Emails from Hell, Part five.

Here is another email I received from Our Man in Hell. I have not yet learned this soul’s identity, but these reports are too good for me to not pass on to you.

{Beginning of email}

            While I watched the two communists, Marx and Moses, walking away, I next saw a beast with ten horns and four heads and…no, wait, that was a hallucination that was written down in the Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. In that book, the beasts were truly frightening but they were all praising The Lamb on His Throne around the glassy sea. The writer was named John of Patmos, who may or may not have been the same John I met, as I described a couple of messages ago. John of Patmos. What was that guy smoking? He must’ve gotten some bad hash from Damascus. No, what I saw was strange, but not terrifying.

            I saw a Native American man dressed up in a Hollywood Indian costume. I approached him to ask him more about Hell.

            “I see by your outfit that you are an Indian,” I sang to the tune of Streets of Laredo.

            “You must be one smart fellah,” he said. “My name is Singing Snake Windbreaker. Well, that’s not my real name. That’s just what I tell people who ask. When I was alive on Earth, we didn’t dress up like this. We Native Americans were sort of ordinary people. What’s your name, fellah?”

            {Response omitted}

            Then I asked, “So, what are you down here for?”
            “And here I thought you must be one smart fellah,” he said. “Who were you just talking with?”

            “Marx and Moses…Wait, you’re not telling me you were a communist too?”

            “Seems so,” he said. “We were communists thousands of years before the word was invented. See, in our tribes and villages—and sometimes in our large cities: Cahokia, near the Mississippi River, was one of the largest cities in the world about your year 1100—we owned the land and the resources in common. We each built our own houses, and we owned those houses, but not the land. We owned our personal items, which were few and simple, but we did not pass them on to our children. There was no private real estate or inheritance of wealth. That made us communists, I guess. And communal land ownership continued long after we started adopting white technologies. I’m a Cherokee. Right, I know, Cherokees didn’t wear costumes like this, as I already said. But long after we were forcibly relocated by the United States Army from our Appalachian homeland to what is now Oklahoma, after we started building white-man houses, and raising white-man cattle, we still kept our communal ownership of land. We did so right up until the Dawes Treaty of 1887. By 1904 all Cherokees (except a few hiding in the hills) were enrolled on the list and our communal land was divided up into individual allotments. It was easier for white people to steal our land a little bit at a time than all at once, see. A white banker swindled me out of my land about 1922. So, you could say, we were communists right up until about 1904.

            “But that’s not the only reason I’m down here,” he said.

            “What other reason or reasons?” I asked.

            “I thought you were one smart fellah,” he said. “Well, look at me.”

            “Your face is all painted, like a Hollywood Indian…wait…your paint is all the colors of the rainbow. That’s odd. When I was alive, that was a symbol of the gay and lesbian community. You mean, you are gay?”

            “I am more properly referred to as Two Spirit,” he said. “Many Native American tribes recognized three genders.”

            “Three?”

            “Yes. Male, female, and two-spirit. The old French word for it was berdache. We two-spirits did not fit into either male or female category. We dressed like women, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of respect, but the other people let us be what we were. But your American evangelists declared—and God was obligated to obey them—that anyone who wasn’t heterosexual had to go to Hell. Didn’t make much difference to me, I was already a communist. Seems to me that a smart fellah like you could figure that out.”

            “Well,” I said, “I didn’t, but I understand your explanation. Imagine, learning things in Hell!”

            “That’s more than you can say for Heaven,” he said, scratching underneath the pink paint. Then his face brightened. “There comes my friend Andrew.”

            A man in a Biblical robe walked up.

            “Is he two-spirit too?” I asked.

            “No. He was one of the Apostles who lived in the Upper Room in Jerusalem after Jesus was crucified. No, he was as straight as they come. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Say, Andrew!”

            “Hey, Joe,” said Andrew.

            “This man here wants you to explain how you were a communist.”

            “That’s easy enough,” said Andrew to me. “All of us apostles lived together—no, we weren’t gay, if that’s what you were thinking—in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and, as recorded in Acts chapter two, we held all of our possessions in common. We were communists, I guess, though we didn’t know it. But that didn’t last long. It wasn’t long before a church hierarchy formed, and the church started attracting rich people, and pretty soon we were just like everyone else has been through all of history, except Joe and his folks and other tribal peoples. But, while it lasted, the Upper Room Commune was a brief shining moment of goodness. Time for lunch. Got some pemmican, Joe?”

            “I hate that stuff,” said Joe. “Let’s go get a nice salad.” And that’s what we did, not for the food value—we were spirits—but for the pleasure of being together.

