Out of Eden: God’s love and the fall

The image to the right features an actual sign at a church in the area, and just across the street, another sign reads, to paraphrase: “Heaven: A prepared place for a prepared people.”

A friend of mine made a salient point years ago that, of course, still holds true today, even as Christianity has been losing ground to nonbelief the last few years in America (more recent research from Pew shows a similar trend), if church leaders insist on using passive methods like billboard messages to attempt to reach the public, they should at least be focused on getting people into the doors of the church, rather than making theological points that a large portion of unchurched people aren’t going to understand in the first place.

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In any case, indulge me while I unpack the message in billboard above and the message posted across the street. “When God made you, it was love at first sight” is essentially saying that, based on theology and biblical teaching, that God’s creation, man, was made in Yahweh’s image and was, thanks to God, endowed with free will to choose right from wrong and was given remarkable intelligence and complexity to be able to rule over the earth as a unique being among God’s other creations. It is also saying, from a more specific and modern standpoint, that God’s love extends to everyone and, to flesh out the idea a little further to really capture what the church teaches, God supposedly loves everyone so much that he sent his son to die on the cross for the atonement of sins, and even when a person chooses not to accept this “free” gift of salvation, God is supposedly grieved by the loss.

If we work through the theology logically and take the Bible and Christian doctrine at face value, we can see that neither statement about God’s love happens to be true, and even if it were, God’s love is actually inferior to the human conception of real love.

Here, I will have to slip into rhetorical language and speak as if I think all of this could be true for the sake of argument. Some Christian apologists have misunderstood this technique, as they misunderstand a great many things, to mean that I might actually believe in God and that I simply don’t like the story or don’t want to accept it. I, in fact, don’t believe, but in order to argue against this theology, I have to assume, at least for the duration of this post, that it could be true in order to fully work through its implications.

So, with that out of the way, the first thing that needs to be said is “God’s love,” agape love, is supposedly the highest form of affection that can be bestowed on another being in the universe, but as we shall see, it is a strange, debased, almost perverse, kind of love. Since we are told that “God is love,” I will speak of love as if it’s a stand-in for God himself (or herself).

God’s love is the kind of love that made it perfectly acceptable to place a wager on Job’s life, one of the deity’s most devout servants, and then stand idly by while this beloved follower was stricken with all sorts of personal maladies and afflictions. It’s the kind of love that commanded Abraham to kill his only son as a demonstration of his own love and devotion.

It’s the kind of love that created humans with the full knowledge that Satan would wander into the garden, under the roving, all-knowing eye of Yahweh, tempt Adam and Eve and cause the fall of the entire species.

It is the kind of love that foresaw from before the beginning how man would suffer and die for thousands of years under unimaginable brutality, enslavement, famine and disease and watched, as Christopher Hitchens has said, with “indifference” and “folded arms” before finally deciding to get involved a few thousand years ago in largely illiterate Palestine.

It’s kind of love in which the end, the salvation of mankind and the consecration of the new covenant, justifies the means by the morally bankrupt concepts of scapegoating and vicarious redemption.

It’s the kind of love that is responsible for heaven and hell, Satan, original sin and indeed, evil itself. For, if God is not ultimately responsible for these things — all of these things — he is not omnipotent or omniscient, and thus, not God.

It’s the kind of love that foisted mankind, without giving us any say in the matter, into a cosmic chess match between the forces of good and evil.

It is the kind of love that compels man to reciprocate that love, bend the knee or perish forever, that commands us to love someone in whom we must also fear.

It is the kind of love that condemned man even before he was created and then proceeded to make humans the carriers of a disease the church calls original sin that has only one cure — that same love, a terrible love.

If all of this is true, God, equipped with the complete knowledge of human history before creating a single biological cell, still hurled mankind into the grist mill, into the wreckage of earth, where we are told that the wheat will eventually be separated from the chaff, where far more than half of us, either unaware of the gospel message or unable to use our reasoning capacities to verify the authenticity of the stories and holy texts, would be cast down to perdition to cringe and scream and burn forever and ever, where we are shuttled out of the womb into the shadowlands, hobbled from the start by ancestral trespasses and original sin.

This is what you must believe about God’s love in order to be a Christian. Perhaps even more wicked is the idea that God, having knowingly shackled his “good” creation right from the beginning, “prepared a place” for those who, concluding that life without Big Brother was just too difficult a prospect, could then be shuffled away to a gloomy ingathering once the veil of woe was finally draped over all of life — the creator paralyzing his own creation and then calling the one and only antidote true love.

At issue, then, are the basic contradictions or incompatibilities between God’s love, humanity’s idea of love and the theological concept of sin.

