McDermott Gift Giving

When I hiked the AT with Kip and Jacob this summer, towards the end of the trip I had a total of 40 Slim Jims in my pack that I had not eaten because, even after two weeks of eating nothing but ramen, I was still a picky eater. So I did was any normal person would do: started a currency. I would pay other people to do things that I didn’t want to do (like clean my pot, hang up my bear bag, and get water, to name a few) with two to three Slim Jims, depending on how I was feeling at the time. This started a trend, and by the end of the trip, everything had turned into an exchange. I vividly remember another student, Kate, getting really frustrated about it, and somewhere along the way, Jacob and Kip ended up arguing about the existence of true gifts.

I think it’s much easier to function like a well-oiled machine when expectations are present. You clean my pot, you get three Slim Jims, and there’s no argument about it because everyone understands the bargain. (Note that this theory reflects an 11-person class out in the middle of nowhere, not global governments, though it very well could.)

However, regardless of the effectiveness of gifts, the question was whether gifts can actually exist, and for this one, I’m more inclined to side with Jacob. While I do believe in God and would like to believe in a God whose love is an unconditional gift to us, I have a hard time actually making sense of how that would work. God sent His only son down to Earth to save us – and in return, it seems (at least from the perspective of someone who spent a decade in Catholic school) that we are expected to use Jesus and His perfect sacrifice as a model for our own lives. This isn’t to say that my opinion(s) are final – I only just recently started to embrace my faith and consider these questions, so any counterarguments will be well received.

Additionally, I feel like God’s gift of life and eternal life is useless if He wants us to use it to aim for Heaven. If it were a true gift, He wouldn’t care where we went and by extension what we do with our lives, and yet He persuades us into desiring Heaven by introducing the alternative full of suffering: Hell. This forces our hand – either do good and go to Heaven, or do what you want and suffer eternally. This is not a real autonomous choice, as any reasonable person would not want to go to Hell, and as such His gift of life is not a real gift because He wants us to do certain things with it (as no good God would want us to go to Hell, but every good God would want us to go to Heaven).

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