{End of email}

Emails from Hell, Part four

The fourth email that I received from a contact in Hell.

{Start of email}

I certainly was not expecting him to address me in English, but this is Hell, so why not. He looked like what I expected: He looked like Charleton Heston dressed up as Moses. So when I saw him, I exclaimed without thinking, “Moses!”

            “Yes, what do you want?”

            “Sorry, man,” I said. “You just look a lot like Moses in the movie.”

            “Well, I am Moses, as a matter of fact.” He stopped hobbling along with his rod (the one, I assume, that he threw down in front of Yul Brynner I mean Pharaoh and which became a snake) and looked at he.

            “Wait a minute,” I said. “Moses, in Hell?”

            “I wasn’t expecting it either,” he said.

            “But…”

            “Everybody asks me. Here’s how it happened. You see, it appears that I am a communist.”

            “A what?”

            “That’s what I said,” answered Moses. “There was no such thing when I was on the Earth. But it seems that millennia after I died a certain philosophical and political movement called communism started, led largely by a man named Karl Marx.”

            At that moment who should come along but Karl Marx. His face is unmistakable.

            “Greetings, Comrade Moses!” said Marx. “Good to see you! I’m happy that you are down here in Hell with me. Not Heaven. Heaven! An exclusive club! I wouldn’t want to join any club that would have me as a member.”

            “Wrong Marx,” I said.

            “I don’t want to talk to you,” Moses said to Marx.

            “What makes you a communist?” I asked Moses.

            Marx decided to answer. “A little review,” he said. “Capitalism is all about the unlimited and intergenerational accumulation of land and wealth. It leads inevitably to a wealthy upper class, generation after generation, who have outlandish political power, as well as economic power. This was the whole idea behind aristocracy, monarchy, and capitalism. I thought that everyone pretty much believed in this system until I came along. But boy, was I wrong!

            “Moses, here,” continued Marx, “commanded the people of Israel to observe a celebration every fiftieth year, which he called the Jubilee. For forty-nine years, people could buy and sell, and make capitalistic profit from, land. But—now get this—every fiftieth year the land would revert to the original owner’s family! It’s right there, in the Law of God, in Leviticus 25! A built-in pressure-escape valve to prevent excessive capitalism! And get this: every Jubilee year, the slaves would be freed! Can you imagine what a catastrophe this law would be for the modern world economy? It would force everybody to care about each other and… Say, Moses, how did it work out, anyway?”

            Moses cleared his throat and said weakly, “Actually, we never put it into practice. Nobody ever has. Just like the Sabbath of the Fields.”

            “Ah,” I said. “I know what that is. It is another law…now, let’s see, where was it…”

            “Leviticus 25, the same place as the Jubilee law,” said Marx.

            “Right,” I said. “All farmland could be cultivated for six years but had to lie fallow the seventh. This would give the land a chance to recover from ecological damage.”

            “It was mainly intended to put the brakes on unlimited wealth,” said Moses.

            “And so that means that Moses was a communist, which the Conservatives in Heaven equate with all kinds of idiocy and evil. Say, Moses, how about grabbing some lunch?” Marx smiled.

            “But I don’t like you, you godless Communist, I mean…”

            “Get used to it, my friend. We are going to be down here together for a long time.” Marx put his arm around Moses’ robed shoulder and they walked away.

{End of email}

Emails from Hell, Part three

Here is the third email that I received from a soul recently arrived in Hell. The first two are in the posts immediately below. When we last left off, the Apostle John, in Hell, had taken our informant to a telescope where he could look into Heaven.

{Beginning of email}

            I don’t know what I was expecting. Souls walking on clouds of blue cotton candy, playing harps? Actually, there were one or two of them doing this. But most of them drove around in Jeeps. The cloudscape looked like a barren landscape, which looked a little bit like the Middle East or Afghanistan. I was soon to discover that there was a very good reason for this.

            At first I could not quite understand what I was seeing. It was, indeed, a whole bunch of Jeeps, and it had the souls of men in it. They wore combat fatigues and carried AK47s. They drove around in random circles—there is no place to actually go in Heaven—but they were obviously waiting for someone. And they were whooping in ecstasy. They took sharp turns that threw up clods of cloud.

            Then I saw another bunch of Jeeps approaching them. It also had men in it with AK47s, but these men had head scarves and long beards.           

            A man from the first group held up what appeared to be a Bible, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Sweet Jesus! Someone from the second group of men held up what appeared to be a Koran, waved it in the air, and screamed out, Praise Allah!

