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The promise of a posthumous paradise doesn't seem appealing to me. A lifetime of bearing the gift of fate, humbly and quietly, the fulfillment of a decades-long plan: birth, Sunday confessional gossip and expressions of sincere regret for my lack of daily patience with the twisted social order, a husband who might prove somewhat tolerable, a handful of children, because that's what my flawless Father created me for, some work along the way to diversify my time in old age by figuring out how to earn extra money for bread, a few moments of disappointment at children who have no time for old age's nagging, and that's it.

So, I guess I'm an adopted child. Borrowed for a predetermined period, written in the Great Book of Life so that after my stay in the survival camp I could appreciate the grace of my biological Father, who, as an exception, would grant me immortality, transparent blandness, deprive me of the gift of free will, and wean me from forbidden pleasures. He would teach me gratitude, a punishment for my failure to live up to his perfection on earth. Because it's so simple. Or perhaps he wasn't up to the task of fatherhood, because despite being perfect, he couldn't look after his children, and the best solution was to turn the earth into a giant orphanage.

Sometimes I wonder how jealousy arose. After all, chaos reigned only in the universe. Heaven held an idyll unimaginable to me, a tainted Caucasian, cluttered with experiences not even a millimeter distant from what was common there. So where did jealousy emerge from such a perfect world, peppered to the brim with beauty, love, and harmony? Who could have created it? Could it have arisen out of thin air? If angels were created in God's image, where did the genetic errors come from? Where did the rebellion come from? Perhaps I'm not yet at a stage of development that would allow me to accept this fact as just another dogma of faith.

I think God must have gone through successive stages of evolution. He sat there, somewhere high up, and with all his flawless perfection, watched the actions of two people sent to Earth. And he must have been truly astonished as, step by step, he discovered increasingly elaborate sins, inflicted upon us by his offended, vengeful winged companions, and to which his increasingly rapidly multiplying children succumbed. It must have taken a long time for God to find the right antidote. However, he didn't try too hard, because it's easier to tell someone: choose, I give you free will, and you do everything to please me enough to allow you to receive my grace. And what was he to do when it turned out that his children, branded with original sin, couldn't resist the deadly whispers? Exterminate them. A long time passed before God satisfied his vengeful countenance. He selected individuals, endowed them with a slightly greater resistance to the filth spreading across the globe, over which he had increasingly less control, and accordingly helped them exterminate infidels using his power. Why is it easier to watch evil spread and, in a fit of nausea, destroy a person than to destroy the source of the contamination with a single snap of his thundering fingers?

Yet we are created in the image and likeness of our biological Father.