"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." ~Flannery O'Connor

Sunday, February 03, 2013

The Super Bowl: a pre-game Thomistic meditation

Objection 1. God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl. For sporting events are "of the world," and God calls us out of the world to share even now in his divine life.

Objection 2. If God did care who wins the Super Bowl, he would be sucked into the world's rabid competitiveness and greed, which are beneath him.

*Sed contra*: God is perfectly rational, and any agent even minimally rational would care who wins the Super Bowl, because so much ego and money are at stake; and where that much is at stake, so is the good of souls.

*Respondeo*: God does not care who wins the Super Bowl *per se*, but only *per accidens*, insofar as one team's winning the game would help more souls to adhere to him than the other team's winning would.

That suffices in reply to Objection 1 and the contrary.

Reply Objection 2. God saved humanity from itself by letting people torture and execute him as a public threat, before rising from the dead. His involvement in the Super Bowl would serve the same end by less gruesome means.

Cross-posted at First Thoughts.
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