Tag Archives: god

Dragonball Super Asks an Interesting Theological Question: What If You Could Punch God in the Face?

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Okay to be fair, in Dragonball and all its different forms, the god that Goku punches is not the Almighty. He’s Beerus the god of destruction and he looks like a purple kitty man.

He shows up and tells the main characters that he’s going to destroy the world unless he can fight the Super Saiyan God. Goku achieves it as he does everything in the series and manages to fight him. He still loses the fight but Beerus decides to let the earth survive.

Dragonball constantly offers that any problem with enough effort, the heroes can overcome it. It’s a pretty hopeful sentiment. There’s nothing that you can’t get over.

What if Noah told God that he was going to overthrow the world and Noah was just ripped off his shirt and shouted for God to come down and face him. What if he made up a team with Jacob who was able to wrestle with an angel for 24 hours straight. What would God’s response be? Just to flood the world anyway?

Of course, Noah did not have the abilities that Goku and his friends do in Dragonball Z. They are gods unto themselves. With the flick of a finger they can destroy a planet or turn a city into a glass floor. It would be interesting to see the world through the eyes of a normal person as Goku and his friends let one of their opponents run roughshod over the planet.

Maybe that’s the issue, that once you hit a certain level of power it’s hard to see other people as anything but disposable. We see that throughout Dragonball where innocent people are constantly caught in the crossfire. Cities are destroyed or their people are killed. Finally in the Buu saga the bodycount reaches the maximum as everyone on the planet is killed. The heroes revive everyone but they are returned to the planet knowing what happens on the other side.

If this was the real world, things would change if the entire world was brought back to life. The entirety of what comes next would be shown to the every single person. Religions would change and some would just end. Would people become more or less reckless knowing that they constantly lived on the edge of a knife because of the actions of a handful of individuals?

It’s a question that we’re not going to get an answer to in the actual text. I guess I’m going to have to find it myself.

Finding My Religion

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When I was younger, I became depressed. At the time, the internet was non-existent and I didn’t know who or what to turn to. I knew that God was supposed to be by my side through all things, so I reached out to him. I prayed and thought that ‘hey, maybe if I’m a good person, God will take this pain away from me’.

It didn’t happen. Eventually, I gave up on waiting for my sadness to dissipate and started triaging it. I found ways around it and to kept it secret. Eventually, my faith just kind of leaked away. I figured if God existed They didn’t care that much about me.

It never turned into bitterness, I mostly just talked about God like an ex that I had a good co-parenting relationship with. I just went about my business and They went about theirs.

I thought of God in sometimes contradictory terms, influenced by the things I read and watched. I thought about the story of Job and wondered how God could do that to one of his believers. I thought about Inman in Cold Mountain wondering what kind of mind had to exist to create something like pain and that God must be tired of being called down on both sides of a conflict. The song A Battle Hymn For Children by the Faint “If it’s true that God roots for the U.S.A/Is every bomb we drop in God’s name?”

I felt a loss though. Something was inside of me and it wasn’t there anymore. In the words of Leoben from Battlestar Galactica, “What is the most basic article of faith? This is not all that we are.”

That was gone. It was there and it wasn’t.

I was okay with that though. I thought about doing the right thing and helping people. That became my guiding star. And that’s when I found out about the concept of humanism.

That one made perfect sense to me. For those that don’t know, humanists, at least in my understanding, believe that every person has fundamental human rights and deserves to be free and happy. You should do good for everyone without the expectation of going to heaven.

When I read that, it felt right. It felt good. It had always felt off to do something because I was promised the eternal reward of heaven. If that’s what drives you on, so be it. But’s not for me. I want to exist. I want to no longer exist. Simple as that. Hopefully, I’ll do some good in the meantime.

However, I have been looking for community. I’ve missed the feeling of belonging to something. I’ve done that in the past, as part of a community service fraternity and a feminist group. To that end, I’ve been thinking about going to the church of the Universal Unitarians.

When I get a chance, I’m going to go to a service. I’ll let you know how it goes. R.E.M play me out.