Limbo

          It's not alcohol that kills people, it's people who kill themselves with alcohol, or kill others when inebriated. Alcohol is not to blame. And, yes, I was buzzed blogging last night. I hope no one was harmed. With alcohol, as with guns, it's people who are to blame for the evil acts committed with them. Instead of abolishing guns or alcohol, we should abolish people--and not just bad people, but all people; for, inevitably, a monster will reemerge from the slime we call the human gene pool and start the whole thing over again. The next Cain will kill the next Abel, or maybe Abel will do the deed this time.
          Too many jinns have escaped their bottles: booze, guns, knives of all sizes, forks, all sorts of explosives, poisons, gases, anvils falling from the sky, fists/hands, garottes, shovels, picks, and sledge hammers, cruel words, heavy objects of all kinds, fire, bows and arrows, razor blades, slingshots, the Internet, poisonous spiders and snakes, water, broken bottles, looks that can kill, automobiles, aircraft, electricity . . . As any Marine worth his salt knows, everything is a weapon. Rather than abolish all of these things, we should abolish people. This would rid the world of all these evils, and it would be easy: just use all of the items mentioned above to do it, and do it very efficiently. We can thereby abolish evil with just one last act of evil; unless you think you can make the argument that guns and such are evil even when no one is left to use them. But I don't think you can, any more than you could argue that a hospital full of healing implements and medicines is good when there is no one left to heal.
          I told a story a few blogs ago about my father smashing my Daisy BB gun after I'd accidentally broken a neighbor's picture window. What if he'd smashed me instead? Well, then not one evil word, not one mistake, not one misjudgment, not one act causing harm, or sin would have been committed by me again. Even better, what if my mother had aborted her pregnancy that resulted in my birth? She would have been doing me a favor, preventing me from committing even a single sin in my life. Pure as the day I was born--well. several days or months before I was born, I'd go straight to heaven, if you believe in some sort of heaven for the innocent. What's more, the world would have been spared whatever evil I have brought about in my 59 years.
          A candidate for the Arkansas state house of representatives wrote a book wherein he advocated a parent's right to petition the court for the capital punishment of a rebellious child. I'd wager this same fellow is anti-abortion; but abortion is the very thing that can save a child from a rebellious life and send him/her straight to heaven. An act of love, a parent willing to risk hell to ensure heaven for the child. But wait, since the motive of the killing or abortion was love, then perhaps no sin adheres.
          For evangelical Christians, the strongest pro-abortion argument would be that one can protect these precious souls from the risk of an eternity in hell. What loving parent would risk a child growing up and not accepting Jesus Christ as his or her personal Lord and Savior? The Catholics are covered here because they don't believe children are born innocent, but with the taint of original sin; hence, a baptized infant goes to heaven, an unbaptized infant goes to, well it was once thought they went to the Limbo of Infants--not heaven, but not exactly hell either (not fixed Catholic doctrine, by the way). The church is more inclined now to send all dead infants to heaven, thus inviting the same dilemma the Evangelicals have. Strict Calvinists are covered because they believe souls are predestined to either heaven or hell, hence the aborted child will go to heaven or hell according to God's will, just as they would have if they'd lived normal lives.

          Leibniz concluded that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire lambasted that notion in his classic Candide, a funny and persuasive book. But if one wants to preserve the notion of a loving God, he should probably go in the direction of Leibniz: that God was prevented by laws of non-contradiction and such from creating the kind of world we, with our limitations, would imagine as perfect. Our world isn't perfect, but it the best of all worlds it was logically possible to create, all things considered. And only God can consider all things.I think all such speculation, while interesting and entertaining, is basically useless. We have the world we have. We can, with our lives, leave a net contribution to the world, or a net deficit from it.

          Forgive me for being all over the board here--this happens when I'm not blogging with a buzz, or when I am--but I trust you to be kind this wanderer. When we speculate about these things, we are being theologians, and all theologians are bad theologians, no matter how brilliant, entertaining, or learned they are. And great theology is intoxicating, like alcohol. Intoxicated theologians can cause great harm. The more we try to pin things down, the more absurd they become, and the drunker we are on lofty things we can't quite absorb; and pretty soon we're aborting all infants to save them, or eliminating evil by eliminating humankind, or portions of humankind. The farther we drink from the source, the muddier and more fermented the water, and the harder we try to make theological sense of mud. But beneath the fountain, were the water spills clear, cool, and pure, the Source is to be enjoyed and experienced, and can't be understood beyond the sense that we may drink it, wash in it, and point to it.
          "All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."