

And I agree with that message. Nobody knows everything, and nobody should act like they have all the answers. Even though I'm pretty damn confident in my Agnatheism(™), I rely heavily on other people's thinking and research; I also lean heavily on some probabilistic ideas that make sense to me, but could be flawed; and the most persuasive argument that I've arrived at doesn't even refute God's existence, it just says that if God exists, he's either not good or doesn't send people to an eternity in hell.

But some of the other threads in the movie don't sit particularly well with me. For instance, we find out that the belief in a blissful great beyond was intentionally created by "the imperishables" because when the groceries believed in a twisted, gruesome future, their existence prior to being purchased sucked hard. So to establish order and generate hope, they came up with their "religion."

And I'm all for hope. I like the New Atheists, but I'm not down with their push to eliminate religious belief. I held religious beliefs for twenty years, and in a lot of ways my existence was better then (because of my hope in an afterlife) than it is now. It was unsustainable (for me) because of the intellectual difficulties inherent in religious belief, but apart from that, I recognize that my life was qualitatively better.

Where I disagree with Sausage Party is that religious belief is a lie foisted on believers by the founders and/or inner circles of religion. I believe that religion evolved organically, based heavily on our evolved instincts, the ones that still make us feel creepy at night in big, dark, empty buildings. But the idea of a group of malevolent (or benevolent) religious leaders creating and perpetrating a lie is way too conspiracy-theoryish for me.

Additionally, we don't have the luxury of anyone coming back from the dead (the "great beyond") to tell us what it's like. Well, we kinda do. We've got near-death experiences, but I've explored those in another post, and their stories don't really help.

I do, however, like the existential message in Sausage Party. We can't be certain of what happens after we die, but we can be certain that right now we exist, so we better get busy living (or get busy dying). Eventually, that becomes the consensus of the groceries: to live life fully right fucking now.

Just last night I had a friend challenge me on that. I had an opportunity -- one that will still be available in the future -- but I chose not to seize it; I postponed the experience, saying, "Now's not the right time." To which he immediately and confidently replied, "Now's always the right time."

I'm an accountant. As such, I'm not predisposed to wholeheartedly embrace things like "Now's always the right time." But I'm also a human. I have no guarantee of anything beyond my finite earth existence. So even if I can't wholeheartedly embrace "Now's always the right time," the only proper way to live is to force myself to lean that direction.

Everybody is Scared Sh*tless of Death (CPE: Continuing Personal Existentialism)

I'm reading the book Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom. My marriage counselor recommended it. Sounded like a fun beach read, so I got it, and it's a little weird how much I'm digging it.

A main theme in the book is that everyone suffers from death anxiety. Extreme death anxiety. And although it's extreme for everybody, for some people it's EXTREME. Since none of us can handle the idea of our finite existence, we all develop defense mechanisms that perpetuate a state of denial.

We're all in denial of our inevitable death.

I'm a CPA. My job requires me to have professional skepticism, and since I read a lot of this book at work, I wasn't totally buying what Irvin was putting down. This happens to me a lot. I'll read a book that makes broad, general claims about the human condition, and I will (A) believe the claims are correct, but (B) believe that I'm an exception. So I was in denial about my denial.

I've never shied away from contemplating my own death, and when I do contemplate it, I usually don't feel the fear. The process of dying sounds horrible because I don't like shark bites, but the ultimate result of death is non-existence. I didn't exist before I was born, and I got through that pretty good. Matter of fact, I think I handled it like a champ.

But the more I've read the book, the more Yalom's either convinced me or brainwashed me that he's right. Even though I don't feel the fear of my own death very often, I'm now convinced that deep down I'm totally fucking terrified of it. And as I reexamine my actions and attitudes toward existence and death, I see that they belie the fact that I'm constantly shitting my existential pants.

Why? Because I know with 100 percent certainty that I'm going to die. Or as Irvin says, "Death itches all the time."

I lift weights. I've been doing it for fifteen years, five days a week. I rarely skip a workout, and when I do it bugs me big time. I've tried to figure out where my drive comes from. I'm an accountant, so I don't have any practical need for physical strength. It wasn't to impress my now-estranged wife. She always said she was good with how I looked, and I believed her. Was I trying to impress other women? If I was, it wasn't a conscious motivation. Was I trying to impress men? Maybe. Dudes comment on my physique a lot more than women do.

A couple years ago, I devoured the book The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. In it he said, "People in all cultures worry about social status (often more than they realize)," and that we all have "a thirst for social approval." So I started to think that my commitment to lifting weights came from my very human drive for social status, and I still think there's a lot to that.

