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“Well, there’s your problem. You didn’t join the one true religion.” “What? I’m telling you, I was a Christian. I read the Bible every day. I donated money to the TV evangelists every Sunday. And I was saved.” “No. Sorry. The true religion is Zoroastrianism, I’m afraid. Bit of bad luck there. Christianity certainly borrowed a great deal from the one true religion, but not enough, unfortunately. Not nearly enough.”
Do you have any idea how long eternity is? My heavens, what an imagination you humans have. What kind of God would leave you burning forever? Most of you wouldn’t do that to a neighbor’s dog, even if it barked incessantly at two a.m. every morning. After about ten minutes watching a dog suffer in the kind of Hell you imagined God was going send his wicked children to, you would be pleading for the damned beast’s mercy. It’s crazy. Create a few beings; those that don’t obey you roast forever? Give me a break.” The demon shook his great head in wonder.
Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives?
Who knows, maybe in a hundred billion years I’ll find my book. I’ll stick it in the slot and boom, I’ll find out that, no, Zoroastrianism isn’t the truth either, but it was really the Baptists who were right all along and this is just part of God’s preliminary salvo into an eternity of horrors. So it’s bam, splash, and I find myself in a sea of boiling sulfur. Or maybe this is some strange philosopher’s Hell where we have to experience every possible Hell that can or has ever been expressed.”
Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.
Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
Now the search is all that matters. I know there will come a time when I find my book, but it is far in the future. And I know without doubt that it will not be today. Yet a strange hope remains.
