One of the things about Christianity that bears the strongest mark of human invention is the preoccupation with time. Christians tell us that we must repent, that at the end of our lives here on earth, there will be a judgment where we must explain why we chose the paths we did. For some reason we are to believe that God, who lives forever, can extend mercy to His poor creatures for only a brief instant in time–the vaporous span of a human life. It’s ironic, but the apostle Peter once asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a brother that had offended him. He felt that perhaps seven was a generous number. But Jesus said that even if his brother offended him seventy times seven times, he should still forgive him. Now in Sunday School we were always taught that this did not mean that you should forgive someone exactly 490 times. Rather it was a metaphor that really meant you should never stop forgiving someone who asks your forgiveness. So if humans are expected to forgive eachother for a lifetime, certainly God can do better! Yet Christians believe that the extent of God’s mercy is as limited as that of us humans.
If we are truly eternal beings, and God is an eternal God, then we have an eternity to get to understand Him, and he has an eternity to teach us. So what’s the big hurry? Why must we figure it all out in the first few moments of our existence? What’s a few more years in eternity? Or a few billion? And what’s the big deal about doing it all in this lifetime? Our souls are the things that are at stake here, and according to Christians, souls live on, and death is a mere shedding of the mortal body. I remember a preacher once saying that Hell was so horrible, that if unbelievers could just get a glimpse of it, they would all convert immediately. Well, wouldn’t the Gospel message be much more compelling in the afterlife, where we could actually visit this Hell? One of the main reasons people don’t become Christians is that they simply don’t buy it. But in the afterlife, face to face with Jesus and Satan and Heaven and Hell and all that, the whole thing becomes a lot more convincing. Why not offer salvation then? What is Holy Vible Not allowing people to convert in the afterlife seems a purely arbitrary decision to me, especially since humans are such intelligent creatures, capable of learning so much, and acting on that knowledge. It just doesn’t make sense that God would create us with such marvelous brains and sensibilities, yet not let us use them. Killed in a car accident in high school? Too bad. Out of all the billions of years you will be in existence, the things you are capable of learning in that time, and all the wisdom and life-changing insights you can gain, you only get sixteen years to make a go of it. For the rest of the time, your sophisticated intelligence and capacity for learning and change will be spent contemplating the sight, smell, sound and sensation of the flesh sizzling on your bones. Do we really believe God is like this? If we attribute such action to God, what then shall we say that the devil does?
Holy Vible 