If God, in his omniscience, was somehow surprised or caught off guard by man’s first disobedience, he’s not omniscient and thus, not god. Those who view the Adam and Eve story simply as an allegory still have to account for the enduring dissonance between God’s love and the problem of evil. If evil springs from God, then God is the progenitor of evil, and is thus, not omnibenevolent; if evil came from another source outside of God, then God is not a unilateral, self-sufficient agent, and is thus, not singular or all-powerful.

Apologists may argue that our idea of love and God’s idea of love as presented in the Bible are two different things: God can see the big picture and his version of love is more broadly defined to include a system of punishments and rewards as a way to teach and help us grow in the faith — the common refrain that we should become more “spiritually mature” — whereas humans’ concept of love is more narrowly focused on interactions and affection in the here and now. But for humans to even be capable of loving someone that we can only read about and pretend to talk to in our heads, God’s love must be relateable to us in some real way, and as I have argued, any reasonable examination of the gospel story will find that this love, real or imagined, holds little intrinsic value, except to those who are the most wishful-thinking, ill-begotten, downtrodden and hopeless.

The Bible must be an attempt to appeal to us, on some level, by human standards of love, but for many of the reasons I just laid out, it fails.

We can even go so far as to say that the modern conception of human love and affection supersedes godly love by several large degrees, and the contrast could not be anymore pronounced.

Real love, unlike godly love, does not come with contingencies. Real love, unlike godly love, is not compulsory and cannot be forced. Real love does not require a series of tests and temptations for verification of authenticity. Real love does not come prepackaged with guilt and fear. Real love is a two-way street. Real love does not require the complete surrender of a person’s individuality. Real love means caring for someone else selflessly as they are, not for who they should be or will be at some point in the future.

Real love, most importantly of all, is unconditional.

Sexism: Not what The Rock is cookin’

Full disclosure: I am a fan of the pro wrestling craft and have been since the 1980s, but I think I present a fairer and more comprehensive assessment of the WWE than the articles critiqued below. The idea for this post came from Don Tony, with the Don Tony and Kevin Castle Show. Go check them out here: http://wrestling-news.com.

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I know the good folks over at the Bleacher Report and Vocativ just need something to keep themselves busy, and in the fully-pajamaed, dweeb-in-the-basement-industry of Internet prognostication, any old fodder will do, but no serious writer who looks at the WWE today can conclude that the wrestling promotion, or wrestling in general, is any more or less sexist in its presentation and objectification of women than other products in the entertainment industry.

But as writers on the Internet are wont to do, Alex Goot, with Vocativ, and Ryan Dilbert, with the Bleacher Report, took great pains to shed all remnants of logic and type up critiques of what they deem is WWE’s glaring problem with sexism, particular in light of The Rock’s recent return to RAW on Jan. 25, as seen here:

The two articles actually read like mirror-pieces because they more or less cover the same ground on the Rock’s seemingly unscripted (I doubt it) conversation backstage with C.J. Perry, aka Lana, about their sexual proclivities, which partly took place in the presence of Perry’s real-life fiancé, Miroslav Barnyashev, aka Rusev.

During the segment, The Rock recalled how Lana met him in a hotel room at some point in the past, and the pair performed various positions in bed, one of which included the “one-legged Russian vacuum.”

According to Dilbert:

The Rock congratulated him on having a wife who was so flexible.

Lana offered no response. She mostly just stood there blushing. She wasn’t a player in this bit of minitheater; she was a prop.

At her height, Lana was both alluring and powerful. She was vicious, power-hungry, a blindly passionate patriot and real wrestling character. Over time, she’s been reduced to the subject of sex-centered storylines. She went from being the smiling, silent woman on Dolph Ziggler’s arm to the smiling, silent woman hanging around Rusev.

On Monday night, WWE pulled her back into the spotlight just to make a cheap joke about her promiscuity.

Dilbert and Goot miss, or purposefully exclude, some rather obvious, yet important details in this, and almost all, segments on WWE programming that anyone with an IQ over 50 would understand. First, these are all fictional characters talking to each other about fictional events. The Rock is not Dewayne Johnson the movie star; he is the “larger than life” character created by the WWE to entertain audience members and people watching at home. He is a little tamped down from the Attitude Era days, but he still says things that would be inappropriate in real life, as do many characters in all facets of the entertain industry.

Second, in order for The Rock, the character, to talk about Lana’s promiscuity, he must also talk about his own. If we want to pretend to tread the moral high ground in breaking down this segment, we might also ask what The Rock was doing getting drunk and messing around with someone else’s girlfriend. Yet, in the criticism against WWE, we are led to believe that only Lana could have been complicit in these fictional hotel acrobatics, as if Lana was the ultimate seducer, and The Rock was just along for the proverbial ride. Could we not call that assessment sexist as well?

