1 – 25 – 17 Free Will and Love

            Why did God give us free will?

Because free will is necessarily for love.

How?

If I say I love my mother because she’ll beat me if I don’t, that’d be considered disingenuous. But I am acting of free will. There is the threat of coercion, but I’m still making a choice to do the thing because my aversion to saying I love her is less than my aversion to a beating.

Isn’t Hell the worst beating that could possibly exist? It’s defined as the end-all, be-all of punishment. Nothing could possibly hurt more, for longer, than Hell.

But what makes Hell hurt?

Hell is sometimes referred to as a place of fire, gnashing of teeth. I’ll try to stick to what Jesus says, because he would probably know better than anyone else. But he’s also prone to speak in metaphors, he probably means something more like Hell burns us like fire and is far more frustrating than anything we’ve ever experienced, hence the gnashing.

How does he say we get there? In the parable of the banquet, which seems to be a fairly straightforward one, people earn being outside the gates and being unknown by God by refusing his invitation to exactly what they’re wanting and watching from the outside. It is a rejection of God.

So they’re outside the banquet, because they rejected God. Their rejection consigned them to Hell while an acceptance of his invitation was Heaven.

The acceptance of his invitation, a willingness to be in his presence. Jesus isn’t terribly specific about the banquet, no menus, or games, or wines are mentioned in specific. But the description of it as a banquet gives the idea of being fed, fulfilled, and in companionship with the other guests and the host. So when Jesus says “Eat of my body” is he not saying that the host is the meal? Well, that’s precisely what the Catholic Church calls it. If the meal is God, and the host is God, then the banquet is just God.

Jesus is simply inviting us into his Life, not some event he has prepared, but living in proximity and communion with Him. So then all this banquet is, is being near to, or with, God.

If Hell is the opposite of Heaven, which based on the preponderance of dualism in so many different faiths and mythologies seems a fairly intuitive notion, then it is simply the absence of God. There’s really nothing in the banquet besides God, He’s the food, He’s the host, He’s even the bouncer telling people to get off the doors because He doesn’t know them.

So here the choice to love God is fundamentally different than my choice to love my mother. My rewards and punishments with my mother are entirely external from her. She’ll give me favor, freedoms, comforts if I please her, and unpleasantness if I upset her. But nothing about these gifts is intrinsic to her, I could get material gifts from anywhere. I may acquire some sort of surrogate mother to mentor and coddle me. I could end up receiving punishment in the form of a beating from any number of people. Though she is undoubtedly important and undoubtedly unique, the gifts and punishments she can give to me are not. There is no one like my mother, but plenty of other people have fed me and clothed me. Her punishments and rewards need not come from her, in terms of her actions towards me, she is replaceable.

One thing God claims to be from his initial revelation to the Israelites is unique. This idea is repeated so often and so emphatically that if we can’t accept it we really shouldn’t be able to accept his existence at all. We may still accept that other religions are skewing an interaction with the same divine, but we cannot confess of another.

A perk of God’s unique status is that He can give gifts no one else can, and punishments no one else can. He can raise people from the dead, drown them, make them see visions while they are well, cure their diseases, fight their battles, in short He can do anything that is impossible. But the ultimate gift and ultimate punishment he chooses to give would still be unique, even if a million other beings had this same immense power.

His reward is his gaze, a communion with himself, his punishment is the opposite. Were his rewards granted from his immense power, say giving us the ability to fly unsupported, they would still be unique, but these are not used. These rewards and punishments are therefore the utmost of unique, not only are they the presence of one unique being, but of the only being of His kind.

So what makes Hell hurt?

If we accept the other things God says about himself (if we believe in Him it shouldn’t be a stretch to believe him) then God is all goodness, all love and all the lasting wholesome joy we’ve ever experienced. Lacking in some of the visceral thrills of wrongdoing, but we are promised we will not remember, let alone miss, these rushes. So then Heaven is all God, all good, all love, all rest. Hell is the opposite of Heaven, the opposite of the presence of God is the absence of God, and hence the absence of all that God is. There is a fundamental difference between this and good vs. evil. Dualism implies that evil is something substantial, that it has morals, a hierarchy, and that there is a “right mode of conduct” in evil, a way to live a good life, and methods of achieving happiness. Our examination would say something similar but with an important distinction. Hell is not the region in space where evil has conquered good, it is the place without good. Evil is nothing more than this absence of good, this absence of God.

So what could possibly hurt more, than losing every good thing? Even the pleasures that we’ve manipulated to be evil, love turned into lust, bear no pleasure anymore. Pleasure is a good thing, and as such it goes with God. So what you’re left with are all the consequences of reckless action, without any rush while it’s happening. The hangover without the drunkenness, the comedown without the high, and the divorce without the forbidden sex.