Ink

Unforgivable

Most of your neighbors have committed unforgivable sins. You find it had to believe that they could be so egregiously and willfully wrong about everything without deliberately embracing Satan and all his pomps.

Nevertheless, you will have to forgive them, now or later. You may set off on a holy crusade to rid the world of unrighteousness, and after all the massacres there will still be sinners. You will not succeed in killing everyone who disagrees with you: either you will be stopped by a superior force, or you will develop repetitive-motion injuries from lopping off so many heads over such a long time, and you will stop because your arm hurts.

And then what? Then you will have to find a way to continue existing in a world that still harbors people who are wrong. And when you have reached that point, you may begin to think that, after all, you yourself are less than perfect, and perhaps it would be less effort, even if not quite as virtuous, just to let God decide who is fit for the new Jerusalem.

Or you could spare yourself some wearisome toil and make that decision now. You could remind yourself that, when Jesus sent out dinner invitations, there were twelve guests, even though he knew that one of them was a devil. You could perhaps persuade yourself that, although you would of course like to be better than Jesus, a pragmatic approach to life might make it necessary to settle for not being any worse than Jesus. You could accept the Judases among your neighbors, and even make pleasant dinner conversation with them, knowing that, of course, everything will be sorted out at the final judgment, and then all the Judases will be properly sorry. But meanwhile you can be polite to them, because it costs you nothing; and perhaps out of some perverted mirror image of your own faith, the Judases will be polite to you as well.