Third, Lana was not suddenly downgraded from a “vicious, power-hungry, a blindly passionate patriot” to the coy, fawning female on RAW the other night just so The Rock could air their — again, fictional — exploits in front of millions of people. Lana has had “heat,” as they call it in the wrestling business, because she allegedly leaked news of her and Rusev’s real-life engagement on social media at a time when the couple were involved in a storyline dispute on TV. She also apparently had some kind of spat on social media with Paige, which also got her some heat. As a result, and this is the usual trend in WWE, she is being afforded less time on TV at the moment.

Fourth, are characters, who represent exaggerated version of real life figures, supposed to simply ignore the topic of human relationships and sex purely because WWE may run the risk of objectifying people? Drunken sex in hotels and promiscuous horseplay are still things people do, right? So, why does WWE run afoul for suggesting that an explicit and fictional encounter occurred between two consenting adults? Cheating on your boyfriend may be unethical, but it’s not illegal.

In any case, over-analyzing dialogue between fictional characters about fictional events in this way amounts to borderline insanity.

While WWE does have its fair share of boorish characters, both male and female, not all male characters in the company dredge up the sexual histories of female wrestlers, and not all female wrestlers are depicted as shallow, one-dimensional Barbies. Examples of the latter include A.J. Lee, who, until recently, was the longest running women’s champion in history, Lita, Jacqueline, Alundra Blayze, Charlotte, Sasha Banks, Natalya, etc.

I will say that when the opportunity presents itself, WWE does tend to go for the relationship storylines too often, in which female characters often get pigeonholed as side-kick figures, and people like John Cena and Ryback, who are supposed to be good guys, as Goot pointed out, sometimes make crude jokes about heel characters, as Lana was at one time. I would chalk these up less to sexism and more to laziness on the part of the writers.

Goot also took issue with Ric Flair kissing Becky Lynch during a match with Charlotte at the Royal Rumble in order to cause a distraction and help Charlotte regain the upper hand.

According to Goot:

Rather than adding anything of value to the contest, Flair’s actions took the audience out of it, forcing viewers to contemplate the strange display they just witnessed, rather than focusing on the action in the ring.

Flair’s kiss becomes even more maddening given how utterly unnecessary it was, with the finish of the match coming after some additional, far less lecherous interference. Bringing sexual harassment into the storyline added little, if anything, to Flair’s villainy.

What Goot failed to mention is that Flair’s character, which he has played on and off for 30 years, actually is an immoral and flamboyant ladies man, and the words, “kiss stealing” are part of his DNA as a character, as in the well-worn mantra that he is a “kiss stealing, wheeling dealing, limousine riding, jet flying, son of a gun.” Goot also failed to mention that Becky Lynch gave Flair a stiff slap in the face in return for his antics.

So, yes, Flair is a bad guy who would not and should not suddenly change to fit in with our modern sensibilities. Would a 2016 remake of “Scarface” show Tony Montana finally getting clean, going into rehab for his cocaine addiction and starting a new life in The Hamptons as a real estate agent? Would we, as consumers, even want to see a reformed Tony Montana? Of course not.

Low brow humor is easy pickings for overworked writers who are under immense pressure to produce five hours of television every week and 12-13 PPVs per year, but WWE is a publicly traded company now and has to answer to advertisers, so while the company clearly still has some outstanding issues related to gender, race and stereotypes, it is worlds removed from the WWE of the Attitude Era or the 1980s in the current PG era of political correctness.

If we want to have a conversation on sexism and the objectification of women in the entertainment industry, we could certainly find plenty to talk about, but we should have some perspective about judging wrestling against other television shows, movies and even music. Where is the outcry against television shows like Game of Thrones, which routinely depicts violence against women, misogyny and sexual abuse? Where is the outcry against shows like Real Housewives of (insert city) and The Bachelor? What about the sexism depicted in Mad Men, 2 Broke Girls and Modern Family? Hell, if we’re so concerned about objectification, why don’t we call for a boycott of Sports illustrated for producing a swimsuit edition?

I agree with Goot that WWE can and should do more to promote strong, confident women who should have more time on the mic and in the ring and be given more complex storylines, but the truth is that WWE does present strong-willed, ass-kicking females every week, 52 weeks out of the year. Perhaps strongest of all, despite her villainy on TV, is Stephanie McMahon, who is helping to run the company, all the while raising three daughters.

To suggest that WWE in the year 2016 is a hotbed of sexism, when one of its principle owners is a powerful female, all the while ignoring the rest of the entertainment industry, which features nearly ubiquitous examples of overt sexism and objectification that trump anything on WWE programming in recent memory, all the while ignoring the fact that WWE is, itself, a form of entertainment, is a dubious claim to make about a company that routinely trips over itself, almost to a fault, to toe the PG line and kowtow to the PC culture.