“So, how do we do this?”, Lady Hypatia asked Lady Kay, who was appointed to brief the Judges. “Do we need to read up on the Qur’an and their entire vernacular in order to present them with something compatible enough with their ideology, so that they don’t instantly jump straight into hell out of fear of offending Sanat Kumar, oh, pardon my language, Allah?”, she grinned.

“No, you do the same as you always did”, Lady Karuna smiled. “Show them the truth. Be honest. Don’t compromise. Separate the normal hurting souls that have been suffering there in ignorance and darkness, from those who are the agents of ignorance and darkness and who caused others to suffer. That’s all there is to it”.

“But wouldn’t their upside-down religion cause them to be resistant to truth?”, Buddha was unconvinced.

“Some might be. But those are more likely to be the villains than the victims, so I wouldn’t try too hard to convince them of anything. Show them the truth, and if they hate it, drop them into the villain box for cooling”, Kay nodded seriously. “The point of allowing that world to exist is to allow souls to choose. Choice means we don’t always necessarily agree with what they chose for themselves, and there are always consequences. And while it may seem that a totalitarian ideology that forces people to accept it or face punishment precludes choice, let’s just have in mind what happened with Christianity”.

“Everybody interpreted it in whichever way suited them the most and just did whatever they would have done anyway”, nodded Buddha. “Also, some variants of Christianity we’ve seen people adopt don’t seem that much different from Islam. God the strict judge, strict Law and dogma, any deviance punishable by excommunication on Earth and hell in the afterlife, and so on. If people can distort a good religion into Islam, I guess they can also distort Islam into a good religion, by selective interpretation and omission”, he looked at Kay. “Am I getting close?”

“Bullseye”, she smiled and nodded. “Eventually, it will come down to the actual soul we’re dealing with. Have in mind that most people just live their lives and mind their own business, nodding along whichever religious system is in power, and since so many have been circulating, they have their own internal idea of what religion is supposed to be saying and teaching, and their eyes will basically glaze over as they chant whatever new stuff they are required to chant, and they will internally believe that God or Gods require them to be good people, not hurt others, not steal, murder, eat wrong kinds or food and fornicate. From their practical position, Christianity and Islam will look the same; more imagery in Christianity, more fasting in Islam, but essentially the same thing; one God, giving commandments, different book, same thing. Most Christians would never know enough to tell you that Christianity is a whole new concept compared to this type of a religion, that it’s a spiritual breakthrough from the darkness of Satan. Most Christian priests don’t get it. So, the idea that, for most people, Islam will be much worse than Christianity or Judaism, is naive. They will feel guilty if they cheated on their wife, or ate a piece of pork, or drank alcohol, and will fear that Allah or whatever they think God is called will punish them for it. They are just people; confused, ignorant, hurt, misguided. However, you’ll eventually get to meet ‘good Muslims’, the ones who actually know the scripture and believe all that stuff. Here, you know what to do. Be yourselves, and if they start with the Athena thing, ‘I’m a loyal slave to my Master; repent, you depraved sinners who dare not to submit to him’, either destroy them outright or send them for a cooldown”, she shrugged.

“I am relieved, as this is straightforward enough”, nodded Lord Azrael. “Show them the Light of God, tell the truth, and if they hate and reject it for whatever reason, it’s their choice and we act accordingly”.

“Have in mind that I lived in a society that might as well have been Islamic”, Zina noted. “My character was such that I would have espoused whatever customs and religious beliefs enough to be able to recite them back, but the only thing I actually cared about was my family. Religious preachers usually lament how people don’t actually follow their religion properly. In this case, it’s a very good thing”, she smiled.

“Let’s not get too optimistic too soon”, warned Azrael. “If that place taught us anything, it’s that we can’t really predict what the souls will actually do once they are down there. You started as a demon and ended up as a Goddess. Some started as angels and turned into super-demons worse than Satan. Some started as sheep, and one ended up being a Buddha and a God, while others kept living in a dream-like state close to non-being. Let’s just keep our minds open and see what actually happens”, the Angel of Death concluded.

…

“I bear witness that there’s no God but Allah, and that Mohammad is his prophet! I am a martyr of Jihad, having killed many infidels before they struck me down. Are you one of the Houris Allah promised will serve me?”

