Wondering About the Wages of Sin.

I find the idea of death quite scary, you know, simply because I don’t know whether anything comes after it and, if it does, what form it takes. I think part of this stems from having been a keen churchgoer as a kid, in which occupation I was constantly reminded that sinners go to hell when they die and spend eternity burning in an everlasting fire.

It seems to me a little cruel and unnecessary to pump this sort of stuff into the heads of children, in part because nobody can expect to go through a life without sinning in one form or another as defined by the various Judaic religions. I gather the Church itself recognises this fact and takes the view that there’s only ever been one man who never sinned, and that was Jesus.

(Ah, but wait a minute. According to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus killed a boy with his supernatural powers when he was himself a child. But I suppose that’s OK because Jesus was a part of God, and if Boris Johnson can break his own rules with impunity, why shouldn’t God?)

The Church does give us a get-out clause, of course. If we can be lucky enough to be given absolution placed conveniently between committing our last sin and taking our last breath, everything gets washed away and we spend the afterlife fortified by a cornucopia of milk and honey and surrounded by feathery beings singing everlasting hymns. Not a very reliable prospect, is it? Nor even a particularly endearing one.

I think I’ll take solace from the notion that God loveth a sinner that repenteth. I do quite a lot of that most days.