On the latest episode of House, Dr. House (an avowed atheist) takes on a patient who is a priest who has forsaken his faith and yet still goes through the motions of being a priest. The priest has abandoned his faith after being falsely (though the staff doubts that the accusations were false and thus think him to be a pedophile) accused by a young boy of molesting him. The priest has been transferred many times between parishes and ultimately finds himself working at a homeless shelter where he becomes very sick. I find the following conversation to be more than a little interesting for network television...PATIENT: Everything I've told you is true.
HOUSE: You lost your faith because a teenager got 'confused'.
PATIENT: ...and my church abandoned me, and my God forsook me, and I couldn't come up with a reason why God would do that.
KUTNER: He gave the church and the kid free will. Their exercise of that free will hurt you, it means you're just a victim of God's gift to mankind.
PATIENT: Oh yeah. God wants life to have meaning, life's meaningless without free will, with free will there's always suffering, so God wants suffering; I got tired of that argument before I even finished saying it. And even if I bought that, what the hell is God doing? Just the big stuff? The acts of God, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the random killings of millions of innocent people? We'd better damn pray.
HOUSE: ... ... God I wish you weren't a pedophile!
Throughout the episode, House is (or seems to be) glad to see that the priest is an atheist, but something changes. By the end of the episode, the boy who (we discover "falsely") accused the priest of molesting him as a young boy returns while he is in the hospital to seek forgiveness and say he is sorry for what he did to the priest's life by lying about him. In addition to this, he receives healing after House figures out what is causing his sickness. However, in order to discover the priest's ailment he has to eliminate the priest's vision of Jesus as a hallucination. The end result is that the sickness only makes sense if the vision of Jesus that priest saw was not a hallucination at all. This, along with the forgiveness the priest receives shakes him in his atheism. The following conversation ensues...PATIENT: What about my hallucination?
HOUSE: Scotch explains that.
PATIENT: That was just a coincidence...
HOUSE: Coincidences do happen.
PATIENT: That coincidence is what brought me to you in the first place.
HOUSE: You promised you wouldn't go there.
PATIENT: Einstein said 'coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.'
HOUSE: A woman in Florida said, 'Look, Jesus is on my cheese sandwich.'
PATIENT: You didn't even want to take my case; you didn't even think I was sick.
HOUSE: The fact that I was wrong is no proof of God.
PATIENT: I'm just trying to understand how my life could completely turn around in a single day.
HOUSE: Don't worry; your life will go back to sucking soon enough. ... Everything that happened to you can be rationally explained.
PATIENT: I know. It's just... Man, that's a lot of coincidences.
I've been thinking about this episode since I saw it. Probably one of the better House shows I've seen in awhile. For once, I finally feel like the writers weren't bashing God entirely, that they were ending on something positive and hopeful.
ReplyDeleteHey, Adam. Thanks for commenting on The Brew. How'd you hear about The Brew?
ReplyDeleteGood post on House, as well. I've only watched a couple episodes and never really got into it. But maybe there's more depth to the show than I thought (or at least this one episode).
Well, Eric, my sister, Libby, writes for The Brew every now and then. She was the one who wrote the article I commented on.
ReplyDeleteI just found this blog because I am writing a little post on facebook about the movie Midway and its relationship to Purim and I wanted to quote this episode about a LOT of coincidences coming so close together.
ReplyDeleteI'm facinated by the Atheism of House and his deeeeeeep ambivalence towards religion. When I lived in the Boston area I really got to know atheism and its many flavors. Some versions are far more honest and thoughtful than others.
Here is my facebook post for those of you not members of Facebook.
ReplyDeleteR. Hamilton Gray
MOVIE SUGGESTION FOR PURIM. In the book of Esther the Name of G_D is never mentioned, and the secular mind can attribute all of the occurances to natural events and mere coincidences. Some of us know that there are few if any coincidences i...n the world. The fingerprints of HaShem is all over the story of Esther even if he isn't named.
LIkewise in the Movie that accurately records the events of the battle MIDWAY there is nothing concrete we can point to that is the smoking gun of Divine intervention. Yet without an American victory at Midway, the Holocaust in Europe would have been profoundly worse than it was because the "win in Europe first" stratagy would have gone by the boards. After the Americans would have been defeated at Midway a second battle of the Coral Sea would have been fought and the Japanese would have taken both Port Moresby and Guadacanal profoundly weakening Austrailia and stretching out the war more than a year
R. Hamilton Gray Cont.
ReplyDeleteIf we had lost the Battle of Midway, many of the Holocaust survivors that we know would never have survived. Many of the Russian Jews we know, might never have survived because their grandparents may have perished in an extra year or two o...f bloody combat. Because of the Europe first policy the US made it a point to send lots of supplies to the USSR, the most critically Fort 2.5 ton trucks and felt lined boots. Little if any of that would have happened after a Midway defeat.
Many more Americans, Jews included, would have been killed in the prolonged war.
During an episode of House a Clergyman that had lost his faith because of a series of slanders and physical maladies had his faith restored by having his name cleared and his health restored in a short period of time. This is the dialog that ends the show.
PATIENT: What about my hallucination?
HOUSE: Scotch explains that.
PATIENT: That was just a coincidence...
HOUSE: Coincidences do happen.
PATIENT: That coincidence is what brought me to you in the first place.
HOUSE: You promised you wouldn't go there.
PATIENT: Einstein said 'coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.'
HOUSE: A woman in Florida said, 'Look, Jesus is on my cheese sandwich.'
PATIENT: You didn't even want to take my case; you didn't even think I was sick.
HOUSE: The fact that I was wrong is no proof of God.
PATIENT: I'm just trying to understand how my life could completely turn around in a single day.
HOUSE: Don't worry; your life will go back to sucking soon enough. ... Everything that happened to you can be rationally explained.
PATIENT: I know. It's just... Man, that's a *lot* of coincidences.
special thanks to Adam Parker at the bring the books blog.
http://www.bringthebooks.org/2009/02/atheism-and-gregory-house.html
Likewise, in the Battle of Midway, I cannot PROVE that the Hand of HaShem was at work, but, to quote the Patient in the House episode... "It's just... Man, that's a *lot* of coincidences."