The Ark and The Dove

Conjecture: Why Sin is Offensive

So I was praying some "Hail Maries" yesterday and my mind started to wander off unhealthily. I started to ask myself, "if there are several million people all praying to a saint's intercession simultaneously, how does that saint get around to intercede for all of us?" After all, God might be omnipotent and eternal, so it's not like He has to rush, but I'm not quite sure how that works for human souls.
I'll readily admit it's a juvenile question, but then it made me think of something else.
Now, before I introduce the conjecture, let me reiterate the classic A&D waiver that this is only a speculative and self-admittedly imaginative construct. I'm not posing this as a theological reality.

Can you tell I'm afraid of accidentally causing a heresy to be named after me some day?

Anyway, the next thought that came to mind was what if the saints, or God for that matter, follow along each person that ever lived for each person's lifespan, in succession. Rather than imagining those in Heaven trying to multi-task several billion people's lives, one could imagine Heaven "following" each person's life back-to-back in a linear sequence. That is, imagine each life is like one DVD in a library set that God watches in a particular order. (Again, I'm totally making this up at the moment.)

So how does that get us back to the offensive nature of sin?

Well, imagine God is following a particularly bad person's life. Heaven is stuck watching all the poor choices of that person for seventy-some odd years, and every time Heaven tries to intervene, the person does something else bad to frustrate Divine assistance. It would get annoying quick and be like forcing someone to live through a Quentin Tarantino movie a couple of million times over when you were really in the mood for something closer to a romantic comedy.

Then imagine Heaven later has to follow a good person who suffers because of the bad things that the previous guy did. "Dang it. It's that guy again. Man, is he annoying..."

It's easy to imagine the God, the angels, and the saints having to deal with a cacophony of prayers and requests for intercessions, but that can make our needs seem negligible and insignificant even when God would rather us bring our needs to Him. Instead, you can imagine a Heaven that has been following you,  particularly, for your whole life...and thus it wants to help you because it wants to see a satisfying conclusion to your story. Thus, all of Heaven is invested in helping you personally, but that also means it is going to be stuck watching you do dumb things.

I'm not trying to theorize "Catholic guilt," although it might look like that (and there's nothing wrong with a little shame culture). Rather. if you think about your life being like some kind of interactive reality show that happens to be the only thing on television for your whole lifespan, you might choose to be a little more courteous and less offensive to your audience.

A Tyrant Absurd

I hear a lot of talk in mainstream media about George Bush being a tyrant.

I've often said that the surest way to know that you are not living in a tyranny is how often you hear that you are living in a tyranny. Tyrants generally aren't keen on being critiqued in public...so they do things like silence opposition on the news, or send critics to slave camps, or kill people with evidence that could harm them.

I have yet to see any evidence to indicate that Bush has done anything of the sort. In fact, part of me wishes we had some good old-fashioned war propaganda. A stark poster showing a terrorist driving his car bomb towards an Iraqi woman and child would go a long way in a world where we are constantly being told that we are at fault every time an Iraqi dies.

Sure, Bush seems to have made some poor strategic decisions, but I don't know that anyone else would fare much better in the hot seat. It's easy for people who do not see the big picture to think answers are obvious and blame those above them for being blind.

Anyway, there are real tyrants in the world, and a lot of them seem hell-bent on starting imperialist wars. Maybe all the Bush-haters could devote a little more energy towards stopping the real tyrants.