The Jaguar and the Thunderbird

When I was a kid and friends of my parents would come over, the men would separate from the women and talk. As  a little boy, I knew that if I sat there and played with a toy and didn't listen too obviously, I'd be allowed to stay. And that is what I did.

The conversation around the barbecue often turned to cars and there would be an inevitable split. My father was a British sports car fan, he'd been to school in England and had taken apart in racing events while there. He liked to drive fast and only really slowed down in his 80s.

But the gatherings also included my mothers friends and the men her friends had married liked Ford Thunderbirds. Every year they would all dutifully trot down to the show room to see the new Thunderbird and every year one or two in the group would buy one.

And so there was a rivalry between the two groups and it was a rivalry based on deep differences. The differences had nothing to do with the cars themselves as both varieties were pretty crappy by the early 1960s. The British sports cars is that the industry was in sharp decline and the sad truth about the Ford Thunderbird is that it was a good car for the first two years and an appalling piece of gimmicky crap ever after, and that is even before the unions destroyed Detroit.

What I remember was that the arguments were so deep they didn't even happen any more. I wanted them to happen because, in my innocence, I really believed the thing very one sided. But they never did. I remember that my father and his brother would sometimes be tempted and start but one would always head the other off by saying, "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object."

The answer, of course, is that nothing at all happens because that is a pseudo problem. It's just playing with words.

The question for the day is this, "Why isn't the problem of evil a pseudo problem?" I mean that quite seriously. It has the same set up. On the one side you have a an all-knowing, all-powerful being who is good and, on the other, you have a world he has created that always has evil in it. No matter how you formulate that problem, those are just words. It has almost nothing to do with the moral challenges of living and believing.