WHO IS GOD? WHAT IS THE GOSPEL? WHAT IS THE COST OF FOLLOWING JESUS?

“Okay, the plague is all my fault.”

So rather than seeing the fallacy of the harm that your proposition does to others, this is where you get defensive?

You’ve attributed the Pandemic to God punishing OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS, not me, and now you want to play victim by accusing me of doing the same to you? It’s just a bug Tom, not a thing that EITHER ONE OF US gets to assume for God as God’s punishment on anyone’s sins.

Could the Pandemic be the rational result of some people’s bad choices, whether those bad choices were intensional or just negligent? Probably. It sounds like a cultural dietary relic in which a Chinese superstition believed the consumer could obtain certain powers from certain wild exotic animals. This lead to wet markets that created a unique environment for a contagion to jump species and then get to us. One’s logic and morals have to be pretty attenuated, however, to claim either some atheistic Darwinian moral logic, or proclaim God’s wrath on OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS. Please excuse me if I don’t wish to be your straw man or persecutor in advocating either the rational or the theological fallacies you present.

We’ve reached the point where our points are made and where defensiveness just becomes an excuse for a lack of introspection. I certainly think about what you’ve said here.

Thanks for taking up the underlying issue (the meaning of human suffering), and for letting me tell you truths that you so obviously don’t want to hear or yet appreciate. I always learn something.

I’ll be happy to respond to anything that concerns the actual issue, but the whole Elder Son anger and hurt feelings thing both misses the point and makes it for me without the need of my actually being your imagined oppressor, something that would run counter to exactly the point that I think Jesus was making.

“You have a narrative. Abortion and sex perversion are not sins. “

That’s not MY “narrative” because I never said that. Neither do I think that the Pandemic is God’s judgement on those who think their sins are somehow inferior to the supposed sexual perverts, who in this case don’t think that they are actually perverts, or the sins of women who legally choose abortion who in this case don’t actually think that they are murderers. The actual “narrative” I’m presenting is the Parable of the Prodigal Son where the Father’s love was abundantly inclusive of the both sons – the one who’s sin was actually in part intentional perverse debauchery and the son who’s sin was exclusion and envious, unloving judgementalism. And yet the Father actually punishes neither sinner (although you should not miss that Jesus’ greatest critique appears to be for the hypocrisy of the Elder Son who wished the Father’s punishment for the obvious sins of his brother while failing to recognize that the failure to love and celebrate his brother’s safe return from death in itself was a worse sin).

Please don’t make up for me narratives and straw men that I didn’t advocate. Just applid God’s narrative in the Parable to your contention that God sent a plague as punishment specifically aimed at the supposed sins that OTHER PEOPLE COMMIT. It doesn’t jibe does it? In fact, under Jesus’ narrative, your contention is refuted specifically in the Father’s correction of the Elder Son. Can you address the actual narrative rather than making stuff up for me to have said?

Nope Tom. Just the opposite – for the sake of the discussion, I’m willing to assume that abortion and homosexuality are sins. It still does not give us the right, for God, to presume and then proclaim God’s punishment for on OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS even if they are actually sins. In this case, we aren’t even talking about the natural consequences God allows that we bring on ourselves for our sins (as it was with the Prodigal Son) but instead a natural disaster which has no obvious causal relationship to the any particular sin, much less to the two specific sins you deem to proclaim God’s punishment for.

Really, honestly, you don’t see the Elder Brother in this attitude? You don’t see any theological or rational error?

“You think abortion and homosexuality are sins? Who knew?”

For the sake of this discussion, it matters not if they are sins. You are presuming to proclaim God is punishing us with this Pandemic. Don’t you see that this is an outrageously presumptuous and dangerous accusation even if these two activities (one’s that you are conveniently incapable of or disinclined toward) are sins. Do you really have no better argument than just to twist what I say to vet and over again?

“Identity politics is extremely devisive, and the LGBTQ movement, in particular. The issue of abortion is the single most devisive issue in our nation.”

Hardly. However, I think you may think too highly of your own ability to figure out God’s priorities on punishing OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS.

If you want to change the subject, from the actual issue at hand, I don’t blame you. If you want to actually consider this issue, then perhaps it would be illuminating to you if you took the other side.

Let’s suppose, again for the sake of this discussion, that I proclaimed for God that this Pandemic is actually God’s punishment on us for allowing a few people in the world to rape God’s creation in order to control most of the wealth. Exotic meats in wet markets actually exist for the Chinese rich – the poor can’t afford this luxury. Deforestation and loss of habitat due to carbon produced climate change have forced bush meat hunters deeper into the jungles to find these creatures exposing humans to novel viruses that may have lain dormant in wild animals for centuries.

There is actually more “but for” and proximate causality between the sin and the Pandemic in my hypothesis than in yours, but wouldn’t you make my same argument that I am making – it’s not up to me to presume how God punishes OTHER PEOPLE’S SINS, and you’d be right in THAT argument.

Oh dear brother. Don’t you realize that you are just projecting your own shadow, your own anger and hatred, on to God? Oh well, you are not alone. Humans have been doing this since the Pharisees thought they were carrying out God’s law by crucifying Jesus. It’s a good thing God does not punish all of humanity for this specific sin, or God would have wiped us out long ago.