Going to Heaven by Arrangement

You wouldn’t have thought it was possible for the devil to go to heaven. But I read it is possible if it is arranged. I thumbed through the English edition of a German magazine in which the opinion of a tiny Christian community in a small village was sample about their ideas of God.

The sampling priest, it was reported, was getting worried about the poor attendance to church. Those who came didn’t bother to pay their church dues. He did not suspect these people had a grouse against the church establishment for making God seem too human: possessing human caprices. The priest observed in a sermon that it was only the very young and the old ones who came to services and asked: “Where are our youth?”

He found out during the opinion sampling exercise that virtually all the youths had become disenchanted with the church. Reason? God had been humanised and the once all powerful Deity whose word was law in ancient times can now be humoured.

A young man, who felt particularly angered, asked why it was that a thief (he actually used the phrase “villainous plunderer”) before an outing, first prays to “our personified God” for grace and success and has this God most often answering his prayers. The victim of such plunder then appeals to the same God for the recovery of his stolen property. He invariably recovers them. Then the young man said: “What kind of God is this? Has he no principles?” Answering his own question, the chap said he believed in the impeccability of God, his only quarrel being that “we have made Him to look very much like us, instead of the other way round.”

The report further said that a woman in her seventies regretted that “a sin is no longer a sin. It is what we wish to make it. Thus, we tell Almighty God what we want Him to accept as sin.” A young man wondered why the sin-quality of a situation should ease off on account of time. He thought a sin remains a sin no matter the time lapse. Otherwise, he observed, “this society (meaning the German society) will soon be allowing murder and rape.”

He pointed to Jesus being referred to as the bridge: the link between the old and the new. He didn’t seem to have any quarrel with that. But to say that it is only through Him that one is likely to enter heaven, gives him the ulcer.

He asked: “What of the Hindus, the Buddhists, and the African infidels? What of the communist world? Will all these go to hell?” this practice of ascribing to God human qualities: likes, dislikes, prejudices and all shades of bias is what rile the young man. And in apparent exasperation, he concluded: “Very soon, the devil will be going to heaven, by proper arrangement.” What’s my opinion? None yet.