            Then both groups dropped their books, got out their guns, and started shooting at each other. This went on for a long time. There was a sun in the sky—not the source of light, but a sort of timekeeper—and one of the Bible guys held out his arm toward it and commanded it to stop so that, just as in the days of Joshua, they could have a longer day for slaughtering their enemies.

            Finally they had fired enough rounds that several of the men were literally pulverized into little puddles of flesh. Others ran from their group toward the other and started fighting at close range, until one of the jihadists blew them all up. What was left was a big, quivering, bloody pile of protoplasm. The jeeps were smoking hulks.

            As I was watching, the Bible slipped off the edge of the cloud and fell down into Hell, landing close enough to me that I could run and grab it. The other group apparently lost a Koran in the same way. It was covered with blood and gore (no mud; it was from Heaven) but, as I started turning the pages, I saw no evidence that it had ever been read.

            John urged me to go back and look in the telescope again. The giant amoeba that had once been two armies of men started separating into two globs and moving apart from one another. Slowly, they formed back into the men who had slaughtered one another. But this time the two groups ignored one another. The men who did not notice the loss of their Bible sat on lawn chairs and joked with one another—of course, I could not hear what they said—as women with coiffures and lipstick brought them bottles of cold beer.

            Meanwhile, the men who did not notice the loss of their Koran sat on rugs as women in robes—twenty-four virgins for each man—ran to them and started feeding them dates. It didn’t take long before each group was swirling in an orgy of food and sex, followed by naps.

            “You mean,” I said to John, “they can live off of beer and dates forever?”

            “They’re spirits, remember,” he said. “No actual nutrition is necessary.”

            Then both groups of men started doing the whole thing over again. I asked John what was going to happen next.

            “They do the same thing over and over again, forever,” said John. “This is heaven to them: to slaughter heretics and infidels. Sometimes they use bayonets and scimitars, just for a little variety.”

            Then I saw a woman, eternally old, sitting off to the side, weeping. I could not tell from her clothing which side she was on. I asked John who she was.

            “She is a mother who has lost her son,” John said. “Oh, her son is right there, she can see him, but every day she has to watch him being killed and then, when he comes back to life, he doesn’t ever think of her, because he is totally engaged in the orgy.”

            I asked John if this was the only thing that ever happened in Heaven. What was his answer? I will save that for a later communication.

{End of email}

Emails from Hell, part two

Here is the second email that I received from a soul recently arrived in Hell. The first is in the immediately previous posting.

{Beginning of email}

            In Hell, you never have to eat, since you do not have a physical body. This would also go a long ways in explaining why there is no torture in Hell: with no physical body, you have no pain receptors. I suppose that is the price to pay for not having torture: without a physical body, you can never again enjoy gustatory pleasures, like eggnog, or Guinness stout, or steak, or mushrooms, or fresh baked bread, or…don’t get me started. It also means you cannot have any sexual pleasures. I’ll try not to think about this.

            All I have left is my mind, so I have to find some way to stimulate that, I guess. Back when I was alive I was a scientist and I spent countless hours investigating the natural world and learning the mysteries of the universe. I suspect that this might be one of the reasons I ended up here. Those evangelists always told me that believing in evolution would get me sent here. I guess they were right.

            I saw another man sitting by himself, so I decided to talk with him. He looked like he was as eager for mental stimulation as I was.

            “Howdy,” I said.

            He just looked at me balefully.

            I tried again. “What’s yer name, partner?”

            “They call me John,” he mumbled.

            “That’s a new one,” I said. “Nobody else with that name, I’ll bet. John who?”

            “Just John,” he said. “We didn’t have last names back when I was on Earth. There were plenty of Johns then, too.”

            “So, which John were you?”

            “John the Apostle.”

            “You mean, the Apostle of Jesus Christ?”

            “Yes, the same.”

            “What the hell, I mean, how did you end up here?”

            “You ever read any of my stuff?” John asked me.

            “Yes, but I don’t exactly have it memorized. But, it was pretty important, wasn’t it?”

            “Yes. I wrote one of the gospels. I wrote that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son.”

            “You wrote that! Dang! I had fifty-three scientific papers and I edited a collection of symposium talks on the aflambulation of billiards, but I can’t hold a candle to you! You must have a citation index of about 300 trillion. I averaged about 2.58 on my works. So, God is love.”

            “Yes, I…”

            “Yeah, you wrote that too. But look around us. Doesn’t look much like God is love, you know, when you see what’s on the other side of the gulf, so to speak. And I still want to know how you ended up here.”

            “I also wrote, For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved.”

            He paused, as if this was supposed to answer my question.

            “You don’t get it? You see, I said that God’s purpose—and remember, I thought that God was all-powerful—was to save the world. That was sort of the point, you see.”

