[ 3 ] I went on to ask what his community believes, and what he
believes, about religion. He replied, “Because we are more learned than
the average person, religion to us is nothing but an evil spell cast on the
multitudes. To average people, religion is like an atmosphere surrounding
their senses and imaginations. Pious images fly in that atmosphere like
butterflies in the air. Their faith hooks these images together into a chain
like a silkworm building a cocoon, from which it will then emerge as the
king of the butterflies. The ignorant crowd loves images that transcend
what can be sensed or thought. Why? Because they wish they themselves
could fly. With religion they make themselves wings so they can rise up
like eagles and boast to the inhabitants of earth, saying, ‘Look at me!’
We, on the other hand, believe what we can actually see and love what we
can actually touch.”
At that point he touched his whore and said, “I believe in this
because I see it and I touch it. Those other charades we toss out our front
windows, and we blow them away with our raucous laughter.”
[ 4 ] Afterward I asked him what he and his colleagues believe about
heaven and hell. With a loud, mocking laugh he replied, “What is heaven
but the ethereal firmament at its highest points? What are the angels
there but the spots that wander around the sun? What are the archangels
but comets with a long tail on which a whole gang of them lives? What is
hell but the swamps where people imagine the frogs and crocodiles to be
devils? Anything beyond these ideas of heaven and hell is garbage intro-
duced by some church leader to win glory from the ignorant population.”
Now, the satan said all these things just as he had thought them in
the world. He was unaware that he was living after death; he had forgot-
ten everything he had heard when he first entered the world of spirits. So
when he was asked about life after death he answered, “It is an imaginary
thing. Perhaps some vapor rising off a cadaver in a grave in a kind of
human shape, or else the idea of ghosts that people make up stories
about—something like that brought the idea of life after death into the
human imagination.”
At that point I could no longer keep myself from bursting into
laughter. I said, “Satan, you are beyond insane! What are you now? You
are human in form. You can talk, see, hear, and walk. Call to mind that
you once lived in another world that you have forgotten, and that you
are now living after death. Recall that the way you talked just now was
exactly the way you used to talk.”
singke
(singke)
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