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Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Ovarian theodicy

The world is chockfull of evils. Let’s take just one especially heinous example. You want to cook fried eggs. But as you’re cracking the shell, you inadvertently break the yoke in the process.

Now, instead of having a pretty yellow center, surrounded by a pure white circumference, the yoke contaminates the egg white. And I don’t need to tell you how appalling that is.

Yet in Calvinism, God is ultimately to blame for this sorry situation. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that there are actually professing Christians out there who brazenly teach something that blasphemous, but Calvinism logically makes God the author of the broken egg yoke. I’m not making this up!

Oh, sure, the Calvinist will play word games with “freedom.” He’ll ransack vain philosophy for hifalutin’ theories that allegedly reconcile predestination with responsibility, but at the end of the day he’s going to tell you that God decreed the breaking of the egg yoke. And God brought that to pass by his particular providence.

So there’s just no way a candid Calvinist can evade the incriminating conclusion that God is ultimately responsible for the broken egg yoke. Not if you buy into his blasphemous assumptions.

For a Calvinist, the egg yoke never had a choice. You see, Calvinism denies the egg yoke the freedom to do otherwise. To break or not to break. So Calvinism reduces the egg to the status of a mere puppet in the hands of the almighty cook.

Arminianism, by contrast, has an ovarian theodicy. Arminianism exonerates God of complicity in the evil of broken egg yoke by pinning the blame squarely on the willful egg yoke itself. The egg yoke was free, under the exact same circumstances, to break or not to break.

And that’s just one example. Don’t get me going on lawnmowers that don’t start when you pull the cord.

3 comments:

  1. That was an interesting post.

    You're not yoking, I mean joking, are you?

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  2. Is this what it means where we read "do not be unequally yoked" or "take my yoke upon you"? or was that "yolk"? ;)

    I've always wondered that if God created us with libertarian free will where one choice is righteous and the other choice is evil, then for us to be righteous would be to not be free, if I understand the Arminian system of free will. In order to exercise this kind of free will, God would have to expect us to choose evil occasionally. Otherwise libertarian free will would be a merely academic construct, a farce of false perspective like so many Hollywood special effects.

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  3. You did not take into account the little girl, who, after coming home from the day's field trip to the chicken farm, discovered there were no chicks in the eggs in the carton of eggs in the refridgerator after breaking open the dozen eggs looking for chicks.

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