…

“All in all, that went as well as expected”, Zina smiled a tired smile to her husband. “But something still bothers me. Lady Kay said something about freedom of choice, how it isn’t compatible with a totalitarian system that punishes you for wrong choices. Doesn’t this also apply to us? We say we are allowing souls to choose, and if they choose wrong, we punish them for it. How does that make sense?”

“Well, it’s not us who actually started the story about choice, but Sanat Kumar. The reasoning of the oldest Gods, since I wasn’t around at that time, was that the souls aren’t really doing much; most either just stand there for eons, or entertain themselves by mischief. What they wanted to do is stir them up to decide what they wanted to be, to introduce a catalyst to the process of spiritual evolution. They knew the choice is always between Eternity and Nothingness, and no choice other than Eternity is truly stable or permanent. The story about there being a true choice that would be an alternative to God is Sanat Kumar’s talk, and it’s of course nonsense. The actual choice, that persists in Eternity, is to choose a way in which you want to worship God, and, as such, a way in which you want to be God, because those two amount to the same. What they wanted to eliminate is a state of non-choice, where souls just hang around and exist, somewhere on the spectrum between Nothingness and God, but not really moving towards either. They, essentially, made it very hard to continue doing nothing and refusing to choose, but all choices other than God are of course eventually fatal, as only God persists in Eternity, and everything else ends in Time”, Buddha concluded.

“So, that’s the true reason why we are being reactive rather than proactive with this whole Earth thing, plugging the holes Satan keeps making, and treating the souls he keeps traumatising, rather than, say, flick a finger and kill him, and end the whole thing. The whole thing is based on the Will of God, which is for souls to seek their true selves, that can be found only by attaining the worship of God out of which they were born”, his wife nodded wisely.

“When I see how the Muslims have distorted the very concept of worship, I grow both angry and frustrated. Angry because it’s revolting, and frustrated because I can’t seem to explain to them why it’s different. They think to worship is to grovel in dust before their Master, and that’s absolutely nothing like what we are experiencing. Sanat Kumar did a terrible thing there, turning people into his dogs”, Buddha frowned.

“He did, but choice is a complicated thing. The souls need to decide what worship is, what they want it to be, what God is, and so on. It’s not just picking between black and white. You need to pick what you are, by formulating an understanding of what God is”, his wife kissed him. “By picking what you do, you pick what you are”.

“And I pick you”, he smiled.

“That’s the source of my eternal happiness”, she smiled.

“So, I heard you refer to the Christians in the third person, ‘they’. Aren’t you technically one of them?”, Kay whispered to the relaxed woman next to her.

“Well, technically, if the word ‘Christian’ means ‘of Christ’, I’m the most Christian person in the whole world. In fact, you can call me Christina”, Magdalena giggled. “But no, I don’t feel like I’m one of them”, she was now serious. “They discarded me, rejected me, defamed me, and thoroughly erased me from their history. I can’t even go out there and comfort them because my presence would confuse them so much it would be counterproductive. So no, I am not one of them now. They chose to have the Church without me, and now, well, they have the Church without me. I, on the other hand, have Christ”, she shrugged. “And I have his cute giggly sister”, she laughed, ruffling Kay’s hair. “I win”.

“Sure thing, Christina”, Kay giggled and hugged her.

“Girls, I’m sorry to interrupt your moment, but we are being called to the war council”, Azrael smiled.

“Again?”, Hypatia’s eyes were wide open.

“Yes. Apparently, Sant Kumar has made his move”.

…

“They call it ‘Submission’, or Islam in their language. I’m sharing a memory block obtained from post-mortem interviews with its founder and his multiple fanatical followers. Lord Azazel’s analysis says that it looks as if a mentally ill person hallucinated something out based on what he superficially heard Jews and Christians talking about their religion, and he went through a memorised copy of their scripture – they call it the Qur’an – from the mind of a dead hafiz, which is what they call people who have committed the whole scripture to memory. It is incredibly bad, to the point where one would get brain damage from trying to read it. Kay, I am sorry to do this to you, but please look into this now and tell me what you think”, Vishnu apologetically smiled at Lady Karuna.

