Darth Wong wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:GrayAnderson wrote:I'm also open to the gates being opened and closed once or twice. Close them around 1000-1100 (Pornocracy, etc.), reopen them in the 1200s (sack of Baghdad, Medieval Inquisition), and then close them again in the 1400s (Renaissance).
Why would Yahweh even care about corruption in the Church, by the way? What offends him isn't corruption as such, it's people asking him annoying questions like "but wait, are you
really the Alpha and the Omega?" For him, the Church was pretty much just an ornament and a mechanism for producing suitably faithful peasants.
The simplest explanation has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with simple numbers: angels do not reproduce quickly, and if unchecked, the ratio of humans to angels in Heaven will eventually rise to the point that:
A) They have no use for more human slaves.
B) They might even fear a human uprising, especially as human newcomers bring increasingly advanced knowledge with them.
Directly, they're not going to care about politics. That's true. But let us assume that, at least early on, the Pope
is used as an intermediary. What's going on in Rome is going to have a disproportionate effect on Heaven's view of Earth. Assume that the early Popes and Church leaders are generally coming in and getting sorted into the "heaven" side of things, but suddenly you get a string of them who are "unfit for service". One or two get written off, yes, but after a long string of them go bad (as was the case at that point), I could see some conclusion-jumping that "If the leadership is rotten and acting like this when earlier it was good, then the whole thing must be rotten". A few strong shows of fervor later, and he reverses the decision...only to flip back when another wave of trouble arises.
Wong, I think you're assuming a rational actor here...something that I think is probably missing from the story, or we wouldn't be hearing about humans being unfit to serve and whatnot. I doubt we'd be hearing about him looking for new species to tend to (let alone mention of him having sought out another race to tend to and suggestions of plans for clearing the humans out of Heaven like races that had gone before), etc., if a servant population was the only matter. What the story presents is someone who is very much off their rocker and who has been for quite some time (though just how long is, of course, a good question).
Edit: Yeah, Simon just beat me to it.
A side-question, probably for Stuart but possibly also for you or anyone else: I'm reminded of how the Greeks had three branches to the afterlife. One was Elysium, one was Tartarus, and one was the Asphodel Fields. I'm fairly certain that this concept wasn't solely Greek, and we know there were other pantheons out there that got cleared out with some concessions (such as that which protected Caesar). Obviously, the winners in that deal set up a very dualistic system, but I know for example that Egypt didn't have much in the way of a Hell (souls were simply annihilated, end of story), there was the Greek three-branch system, Mesopotamians didn't have much in the way of a heaven, etc. Therefore, is it fair to speculate that the other deities had differing systems set up with their own machinery?
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