“Wh…what am I doing here?” John asked as he reached the checkpoint.
“Let’s see,” the guard said, leafing through a thick notebook. “Ah, John Sedgewick. Here it is. Says here you cheated on your wife.”
“Well, to be fair, she cheated on me first,” John said, in his defense.
“Be that as it may, it’s still adultery.”
“But everyone does it,” he countered.
“Which is why Hell is such a crowded place.”
“So this is…” He couldn’t quite say the word.
“Yes, John, it’s Hell. Didn’t you notice all the fire and brimstone and tortured screams?”
“So what? It’s like East L.A. in the summer. Big deal.” But it was a big deal, and John knew that it was. He tried to reason with the foul demon. “But my wife didn’t even care that I cheated on her. She said she was glad to get me out of the house.”
“Lovely women, your wife” the demon quipped with a shake of his head. “But you got out of the house every Saturday for over a year.”
“Yeah? Well, that was when my wife liked to clean. Again, so what?”
“So Saturday is the Sabbath, and screwing your neighbor on the Sabbath isn’t so holy, John. Also, in breaking Commandment number four, you managed to break numbers three, eight, nine, and ten.”
John was at a loss. He ditched bible school when he was kid – not to mention church as an adult. “I don’t follow.”
“No doubt,” the demon snickered. “Anyway, you told this women that her husband was cheating on her first, in order to get her to sleep with you.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And he wasn’t. You bore false witness against your neighbor. And you swore to God that he was cheating on her, to boot. That’s fallaciously swearing in the name of the Lord, John. And you coveted your neighbor’s wife. And you ate his food and drank his beer.”
“I was hungry and thirsty,” John whined.
“Yes, well, it was stealing.”
|
