It’s been about a month since I’ve last posted a blog entry, but something so outrageous has prompted me to come out of hibernation. You undoubtedly know about the Greyhound incident in Manitoba. Well, Tim McLean’s funeral is slated for tomorrow in my home city and guess what… members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) plan on protesting the funeral. These whackjobs thank their god for what happened to Tim. From their website:
I cannot understand how people can be so insensitive and just downright insane to do such a thing. The WBC is notorious for also picketing at funerals of American soldiers. Just watch a WBC member try to defend her cause… with that stupid grin:
These people need to be stopped at the border from entering our wonderful country of Canada.
One of the most memorable scenes from the 2005 movie Batman Begins showed a young Bruce Wayne training with his mentor. They had a conversation that went like this:
Mentor: Your parents death was not your fault, it was your father’s. Anger does not change the fact that your father failed to act.
Bruce: The man had a gun.
Mentor: Would that stop you?
Bruce: I’ve had training…
Mentor: Training is nothing, the will is everything… the will to act.
There are moments in life we all regret, where we know that if only we had had the will act, that then our lives may have turned out differently. One of my friends studying to become a priest told me last night that most everything that happens in life is God’s intent, but yet we still have free will. This somewhat puzzled me since how is it that God can intend for events to happen, yet we can still have influence on our own futures? I think one way of looking at it is like this: God is like a helicopter pilot that can see above a highway that winds through mountains. He can see where the cars are going, but the drivers in those cars can’t see what’s beyond the mountains obscuring the winding path.
Q: If God knows today what I will do tomorrow, what happens to my free will?
A: Nothing at all. God’s foreknowledge of something isn’t the same as pre-ordaining it. In fact, it isn’t really foreknowledge. What we call God’s foreknowledge is merely knowledge of what is future for us. From the divine point of view, it’s knowledge of the present. Remember, unlike us, God is outside of time. His existence isn’t divvied up into compartments known as past, present, and future. He simply is. As a result, God sees what is past, present, and future for us as one grand Now and understands how it all fits together.
Think of it this way. You’re traveling through the mountains along winding roads. You don’t know what’s ahead. A helicopter flies overhead. From his vantage point, the pilot sees miles beyond you. He knows where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you’re going.
God is like the helicopter pilot. He sees the whole road of life, while we see only immediately ahead of us. His knowledge of where we’re ultimately headed in no way diminishes our freedom.
Here’s that scene from Batman Begins that I’m talking about.
Here is a clip from ER that shows that when it comes right down to it and someone is knocking on death’s door they really, really want to know that they are forgiven. No amount of pius platitudes or feel good religion can compare to hearing a priest say “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
I was flipping through the channels and came across this ridiculous infomercial for the “Bender Ball”, which is supposed to give you spectacular abs. All it is is a tiny inflatable ball you put under your lower back while doing crunches! Do people really buy into their claims that this ball is the magic answer for a six pack? I mean, come on, you don’t have to be in physio school to know that this magic ball is a piece of junk! You don’t even need a ball for ab work! This is definitely going to be the topic to my next podcast’s physiology section! It irritates me that some people would be so callous as to take advantage of other people’s money. There’s no loving of one’s neighbour going on here, that’s for sure.
The man in the following video went through quite the ordeal to order the Bender Ball. If anyone out there is actually considering getting this thing, we need to talk.
For people who say that there is a lack of reverence in the way some masses are celebrated today, maybe it’s because they miss the reverence that accompanied the old Latin mass, like in this video. Here, the priest is incensing the altar, accompanied by “Lord have mercy” sung in Latin. I wish I was there…
