About Today's Readings

I'll just reproduce a bit of the First Reading here.

The sun was just rising over the earth as Lot arrived in Zoar; at the same time the LORD rained down sulphurous fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah from the LORD out of heaven. He overthrew those cities and the whole Plain, together with the inhabitants of the cities and the produce of the soil. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she was turned into a pillar of salt.

Early the next morning Abraham went to the place where he had stood in the LORD’s presence. As he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and the whole region of the Plain, he saw dense smoke over the land rising like fumes from a furnace.

Genesis 19:23-28

The sad thing is that God could visit a Divine Chastisement upon a city, a country, or the whole world these days, and nobody would even acknowledge it for what it was. That's how hard-hearted we are. It would just be a "tragedy" or a "calamity." Nobody would think of it as punishment for two reasons:

1. God would never do such a thing (ignore whatever you know from Scripture, Saints, Fathers, Doctors, and Magisterium).

2. We're way better than those folks back then. What could we have possibly done wrong that would mean being punished?

Number 2, of course, is an outgrowth of the notions of "soft universalism" that we mentioned in our review of Will Many Be Saved? Not only does nobody deserve eternal punishment, we can't even stomach the idea of temporal punishment anymore. We're too good for that, and God better recognize that fact or else He's just a big meanie.

What a childish, immature people we are.