Her eyes and her Jewel flickered for a moment. “I took my time analysing everything you gave me in entirety, and went back in time to report”, she nodded, as the rest of them looked at each other with wide eyes.

“I agree with my husband, but it’s actually worse. It looks like a religion of monotheistic absolutism, and something similar to Judaism or Christianity, but a deep analysis shows it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, this is the religion of Baal, made more extreme, more cruel, more despotic, and it comes with a political agenda, so it’s actually not so much a religion as it is a political system of submission to Sanat Kumar, aka Baal aka Master aka Allah, where the adherents to the religion, or Muslims as they call themselves, submit to the will of Allah, and they are ordered do forcefully subjugate ‘non-submissive’ people and submit them to Islam, so that Allah will reign supreme because it’s his world and his will must be obeyed. Essentially, Sanat Kumar saw what worked in the past, modified it so that it can’t really be turned to good other than by outright rejecting the scripture, and ordered that anyone rejecting Islam be put to death. In essence, it’s a death-cult of Baal posing as the third Abrahamic monotheistic religion”, she finished gravely.

“Your observation about it being a re-hashed cult of Baal seems to be spot on, but what gave you the idea?”, asked her husband.

“When I read the scripture and saw how the dead Muslims behaved, the image of Athena in her depravity and madness kept popping up in my mind, and I went back to it all to see why. It turned out to be the key to interpreting the whole thing”, she smiled at her love. “But next time, please let me analyse something nice, like Bhagavad-gita?”, she looked at Lord Vishnu pleadingly.

“I will try, but good things hardly require heavy artillery such as you and your husband, sweetheart”, Vishnu smiled back at her.

“What is the current status? From the urgency, I assume this thing is spreading across the vacuum left by the fall of Rome and the plague of Justinian”, Lord Shiva asked.

“You are right. It’s spreading by conquest and self interest. Basically, one has a choice of either being oppressed, or joining the oppressor class. You can guess what happens”, Vishnu frowned.

“I see Alexandria is no longer Christian. Cyril’s accomplishment didn’t last, but he would have made a good Muslim anyway”, Hypatia grinned with a taste of bitter irony.

“Not just Alexandria, but the entire Northern Africa as well”, nodded Vishnu. “Also Persia. They are spreading like locusts, because what they are preaching feels close enough to what people already believe, that they don’t think it’s worth the price to oppose them. The problem is, they don’t understand the theology well enough, and the Muslims lie in order to get them to convert, and once they do, it’s death penalty if they convert back. The whole thing is deeply disgusting, deceptive and satanic in its nature”.

“Are there any good sides to it that we could exploit and modify in order to use it for transcendental purposes?”, asked Lady Shakti.

“There are some. There is belief in an afterlife, but it is of non-transcendental nature. It promotes charity. It discourages arrogance and boastfulness, but the problem is, it does so in a manner that looks like Athena’s disgusting submission to her Master, rather than the way we worship each other. It turns people into lying, pathetic, cruel worms. Its absolutistic monotheism can probably be modified into worship of the fundamental reality, but one needs to be really motivated and just take a thing or two out of context and ignore the rest of the nonsensical and vile ramblings of the scripture. It is going to encourage family values, and strongly punish crime. It also promotes in-group respect and equality. There’s no human sacrifice. Other than that, it’s one of the worst things I’ve seen”, the Lord frowned in disgust. “It’s basically a religion of slave trade, pillage, murder, both male and female genital mutilation, cruelty and subjugation, built upon the basest human nature and total lack of sexual restraint by its founder”.

“You mean, they are going to go around the Mediterranean and abduct Christians to sell them on the slave markets and Muslims are going to systematically rape Christian women in the conquered lands?”, smiled Azazel.

“You think you are joking”, his wife responded gravely.

“Seriously?”

“Yup. Imagine Athena/Anthea leading a religious conquest in the name of her Master, taking vengeance against the nonbelievers for what she endured in that temple basement and you’ll get the picture”, Lady Kay’s eyes were now glistening with tears, and her voice was no longer steady. “It’s the worst, most virulent calamity Satan ever let loose on the Earth, and I’m including the Plague of Justinian in the analysis”.

“Bloody hell”, Azazel swore.