But now that I've read Existential Psychotherapy, I'm totally convinced that lifting weights (and exercising in general) is part of my defense mechanism against the crushing reality of my ultimate death. As long as I'm getting stronger or at least maintaining a higher-than-average level of physical fitness, then I'm not dying. A faint and less-than-rational thread of my inner dialog is that weaker people, less fit people, are the people who die, but not me.

I don't seem able to escape this fitness delusion even though it's obviously bullshit. First off, I'm not that fit, and I eat like shit. Second, I know I'm going to die regardless of my fitness level. Also it's pretty clear that this defense mechanism won't last. Eventually I'm going to age to the point where I can't keep lifting or running or riding the exerbike or mall walking or doing whatever water aerobics does. This particular source of denial has an expiration date.

But the fitness delusion also reveals my primary defensive strategy: If I'm making progress, I'm holding death at bay; to stop growing is to start dying.

Now I understand why I've always had a high need for achievement. Every time I achieve something, I prove to myself that I'm not dying. Achievement is growth. Stagnancy is death. When I'm not pursuing a goal, I feel like a zombie, like I'm just waiting for death.

I blog to feel not dead. That's why I always want to blog more than I do. Sometimes I think I don't want to die until I've gotten all my ideas down on paper. More likely, as long as I have more ideas to get down on paper, I feel like I'm not going to die. More denial.

And now I'm  questioning how much my denial tactics have caused the failure of my marriage. Irvin Yalom says, "For some ... commitment carries with it the connotation of finality, and many individuals cannot settle into a permanent relationship because it would mean 'this is it,' no more possibilities, no more glorious dreams of continued ascendancy." To me marriage feels static, like a destination that you can't leave, like a place where growth is misaligned with consistency; therefore, it impedes my denial of death. It prevents me from scratching my death itch.

It's far too simple to think this is the only factor contributing to the breakdown of my marriage, but it's also obvious that I can't fully engage in a permanent relationship until I figure out how it can be an engine for my personal growth despite it's inherent finality.

As an Agnostic, I Really Miss Not Having a Bible

I converted to Christianity in eighth grade. In ninth grade, my youth pastor, a great guy named Len Kageler, told us we should read through the Bible, cover to cover, once a year. So I started doing that.

In the twenty years that I was a Christian I probably read the entire Bible front to back a dozen times. And that doesn't even include Bible studies or sermons or other ways I'd expose myself to the scriptures.

I wasn't supposed to have any pride, so I tried to not make a big deal about how much I read the Bible. But the space I created for myself in my various Christian circles -- my Christian identity -- my "success" as a follower of Jesus -- was based largely on my familiarity with the Bible.

And now that I'm an agnostic (a doubting atheist) I find myself missing having a Bible.

The truth of the Bible was a postulate, a given; it was axiomatic. I approached it presupposing its truth, and I spent thousands of hours of mental P90X figuring out what it meant and how to apply it to my life. My goal wasn't to figure out whether or not it was true. My goal was to figure out what God was like and what life was like and what reality was really like.

Now, as an agnostic, whenever I read philosophy or religion, it seems I'm judging its veracity and little else. Even if I've determined that a particular book is believable, it's reflexive to determine the limitations, the scope, of the ideas presented. Dawkins' book The God Delusion is great (and by the way he outs himself as an agnostic in that book), but it doesn't help me with my marriage or my job, and it definitely doesn't clarify my purpose in life.

The Bible was an all-purpose text. It was a complete manual for human life. If any aspect of existence wasn't covered explicitly, I  just had to dig deeper to find principles that shed light on the problem. The answers were in there if I sought them with enough tenacity.

It was a wellspring of wisdom and encouragement. God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life; the Bible is where he expressed his love and revealed his plan. It was a dependable source of hope and inspiration.

As an agnostic, there's no omnipotent force that is working in the best interest of all mankind, I can't know what reality is really like, there is no ultimate hope, and there's no book that I can spend a lifetime reading and re-reading to find inspiration and new messages of love and redemption.

I'm not complaining. (I'm kind of complaining.) I'm just feeling sentimental.

If there's a book that has consistently helped you at the art of living, it'd be cool if you'd share it in the comments.

It's Agnosticism, Not Brain Surgery: Should I Believe a Neurosurgeon's Near-Death Experience?

I tend to believe people. If somebody tells me they had a near-death experience, then I believe they had a near-death experience. I don't have too much professional (or even semi-pro) skepticism when it comes to personal experiences.

