It all began with an argument; and the argument had to do with God, and God was the whole argument.
The argument had to do with God right from the start.
Every topic came up in the course of the argument; and if it hadn’t been for the argument, none of these topics would have been raised.
It was a very lively argument, and its liveliness made it very illuminating for everybody involved.
Here, for example.
When I saw Michelle Shocked perform in Auburn a little over a year ago, she described herself as “to the left of Emma Goldman.”
Well, today Emma is a shrinking figure in Michelle’s rear view mirror.
Damn, I used to like her.
A question that Christian children sometimes (and Christian adults too seldom) ask is whether, if they should pray for their enemies, that means that they should pray for Satan – i.e., pray for Satan’s eventual reformation and redemption.
The traditional answer is that angels’ mode of existence, between time and eternity, is such that their choices do not take place in successive sequence but rather permeate their entire existence and so are irrevocable; hence an angel who chooses sin has no possibility of redemption, meaning that praying for Satan would be pointless.
But what exactly is this mode (“aeveternity”) intermediate between time and eternity supposed to be? Aquinas reviews several accounts of aeveternity and proposes his own. The problem is that, perhaps apart from one option that Aquinas dismisses as incoherent, none of the accounts seems incompatible with angels’ choices being revocable. In any case, if one can petition God, whose choices are supposed to be timeless – and if Catholics petition saints, whose choices are supposed to be aeviternal – then apparently trying to influence the choices of nontemporal agents is kosher, so why should Satan’s nontemporal character be a bar to hoping for him to mend his ways?
This is a purely hypothetical debate for me, since I don’t believe in Satan (nor in the coherence of a timeless agent’s interacting with temporal events, for that matter), but it’s interesting nonetheless. (I implicitly took a side in a story I wrote in high school.)
My review of Bruce Bawer’s The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind for Reason.com is now up.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t like it.
William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator was the premier abolitionist journal of the antebellum u.s. I’ve just posted three pieces from The Liberator: an anti-voting piece by Garrison, an anti-slavery piece by Lysander Spooner, and a report on an 1858 reform convention.