“Yup, that’s what they will turn the Earth into”, his wife nodded. “Impaled men, raped women, globalised slave trade and Allah-u-Akbar”.

“Are they worse than the Assyrians?”, asked Lord Shiva.

“In fact, yes”, Kay nodded, still in tears. “The Assyrians were limited geographically and couldn’t extend this much, and they were a nation-state. Islam is a highly virulent mental illness that spreads through vileness of human nature, and is aided by Sanat Kumar, on his home ground. I’m trying to see how this could be any worse, but my imagination is failing me”.

“I’m sure we’ll see worse”, Lord Shiva rumbled gravely, scratching his head. “It’s that kind of a place”.

“Are there any positive elements to this?”, asked Lady Mary. “I mean, there is always an upside to every calamity and depravity”.

“Yes, I think so”, Kay was now brightening up. “I did a projection. As they are establishing long trade routes, assimilating cultures and unifying the language across a large territory, it is expected that they will spread good and useful sciences and technologies across that space, and since they will interact with the adjacent territories, to them as well. Europe is basically on its knees at the moment, almost all knowledge of Greece and Rome forgotten and lost, books burned in silly conquests and lost to decay and neglect. Significant treasure troves of literature were preserved in the Middle East – Alexandria and other places – and there’s lots of good stuff in Persia, as well. It’s all likely to be spread across the islamic space and adjacent territories, and it might restart things from the point where the fall of Rome and later calamities ended them. It might serve to restore Europe’s heritage after the catastrophic downfall”.

“Or it will just run Europe over and bury it under the eternal darkness of Satan”, replied her husband. “It’s a toss, really”.

“Europe is already under the darkness of Satan”, grinned Lord Shiva. “Its ability to fall further is limited by the unpleasant fact that it’s already splattered on the ground”.

“There are significant bright points to all this”, voiced Hypatia. “The transcendental concepts and energetic conduits have become the inevitable part of collective thought. Christianity is still there. The scripture remains. The guardian angels are enhancing this, and that part is stronger than ever. We have Buddhism still. Hinduism is getting smarter as well; the Upanishads, Mahabharata, Bhagavad-gita, Bhagavata-purana. I’ve read them recently as requirements for my work, and recommend that you do so as well; there’s actually stuff about some of you there, and some of it seems to be spot on, as if the author actually had enough of a vision of the real Gods to inspire his work. It’s actually on par or better than what currently passes for Christianity. Buddhism and Hinduism seem to be cross-pollinating, as good ideas from one are adopted by the other and vice versa. If I had to think of an analogue of this, it would be cross-pollination between Christianity and Neoplatonism”, she finished on an optimistic note.

“I am so grateful that we have you, Piercing Insight”, bowed Lord Shiva. “You are indeed correct, and the blessing of your presence and mind has brightened my day after all the terrible news we’ve heard”, he bowed deeply to the blushing woman.

“Same here”, smiled Lady Kay, now in a significantly better mood, and the others nodded in assent as well.

“So, what do we do now?”, Lord Azazel raised an eyebrow.

“We count our blessings, as Lady Hypatia recommended”, Lord Vishnu replied. “Work on strengthening individual transcendental connection. Comfort the suffering souls. Work on the specifics, while Sanat Kumar has initiative in the field of the general trends. Subvert evil with the good. Help the Muslims develop a transcendental version of Islam. Help India as much as possible. Work with the Buddhists as they develop a more transcendental, mystical versions of the teaching. Work with Hindus who explore yoga, puja and bhakti. If we do enough in this sphere, things might emerge that we don’t expect at this point”, he finished.

“What kind of things?”, wondered Lady Lakshmi.

“I don’t know. Maybe even coffee with whipped cream in the capitals of Europe”, he joked.

“That will be the day”, snickered Lord Shiva.

“I don’t know if anyone is still alive down there”, sighed Azrael. “First it was the volcanic winter that caused a great famine, since crops were diminished or outright destroyed across the world. But then the plague hit Europe, and about fifty million people died”.