But the conclusions people make based on their personal experiences, those make me skeptical like a Sports Authority employee selling a treadmill to Chris Christie. I wrote a post about how personal experiences don't bring us any closer to the truth about God and ultimate reality. Near-death experiences are no exception.

A friend encouraged me to read Dr. Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife. It's a doctor's first-hand account of his own near-death experience while he was in a coma for seven days.

After recovering and recording his experiences, he began researching near-death experiences. "Though no two NDEs [near-death experiences] are exactly alike, I discovered early on that there is a very consistent list of typical features that they contain." But the fact that no two NDEs are the same is the beginning of the disproof of his proof of heaven.

If NDEs were proof of a particular belief system, then all NDEs would have to be very similar. If after we die we all go to McDonalds, then everybody who has an NDE better see a chubby guy with a half-tucked-in shirt and a name tag that says "Manager." If even one person has an NDE in which they are offered Doritos Locos Tacos, then the inductive, experience-based proof of McDonalds-after-death is invalid.

Even if everyone who had an NDE had the exact same experience, consistency of experience among the near-dead isn't enough to prove whether or not something (like heaven or McDonalds) is real. People who take the hallucinogenic drug ayahuasca report a consistent list of hallucinations. They regularly see jaguars and snakes. But no one contends that the stoner confronted with the jaguar and/or snake has encountered an actual jaguar and/or snake. What it does seem to signify is that brains in a similar states (ayahuasca trips) report similar perceptions (snakes and jaguars).

In Chapter 24, Dr. Alexander's describes what he calls his post-coma "ICU psychosis." He went nutballs immediately following his coma and near-death experience. After waking up he saw Russian and Chinese emails in the air in his hospital room. "I became obsessed with an ugly background of 'Internet messages' that would show up whenever I closed my eyes, and that sometimes appeared on the ceiling when they were open." And for a stretch of time he was convinced that his wife and his physicians were trying to kill him.*

Due to qualitative reasons, Dr. Alexander believes that his waking delirium did not reflect reality, but he holds tightly to the truth, validity, and memory of his NDE - the NDE felt realer than the ICU psychosis. Everyone agrees that he was not experiencing reality when he was seeing Chinese internet messages on the ceiling, yet many are convinced that he truly experienced heaven as he flew through the air upon vast fluttering waves of butterflies next to "a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes."

I trust that Dr. Alexander's NDE did in fact feel realer than the ICU psychosis, but feelings of realness don't substantiate the truth of subjective, personal, inner experiences.

But even if I take Dr. Alexander's word for it, and believe he really went to heaven, that doesn't do much to alter my agnosticism (my "doubting atheism").

The heaven Dr. Alexander visited was a universalist picture of the afterlife: no hell, no judgment. The message Dr. Alexander received during his NDE and summarized multiple times in his book was, "You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong." The easiest theological interpretation of this is that everybody is loved, no one has anything to fear, and no one can do anything wrong. That's universalism, and I'm okay with universalism.

Listen. If God does exist and knows everything I've ever done, thought, said, and felt, and he still loves me deeply, dearly and forever, that would be awesome. I hope that's for real. I don't believe there's enough evidence to support it, but I hope it's for real.

Another interpretation Dr. Alexander's message of love and comfort is that it was intended specifically for him and not necessarily for the rest of us. Maybe if I had a near-death experience God would tell me, "You're tolerated and mediocre. You're afraid of dogs. You can't do anything right."

But this more exclusivist interpretation this still doesn't line up with most Christian traditions. Dr. Alexander had no reason to expect favorable treatment from God. He was not a committed Christian prior to his near-death experience. He was sort of raised Christian, he was married in an Episcopal church, and he attended church only on Christmas and Easter. Regardless, as he explains in his book, he had pretty much written off the idea of God's existence.

His experience could be explained by Calvinism: despite himself, he was chosen by God, predestined unto salvation. And I'm cool with Calvinism. If God has chosen some people for glory and others for hell, there's nothing I can do about it other than hope I'm one of lucky ones. Doesn't seem fair, but God doesn't necessarily need to be fair.

Assured salvation (once saved always saved) could also explain Dr. Alexander's NDE. Many Christians believe that once a person comes to Jesus in a true act of repentance, that person is guaranteed admittance into heaven and escape from hell. Maybe Dr. Alexander repented and came to Christ as a child, and was therefore permanently put on God's good list. I'm probably covered too if this is true. I followed Christ wholeheartedly for 20 years despite persistent doubts, so I should be good. Still seems unfair to atheists who weren't lucky enough to convert for awhile.