            “But, John—not like I’m an expert or anything—but don’t you have to be good in order to be saved?”

            “I didn’t add that clause, did I? Think back over what I wrote. It’s all about God, His Son, and the saving the world. The world, as I understood it, didn’t have to do anything to earn that salvation. But, in another passage, I did say something about what was necessary. I wrote, Love one another, for love is of God; He who loves is born of God and knows God; He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

            “Yeah, that’s nice, John.”

            “Oh, it’s more than nice,” said John, finally becoming animated. “What it means is that everyone who loves is saved just for being someone who loves. Love entails many different things, many behavioral components. There is no way to remember all the rules, so you just remember the basic principle: love.”

            “Okay, I am no closer to understanding what you are doing down here.”

            Right then a slight-looking young man came over and sat down beside us.”

            “Hi, John,” said the young man.

            “Hi, Mickey,” said John. Then he explained to me, “Mickey died of AIDS back in 1989. He was gay. He couldn’t help it. He spent his whole life showing love to people. Not by being gay, but just by being a really nice guy. Now, according to my rule, he should have been admitted into Heaven. But the forces that be were not about to allow the spirits of dead gay men or lesbians enter Heaven! So, of course, Mickey didn’t make it. Now, do you understand? That means I didn’t make it either, since I was the one who published the rule that would have allowed people like Mickey to get in. So that means that I had to go to Hell, too.”

            “But, you were an Apostle!” I nearly screamed. “Surely Jesus…”

            “Jesus doesn’t have much of a say in it,” muttered John. “No, it’s the Republican Party who gets to decide who goes to Heaven and who does not. Them, and the Jihadists. Now, if Jesus had anything to say about it…” He sighed. “But that’s expecting too much.”

            “And so we miss out on the pleasures of Heaven?” I asked.

            John gave me a wry smile. “I want to show you something.”

            He stood up and led me up a stairway. Mickey followed last. Up at the top was a telescope. Not one of those big suckers like on Palomar, but, well, it looked like the one Galileo used.

            John said, “With this telescope, we can see into Heaven. Please, take a look.”

            I saw Heaven opened, just like John wrote in the Book of Revelation. But that is the next email.

{End of email}

Emails from Hell, Part One

As C. S. Lewis said at the beginning of The Screwtape Letters, I have no intention of telling how these communications fell into my hands.

A person who recently arrived in Hell has had the unique opportunity to send back a series of emails describing what he or she (identity unknown) saw. This information is so valuable that I cannot withhold it from you.

{Beginning of email}

            When I woke up from my coma, I found myself in a place with lots of people rushing around, jostling each other, yelling at each other, jumping ahead of each other. I watched for a while, and finally realized that I saw the same people going over the same path over and over mindlessly. Only after some reflection did I realize that I was in Hell.

            I approached someone who was clearly one of the demons in charge.

            “Is this Hell?” I asked.

            “You must be new here,” he answered. “What the blazes do you think this is?”

            “Well,” I said, “I was expecting Hell to be a place where every second of every minute of every hour of every day is exquisite, unimaginable pain and torture in hot flames forever and ever.”

            “Oh, you been listening to those TV and radio evangelists?”

            “Why, yes. Aren’t they supposed to be the ones who know what hell is like?”

            The demon had himself been very busy, but seemed relieved to have a chance to put his work down and talk with me. “No. They just made all that stuff up. It’s easy enough for them to say stuff like that, to scare the shit out of you humans so that you will give them money. It’s a natural selection process, see.”

            “You mean, like Darwin?”

            “Yeah, you got it. Any evangelist who made Hell seem more painful, or hotter, would get more money from frightened parishioners than the other evangelists whose visions of Hell were just a little bit less extreme. It was a race to the top, my friend. But those stories are just a pack of lies.”

            “Lies? So, I guess those evangelists, like the late Jerry Falwell, are here in hell?”

            “I’m not permitted to discuss individual cases. But you can just look around you and see that nobody is suffering anything they are not bringing on themselves. Oh, by the way, some of the early Christian theologians were even worse. St. Jerome said that in Heaven there was a special balcony where the saved ones could stand and look down into Hell forever and watch the suffering of the damned. That was his idea of Heavenly bliss! See, it’s like this. They say God is going to inflict infinite torture on souls forever. But then it’s us demons who have to actually put it into action, see. And I speak for all the other demons here, we just can’t bring ourselves to inflict such torture. A little, now and then, for fun. But I get tired of seeing people suffer.”

            “Even demons?”

