“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.