Mormonism could also explain the NDE. Mormonism is similar to universalism in that Mormons believe that everybody is going to one of three degrees of heaven (except apostates who go to outer darkness - a Mormon version of hell). Maybe Dr. Alexander was checking out the Terrestrial or Telestial level. I'm cool with Mormonism because if it's true I get to go to a pretty sweet place. Maybe not the best place, but still pretty fucking sweet.

Dr. Alexander's proof of heaven doesn't align easily with established religious thought (for example, Jesus was nowhere in his vision of heaven). As a result, many religious people, like this guy, reject his experience as false. Interpreting Dr. Alexander's NDE isn't an atheist vs. theist issue. It's more like Dr. Alexander's experience vs. any worldview that runs contrary to Dr. Alexander's experience.

Finally, what if Dr. Alexander is just full of shit? Like I said, I tend to believe people's personal experiences, but there's a chance that the dude is just plain lying.

Check out this interesting passage from Chapter 30:

I'd always believed that when you're under the burden of a potentially fatal illness, softening the truth is fine. To prevent a terminal patient from trying to grab on to a little fantasy to help them deal with the possibility of death is like withholding painkilling medication.

Maybe he's doing the same thing here. Every human being is under the burden of certain death. Could Dr. Alexander be purposely "softening the truth" and giving us a little fantasy to hold onto?

Another NDE author, the young Alex Malarkey who co-authored the book The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, recently made an official statement saying,

I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.

Alex wrote this in an open letter after his book had already sold over a million copies. He was six years old when he was hit by a car and slipped into a coma, he was nine when the book was published, and he's now a teenager, paralyzed from the neck down. And he admits that his story was a lie.**

Look at NDE stories from a fraud triangle perspective. The fraud triangle suggests that three things need to be present for a normal person to commit fraud: opportunity, incentive, and rationalization.

The opportunity to lie about an NDE exists for anyone who almost died. No one can fact-check their statements. At best people could look for inconsistencies, and inconsistencies can be explained by saying that we are limited to human language to express things that are beyond our ability to communicate.

There's incentive to lie about having an NDE. The NDE book market is hot, and your book could be made into a feature film. Fame and fortune are available to people with near-death experiences; fame and fortune came to Dr. Alexander.

Lying about NDEs can be rationalized pretty easily, too. Dr. Alexander expressed a wonderful, even charitable, rationalization above. His lie could soften the bunt-force trauma of inevitable death.

I'm not saying that Dr. Alexander's story is a fraud. But I am saying that it could be.

One last thing. Dr. Alexander explains that his experience occurred while his noecortex was shut down. This is the closest he comes to proof. His reasoning goes something like this:

1. As a neurosurgeon, I am certain that my neocortex was completely shut down.
2. If consciousness comes from the physical processes of the neocortex, it would have been impossible for me to experience consciousness while my neocortex was shut down.
3. I did experience consciousness while my neocortex was shut down.
4. Therefore, consciousness emanates from somewhere other than the physical brain.
5. Therefore, we are not merely physical creatures.

This is a non-rigorous proof of mind-body dualism. If I were to accept it as proof, it would prove the existence of a spirit or soul. It doesn't prove that his experiences were real, and it does nothing to direct me to a specific belief system regarding God or the afterlife.

NDEs are extremely interesting. However, they aren't proof of heaven. But they don't disprove heaven, either. They're just fascinating experiences. Like seeing Russian email messages on the ceiling or hallucinating about jaguars and snakes.

*Immediately before coming out of his coma, his wife and his doctor were discussing pulling the plug on him. So although they were no longer considering killing him, his paranoia may have been the best substantiated of all his strange experiences.
**Upon closer inspection, it's hard to tell from his letter whether he's saying that he lied about his experience, or if he's saying that he now rejects his NDE because it doesn't fit comfortably with his current conception of Christianity.

If God Exists, Then Why Does My Dog Hump My Leg?: How Animal Behavior Informs the God Debate

In 1860 Darwin wrote, "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created [certain parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat would play with mice."

Interesting point. Let's take it a couple steps further.

If fornication is sinful and abhorrent to God, it's hard to believe he would create the mouse-like brown antechinus. "Insatiable to the core, he goes from female to female, mating until his immune system becomes suppressed, he develops severe ulcers and gets infected by parasites and dies at the end of the mating season."

