Futurama Episode

Bender becomes a god

We were meant to watch “Godfellas” an episode where Bender the Robot becomes God to two small civilisations on his body. But the remote of the DVD player wouldn’t work AAAAHHHhhhhhh!!!!

We broke up into our small groups and discussed the episode; two of my students had seen it before. The point of the episode is that when Bender tries to help the people he ends up destroying and killing them. When he doesn’t help them they lose hope and start fighting each other. One civilisation denies Benders existence and then they have a nuclear war and kill each other.

Bender than meets a being who might be God and he explains to Bender that when you answer prayer you have to do it in a way that people aren’t sure whether they did or Bender did it. That way they don’t become dependant or lose hope.

Drawings of God

Students were encouraged to draw their God or something that represents their God. While we did this each student shared something of what they believed God to be and if they didn’t believe in God what they would want him to be.

What God is like

Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son

Everyone agreed that they would like God to be loving, to be like parents who always cared and looked after them. We also thought that God should be ‘just.’ For example why do good parents have their 3 week old child die, why do good people suffer long agonising deaths while evil people get away with what they do.

The life of Christ

When we think about the qualities we would like God to have and we read the Gospels in the New Testament we have an opportunity to see whether Jesus Christ is God. He was kind; he touched the untouchables, gave sight to the blind, fed the poor, taught the simple, raised the dead, and forgave sins. Christ did not profit materially; he was not wealthy or powerful. When he died he only had a small number of disciples. Christ was not selfish; he came to serve rather than to be served.

Free will

One student who doesn’t believe in God was very fair by stating that God would not break a person’s free will. For example a person who kills another person chose to kill and it would violate their free will for God to prevent that action.

Emotional evolution

Some of the students raised something I said last week about human love and art. They expressed their belief that animals have emotions and love is an emotion that has evolved. It is great to see that the students are exploring and challenging ideas. This is what the class is about. There wouldn’t be many examples in evolution of one species sacrificing themselves for another. Christ died for his enemies and teaches that all his disciples should love their enemies. This is not natural and I would argue contrary to the principles of evolution (self preservation or that of our family).

Questions

Students asked me whether I believed in Adam and Eve. I explained that I believe in a very big God who can do anything and it was no trouble for him to make the world in 6 days. Some disagreed with this based on scientific evidence for evolution. They argued that God could have used evolution to make the world.

Suffering

Christ's shares in our suffering

Chance or purpose. I shared with the students that last weeks lesson inspired my recent article for the Western Echo, called Purpose or Chance. True Burma and China are hard to reconcile with a loving powerful God but chance is indifferent to our suffering. At least my God is willing to share in our suffering, he cares about suffering and he is doing something about it. He left his life of privilege in heaven, was born to poor parents, lived a hard life, was rejected, betrayed, beaten, tortured and unjustly killed on the cross to rise again.