"But God by nature must love Himself supremely, above all else."
Fr. Emmet Carter
This is part two of a look at an article written about the "restorative and medicinal" properties of punishment, as espoused by Fr. Emmett Carter (https://catholicexchange.com/gods-punishment-is-just-restorative-and-medicinal/).
Ideas of this sort in Christianity go back to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas - two saints who saw the suffering of Christ as sure fire evidence that God needed humans to suffer to balance the cosmic scales of his love for us. Sure, he could've come up with a better game, or made better humans, but its apparently the suffering he really enjoys seeing.
Carter's essay raises countless questions, especially about the true nature of God's blood lust, but lets stick to just four simpler ones.
The first question deals with the idea of "free will." According to Christians, God designed us with the ability to freely choose to obey or offend him. Yet this is actually not as black and white as Christians pretend. Why? Because of three things. The first is that, even though we "may" be designed to have and operate with "free will" (and there's evidence to suggest, like complex PTSD and addiction, that this isn't necessarily the case), we are also pre-designed with a stain of "original sin" that predisposes us with a preference for the sweet sugar of sin more than obedience to an institutional Church - a Church that claims "infallibility" to preach morals even as it only ever practices those morals with all of the fallibility of being purely human.
We are born, in other words, pre-conditioned to see the world through the trauma of separation due to sin. In effect, we are born with a nature predisposed to start salivating for sin far more than we want to go to church and obey. To override our "sinful" nature for the former, we must be conditioned and "nurtured" for the latter. Yet pure " free will," which would require not having been designed with a greater desire to sin than not to sin, requires being born without having a biology that prefers the opposite of what our souls require for salvation. And nothing proves this more than that we are required to live our entire life ingesting supernatural sacraments, not to ever actually fully cure our bodies of our natural addiction to sin, but simply to retard that addiction from metastasizing. But as the Church's cover up of its own child abuse demonstrates too well, it doesn't work any better than a placebo - which also requires you to "believe" it's real to work, even when it's just a sugar pill.
The second problem with the idea of "free will" concerns ideas of heaven and hell, which are tools used by behaviorists and dog owners alike to shape behavior much like Pavlov conditioned a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. He could have also conditioned the dog to shake in terror at the thought of being electrocuted for failing to fetch a stick at the sound of that same bell. Once classically conditioned, the dog's nervous system ensures it is certainly less "free" to choose not to salivate or fetch a stick than prior to such conditioning. And the whole purpose of requiring church attendance every week is to cultivate such conditioning, with heaven being the reward and hell being eternal electrocution.
But how free is a person to choose to go to church every Sunday when they are convinced they, and perhaps even their children, will be set on fire for deciding to sleep in instead?
And third, however "free" we are supposed to "believe" we are, none of us had any "freedom" to decide whether we wanted to be born in the first place, nor whether we wanted to be forced to play God's little game of eternal life or eternal torments, a game which no one has the "free will" to avoid playing or opt not to play.
The second question such an essay raises is whether punishment works at all, to either reduce crime (or sin") or change behavior. According to scientific research, it not only often fails to improve behavior, or only does so to a point, but can even make a bad actor even worse. Those who accept they are damned to hell already, since hell is eternal and inescapable, are only incentivized all the more to revel in committing sins of every degree and kind, in an attempt to make sure the hell they are destined for is well worth the price of admission.
The third question this article raises, then, is about how such a "belief" can be reconciled to eternal hell, for there is no way eternal punishment can ever be defined as "restorative and medicinal," for the sake of the culprit, but only for the sake of the victim. In this case, the victim is an eternal God, who can be neither proved to exist at all or demonstrated to have taken any offense whatsoever, but for the word of a Church that placed protecting its brand above accounting for its own sins. Why God decides to take eternal offense at these "sins" of ours, even as all of our own religions and philosophies all teach us to rise above being offended by small minded people, is a bit of a mystery.
Let's just ignore the fact that the same God that takes eternal offense at our own transgressions also commands us to "turn the other cheek" at those who transgress us. Clearly, to strive to be like God is to take eternal offense, while God commands us to NOT be like him, but commanding us to turn the other cheek. And if we fail to follow this command? God takes eternal offense, and tortures us eternally for it. Naturally.
Apparently, even if God wished to take no offense at our sins, he is either powerless to put an end to both the "hell" and the eternal suffering of those who find themselves in it, or is eternally indifferent to the agony of the victims of the game of life, none of whom asked to be born, and all of whom were forced to play a game in which they could end up being tortured for all eternity if they fail to play by the right set of rules - of which there are to date more than 42,000 brands of the Christian game-rules, and growing.
And lastly, why is it that such "priests" can make such claims, especially when the bulk of evidence demonstrates how both false and problematic such claims can be (akin to treating the mentally ill as "witches" who's souls can only be saved from hell by burning their bodies to death), and not only never be held accountable for spreading such "fake news" and bold faced misinformation, but be applauded by their flocks of "believers" for doing so?
Carter's arguments for the benefits of punishment were relied on to justify the brutal torture of slaves in America, the torture of heretics and witches across Europe, and various other forms of violence used by Christian inquisitors and vigilantes in every age. All of this torture found its intellectual foundation in St. Augustine, who not only advocated for the use of torture, but came to prefer it as a superior method of converting unbelievers to his brand of "love."
In "The Shining," by Stephen King, Jack Torrance tries to murder his whole family on a mountain top out of obedience to "a much deeper voice than his own." Like Abraham obeying the command to murder his son Isaac to prove he is worthy of being saved from eternal torments himself, so Jack Torrance commands his son Danny to come and take his "medicine." By this standard, the "love" Emmett Carter is describing is the same that a psychopathic killer wishes to show his son for disobeying him.
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