Before the latest episode of The Simpsons aired on Sunday, March 28 (Palm Sunday and the day before Passover), the show's producer, Al Jean, promised, "people of all three religions will be equally offended."
He was right. The episode, in which the Simpsons visit Jerusalem, offended me as a Jew and as a believer in Jesus (I am both), and, if I were a Muslim, I'm sure I would have been offended as well.
Not that the show wasn't very funny at times. The airplane carrying the Simpsons to Israel smashes a wine glass as it touches down on the runway. They stay at the Wailing Waldorf. Their Israeli tour guide escorts them in a van labeled "Chosen People Movers." Homer's Christian neighbor, Ned Flanders, goes to a movie, The Reformers (a takeoff on The Transformers), in which two Jewish transformers are about to do battle when one says, "We can't transform on the Sabbath. Let us power down and contemplate the Torah." And they do.
I won't bother to detail the more offensive jokes and comments. Suffice it to say that the writers didn't run jokes by clergy from any of the Abrahamic faiths.1
I'm far more concerned about the misimpressions the show gives about Jewish and Christian belief. When Krusty the Klown, who is Jewish, tells Lisa Simpson that he doesn't want to go to hell, she tells him, "Jews don't believe in hell." While that may be true of many modern-day Jews, it hardly speaks of a significant minority. Author Simcha Paull Raphael notes that "rabbinic literature does assert that certain classes of sinners are eternally condemned to Gehenna [hell]"2
Even more disturbing to me were the words of Ned Flanders, who invites the Simpsons on the trip to Israel in the hope of redeeming Homer. When Ned finally loses patience with Homer in the Holy Land, he says, "I believe every soul has the possibility of salvation. At least, I thought so till now. Homer Simpson, you are not worth saving!"
Those words hurt Homer, but Ned never apologizes. That bothered me even more.
The good news of the Bible is that although we all have sinned (and, in that sense, none of us are worth saving), God demonstrated his love for us by sending Y'shua (Jesus) to die for our sins. So we have much worth to God.
A common misconception is that we can somehow make ourselves good enough to be accepted by God. That is as impossible for the "Ned Flanders" of this world as it is for the "Homer Simpsons."
This is a holy week on both the Jewish and Christian calendars. And that makes it a good time to reflect on the Lamb of God who, if we will receive him, makes us acceptable to God. Jesus (Y'shua), claimed to be the once-and-for all Passover sacrifice who not only died but rose from the dead! Happy Pesach! And Happy Resurrection too!
1 comments:
If God was all-powerful and all-loving, with free will yet perfectly good, God would create life with similar properties: with free will and perfectly good. Meaning that there would be no human-created evil, and no need for evil, suffering or death in the world in any way. However, there is evil and death in very great quantities, therefore it holds that if the situation was created by a god, rather than natural forces, then such a god is not omnipotent and benevolent. Given that such a god exists, it must be malevolent: An evil god, who created life for the sole purpose of watching life suffer.
Such a god would make life, in its very essence, impossible to exist without death, violence, suffering and struggle. Advanced life, especially, would be inherently prone to nastiness, wars, immorality, killing and causing of suffering. As this is how it is in the world, it holds that the existence of such levels of suffering, if it is the result of intelligent design, is thoroughly evil, and to call god "good" is a corruption of the truth.
As it happens, the world is as we would expect it to be if the designer of life was evil. Ancient religious minds also realized this. The Manicheans explained that this world was the creation of an evil God, and that we had to somehow escape from it. Some people criticize this, asking, if the world was designed by an evil God, why is there some happiness and goodness in the world? Why isn't the world purely evil, with only suffering?
class="IQL"“A Manichean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge [who] created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed. class="IQR"” "History of Western Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, p571
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