            “Look, pal, I’m a demon, but I’m not insane. St. Jerome, see, he was fucking insane. But not me. Enjoying infinite torture forever is incompatible with mental function.”

            “I guess that makes sense,” I said. “But now I have to ask, what am I doing here?”

            The demon pulled out a portable scanner and aimed it at me. He looked at a computer screen. “Well, says here, you were a Democrat.”

            “What’s that got to do with…”

            “To go to heaven, you have to be a Republican. Or else a jihadist. They get to go also.”

            “But I thought Hell was for souls who had not repented of their sins.”

            “See, it’s like this,” he sighed as he explained it to me. “If you are a Republican, you can download a special app in your brain that will automatically keep you repenting of your sins. You don’t have to think about it. Sort of like those automatic virus scanners on your computer. They keep zapping viruses you don’t know you have. Well, the Republican app sends in a forgiveness request every 10 picoseconds, and God is obligated to forgive any Republican sin upon request. This way, the Republicans can keep on sinning—having wild sex, screwing the poor, fucking up the Earth—and they are almost instantly forgiven.”

            “And Democrats can’t do this?”

            “Sorry, pal. Republicans have the patent on it. It is an app called CheapGrace. It’s named after a concept invented by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer was executed for resisting the Nazis. He said that simply reciting some words is not really repentance. Grace and forgiveness have to be costly enough to make you actually change the way you live.”

            “Is Bonhoeffer here?”

            “Again, I can’t discuss individual cases, but he wasn’t conservative enough, you know, to meet the rules. Now, as for that app, It’s a sweet deal. You can hate, rape, lie, pillage, and steal all you want to, and your record is clean. Now, Democrats, like you, I feel kind of sorry for you. Because the very fact of being a Democrat means that you have to come here to Hell. You can repent, but the very next picosecond you are a Democrat again and as guilty as Hell. So, get used to it, pal. You’re going to be here a long, long time.”

            And so I decided to spend my time (since I had been a scientist back on Earth) exploring Hell. I will send back dispatches whenever I get a chance.

{End of email}

Watch this blog for future reports from Our Man in Hell.

Welcome to a New Year of...Craziness?

Welcome to the new year. It is a major election year in the United States, and you can expect it to be totally crazy, irrational, and disgusting.

As I have previously written, the human brain did not evolve to help us understand ourselves, or the world, or the cosmos, but to dominate one another and, sometimes, to cooperate with one another. Conquests and alliances and mates. That's what human intelligence evolved for.

Recently, the alliances part has shrunk. This year, intelligence will be used primarily in the service of antagonism. One example of this is that the Republican Party has become the party of hatred toward anyone who disagrees with it. The right wing of the Republican Party even seems to hate the moderate Republicans. I can't quite figure out what Donald Trump's message is, but it sounds like, "I hate everyone who disagrees with me in any way." Can you imagine a progressive person like myself yearning for the old days when "Republican" meant someone like Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush, or George H. W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan? At least they didn't talk like they hated everyone.

This being a religion blog, I would like to tie this in with conservative Christianity. If Donald Trump ends up being the Republican nominee, you can bet your bottom euro that conservative Christians will support him enthusiastically as the person whom God has chosen to lead us forward in these immoral modern times. And the reason they can do this is that they seem to be completely convinced that, for Republicans, there is no such thing as hypocrisy, and Republicans need never be ashamed of anything they do. They are, after all, God's chosen people.

A couple of examples. The most visible one is, of course, Trump himself. He cheated on wife number one with the woman who became wife number two, and on wife number two with the woman who became wife number three, and fathered a child out of wedlock. Obviously God's choice to make America a moral nation again.

A second, recently-visible example is the Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She believes that God gave her the right to make up the law for herself. But even more than this, she is a hypocrite. A thorough, complete hypocrite. She puts herself up as an example of morality, yet she has had four marriages. She gave birth to twins fathered by the man who was to become husband three five months (count on your fingers, folks) after divorcing husband one; they were adopted by husband two. She is on number four, and God knows how many more husbands He has planned out for her. She claims to have repented, but she still puts herself up as an example of morality. (Should we forget all about her past, because she has repented? Republicans would not allow any Democrat to be forgiven. As a matter of fact, in the case of President Obama, they invent sins to accuse him of.)

Republicans consider themselves exempted from whatever moral standards they think God expects the rest of us to follow. This means that they can and perhaps will do anything, anything at all. Combine this with the fact that they think God wants them to possess as many semiautomatic weapons and other firearms as possible, and you get a scenario of total chaos. I hope I am wrong about this, but it is best to prepare oneself mentally and not be taken totally by surprise should the worst possibility come to pass.