If masturbation is sinful and abhorrent to God, it's hard to believe he would create the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite, or that one spider monkey at the zoo.

If infanticide is at least as abhorrent to God as it is to me, it's hard to believe he would create gerbils because they tend to kill and eat their own young.

If lying and stealing are sinful and abhorrent to God, it's hard to believe he would create the tufted capuchin monkey who "will use alarm calls normally reserved for predator sightings ... to illicit a response in fellow group members and then take advantage of the distraction to pilfer food."

If suicide is objectively immoral, it's hard to believe God would create lemmings. Regardless, the lemming is the best swim team mascot ever.

If murder is abhorrent to God, it's hard to believe he would create the blue-footed booby. They're killers from birth. The stronger blue-footed booby chick "will kill the [weaker] chick if there is a food shortage. During lean times, the [stronger] chick may attack the [weaker] chick by pecking vigorously, or it may simply drag its younger sibling by the neck and oust it from the nest."

If homosexuality is abhorrent to God, it's hard to believe he would create any of the 500 species of animals that exhibit homosexual behavior, like bottlenose dolphins, African lions, or the Andean bird species called the cock of the rock.

If coarse language is offensive to God, it's hard to believe he would allow Adam to name a species of bird the "blue-footed booby" or the "cock of the rock."

The big question here is, Can animals sin? Are ethics and morality applicable to any species other than humans?

It's generally held that animals can't sin. Chimpanzees are considered the smartest animals, but they're only about as smart as a dumbass three-year-old. Animals don't have the cognitive skills to act contrary to their instincts. If "ought" implies "can," then "can't" implies "do whatever the hell you want."

If ethics and morality don't apply to animals, then either (1) morality is relative because things that are sinful for one species are righteous for another, ie. "Thou shall not hump thy groin against another's leg, saith the Lord, unless you're a golden retriever," or (2) God created animals with behaviors that really piss him off. 

If ethics and morality DO apply to animals, then humans are sinless lambs when compared to actual lambs. Humans screw up a lot, but not like those lecherous bonobos. Also, if animals were capable of sin, then wouldn't God have become a snail to die as a substitutionary atonement on behalf of all snails so that, if they accepted Jesusnail, they could be saved from eternal torment in salt?

If morality were absolute, and if the ideas of sin and redemption didn't apply to any species other than humans, then it would make a lot more sense if God made every animal species such that they instinctively exhibited perfect Biblical behavior. Which would be tough for Old Testament whales since krill isn't kosher.

Love, Coercion, Hell and PowerBall: Adventures in Theodicy

A theodicy is an attempt to explain how a good and omnipotent God can coexist with evil. It is not an epic poem by Homer.

Saint Augustine's theodicy denies the existence of evil at all. His view is that evil is not a thing unto itself; rather, evil is simply the absence of good, and therefore it doesn't exist. It's the same reason I can't be a vegan because vegan food doesn't actually exist; it's simply the absence of food that is delicious.

The most prevalent theodicy is an appeal to free will. God's main desire is for people to love and worship him (probably because, as the prime mover, he had an absentee father). Since love and worship that is either coerced or pre-programmed is not truly love or worship, he gives us the capacity for hate and apathy. In other words, love cannot exist without free will. We can't be forced to love. Therefore the existence of love requires the existence of both hate and apathy (or at bare minimum hate and apathy have to be to be possible). God wanted so badly to be the object of people's love that he chose to create a world with evil. (Just like how Neil Diamond wanted so badly to be the object of people's love that he created Song Sung Blue.)

At best this theodicy is an adequate explanation why humans do evil things. It's doesn't really help with the idea of natural evils like tsunamis, earthquakes and Gallup, New Mexico.

However, the free will argument has its limitations even with human evil. God doesn't want to coerce us into loving him, yet the mere possibility of eternal torment in hell is coercive. It's the math of Pascal's Wager: If there is a non-zero probability that Christianity or Islam (along with their respective eternal hells) is true, then that possibility - remote as it may be - is coercive. Any reasonable person would strive to love God because that would eliminate the risk of going to hell, and eliminating the risk of an eternity of the worst existence imaginable (Song Sung Blue will be played on loop in hell) more than justifies any resulting opportunity cost.

That was my story. The math of Pascal's Wager (that is, the possibility of eternal hell) coerced me into following (and loving) Jesus long after I determined that the claims of Christianity were highly improbable. Somewhat like how the California State Lottery coerces me into buying a PowerBall ticket despite the ridiculously improbable odds of winning.

