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.
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