“I think slightly less than third of the population of Europe was wiped out, and almost everybody who remained is suffering terribly”, his wife leaned into him, as mentally exhausted as he was. “It wiped out the legions of the military because the closely packed encampments were a fertile ground for the contagion. It wiped out the elderly because they were weak, the children died because their parents died and couldn’t care for them, and there are places where almost nobody is left. There are places that weren’t impacted, but since the entire civilization has been devastated, they will suffer the secondary consequences as well. And, of course, some are taking opportunity to wage war on the weakened neighbours, and the agriculture suffered because dead men can’t farm, so there was famine as well”.

“There is, however, the good Fairy called Kay, who brought coffee, Jesus and Mary, to cheer up the much beloved hard working couple in distress”, a smiling Goddess shimmered in with the two more in tow, and the atmosphere improved immediately, with all the hugging and blessings.

“How are Lady Zina and Lord Buddha doing?”, Azrael asked the Goddess of Wisdom.

“About as well as the two of you, which is why her Holy Mother and Lord Shiva are cheering them up right now, while Lord Vishnu and Lady Lakshmi have taken over coordination of the efforts to alleviate the consequences and reduce chaos, and my husband is with them now. There have never been so many people who at the same time believe in transcendence and blame God for leaving them to die in that hell while they prayed for help”, she sighed gravely. “Fortunately, having billions of angelic volunteers willing to assist us in our efforts made all the difference. They have hardly any experience with post-Earth souls, but it didn’t matter. They were basically just comforting them and showing them that all will be good now”.

“In essence, as Satan wrought all hell down there, the entirety of the Heavenly Kingdom mobilised in return, and the concept of idle angels with nothing useful to do is now firmly in the past”, Mary noted. Her husband had to leave early and join his parents who were comforting the grieving souls, and since nobody on Earth really knew who she was, and explanations would actually make things worse, introducing a crisis of faith to people who were already shaken enough, she could afford to slack off. But comforting the stressed out Judges was important work, too. They were family, and they were hurt and tired.

“We are so tactically overwhelmed at the moment that we are strategically completely blind”, Azrael sipped his coffee, having cheered up significantly. “Caring about the distressed souls is a priority and it’s taking everything we have, while Satan is causing disasters with a minimum of effort, and he couldn’t care less about anyone there; the more they suffer the better, and the less he has to do to make them experience a spiritual crisis. So, essentially, he has all the initiative at this point, while we need to contend with trying to control the outcomes he is causing”.

“That is true, but this is expected, as our priority have always been the souls, and his priority has always been his own ego trip and causing ignorance and suffering. Also, at this point we are having five guardian angels available per every human person on Earth, regardless of what kind of a soul is in there. Those angels suddenly have something useful to do, other than build mathematical models that simulate chirality of kalapa structures”, Kay smiled.

“They really saved the day”, Hypatia nodded firmly. “We sent them to be with everybody who was afflicted by this calamity, both on Earth and during the process of death, so everybody had a comforting angelic presence with them, so that spiritual darkness wouldn’t overwhelm them”.

“The angels did almost all the work, and we just had to intervene with a small part of it, and yet it was still too much, so much so that we really started gasping for breath by the end of it, and we really appreciate you stopping by”, Azrael smiled at the divine women who enveloped them in a field of comfort and peace.

“I agree with my husband that this must be giving Satan free reign to scheme and invent countermeasures to everything good we have been doing lately”, Hypatia noted, but with a smile, since the blissful field of love generated by Mary and Kay was making her tingle with pleasure. Also, there was something about that coffee that seemed to work the same way. “Wait a minute, that coffee we seem to be having constantly, that’s some kind of an externalisation of God’s blissful inner nature, God’s love, a nectar of devotion, something of that sort?”, she grinned at the women.

“Hush!”, Kay giggled a conspiratorial giggle. “It’s coffee. That’s all I have to say”.

“The secret is safe with me”, Mary laughed. “The Christians would call it the Holy Spirit. We call it coffee”, she hugged the giggling Goddess.

“We need to start thinking ahead, so that the next disaster of Sanat Kumar’s making doesn’t catch us unprepared, though”, Azrael couldn’t help smiling at the giggling bunch.

“Probably, but you both need some serious downtime first”, Mary nodded. “Which means friends, family, love, kindness and…”, she inspected her cup, “…coffee, apparently”, she winked.