I don't want to miss an opportunity to explore a possible explanation for my problem with God's hiddenness that is buried in all of this. Pascal's Wager isn't truly coercive. If it were, then everybody would be a believer.* It's only not coercive because there are at least two mutually exclusive worldviews that include eternal hell as a consequence of not loving the right god. However, if God's existence and identity were obvious - if he were not hidden - then hell would be truly coercive. Right?

Nope. The coercion argument is entirely BS because none of it applies to love. The greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. It's a gross oversimplification to think that love of that intensity is simply a choice that could possibly be coerced. I can't select a random person and choose to love that person with all my heart and soul and strength and mind, nor could anyone coerce that kind of love out of me.

To look at it from another angle, the God that I followed for 20 years - it was impossible not to love him, not because he forced you to love him, but because he was fucking amazing. The just and all-powerful God who created the universe knew everything I ever did or thought or felt, and He still loved me with all of his heart and soul. If it were true, how could you not reciprocate that love?

Ironically, I am prevented from loving God because I can't love someone if I'm not sure he exists; I can't love someone who never shows up. And please don't say, "But Jesus did show up and die on a cross for you." That's like telling someone, "Hey, your dad isn't an absentee father. Before you were born he set up a billion-dollar trust fund for you. And then he took off for the rest of your life."

This theodicy that says that love cannot exist without free will also seems to fall apart when applied to God himself. Does God have free will? He doesn't have the capacity for hate or apathy because those things go against his nature. Therefore, either God does not have free will and he's an automaton without true love for anyone, OR it was possible for him to have made us a skosh more in his image where we have free will but we're never evil because it's simply against our nature.

*It is interesting to note, however, that Christianity and Islam - the two main faiths with eternal hells - are the two biggest religions on the planet. Those two religions account for 54.8% of the world's population.

If God Exists, I Hope He's Not Walter White: The Trilemma Revisited

Let's say some guy specializes in estate tax return prep. Due to Obamacare's lack of death panels, revenue is down, so he decides to generate some business by throwing old ladies with net worth greater than $5.34 million off of the subway platform.

No Question. That's bad.

But what if it's just him and John Kerry's wife alone on the subway platform, and before he has a chance to hip-check her into the chilly embrace of Form 706, she falls off the subway platform on her own. I don't know why. Maybe she got dizzy from the subway's inescapable smell of hot piss. She begs him to pull her up, and he could totally do it because he did CrossFit that one time. He explains to her that he's not going to help because he needs the work so he can afford to go to the Cheesecake Factory. She tells him that she's already got an estate tax guy on retainer so he wouldn't get her business anyway. 

But he still won't pull her up. He has the power to execute an easy rescue, but he doesn't. He just stands by and watches her get Wile-E-Coyotied by a train.

Everyone agrees that's bad, too.

The main thing that made me throw in the towel with Christianity is the following problem:

God is hidden - or as C.S. Lewis says, God is not "sensibly present." Christianity claims that God is good and that he sends people to hell for wrong belief. I argue that God cannot (1) be good, (2) choose to be hidden and (3) send people to hell for wrong belief. At most two of those three things can be true about God.

I other words, if God chooses to be hidden, he can't send people to hell for wrong belief and still be good. (For more on this, see my earlier post "The Trilemma of Hiddenness + Goodness + Hell.")

A friend of mine called BS this argument. He said God does not send people to hell for wrong belief. People wind up in hell because of their sin. Therefore, God's goodness is unimpaired because my sin is the proximate cause of my eternal torment in hell, not God's apparent capriciousness. 

Proximate cause was explained to me like this: If an ambulance doesn't make it to my house fast enough, that's NOT the proximate cause of my death. The EMTs won't be held responsible. They didn't murder me. They're not bad people. The proximate cause was autoerotic asphyxiation, and I should have know better.

But what if an omnipotent EMT doesn't make it to my house fast enough? Does that change things? If he's omnipotent, he could have performed an easy rescue, but he chose not to. Probably because he's grossed out by autoerotic asphyxiation.

But what if this omnipotent EMT saved some other autoerotic asphyxiaters, but he didn't save me? Would he have been less just for saving me than for saving other autoerotic asphyxiaters? If not, he's just like the guy who let John Kerry's wife spoon a train. He's just like Walter White watching as Jesse's girlfriend dies.

So the question is, Does the trilemma hold if the third statement is changed from "God sends people to hell for wrong belief" to "God refuses to save people from hell for wrong belief"?

Nope. God can't choose to be hidden AND refuse to save people for wrong belief AND be good.