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The way the metaphor works, you’re being lowered into the water (symbolizing a grave) and being raised (resurrected) as a new creation free of sin. (Symbolically. More literally, the “free of sin” bit lasts about 0.4 seconds until you have your first conscious thought, and then you probably need more sanctification.) The question nobody ever seems to ask is, what happens to the sin afterward?

I mean, that water ought to be downright toxic. Original sin is a big deal, and in most denominations they don’t even try to dispose of the waste safely. In fact, the pastor is often standing in it the whole time.

If you haven’t seen the sort of baptism service I’m familiar with, it involves a bathtublike container maybe a third the size of a Jacuzzi, with a church leader doing serial baptizing.  Any Christian can baptize someone, but usually it’s one of the ranking people in the church. Catholics probably bless the water first (it’d be weird if their religion includes holy water and they don’t use it for this) but in most denominations holy water isn’t really a thing. So there’s no confounding variable from that direction; it’s just water plus enough of humankind’s innately fallen sin nature to damn someone to Hell a couple dozen times over. And the pastor, along with whoever goes last, is standing in it.

But that very fact tells us it’s not all that dangerous. Concentrated evil sounds scary, but apparently a normal mustard-seed-sized amount of faith can protect people from it. 

There’s a ritual described in Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest places all the sins of the Israelites onto a goat (hence our word “scapegoat”), and then sets it loose in the wilderness. The population at the time was a bit over 600,000 (source: the for once incredibly convenient Book of Numbers). So we just have to find that goat (we can use my time machine), make it more intelligent until it’s capable of becoming a Christian, and baptize it. From a safe distance. Because seriously, that much concentrated evil is probably radioactive or something. We’re talking the sins of a nation here; this is a decent fraction of the stuff that motivates prophecies of Armageddon.

Sacrifices aren’t really a thing anymore. If I remember right, the branch of Judaism that eventually became the current one hasn’t done animal sacrifices since the destruction of the Temple back in ‘70. (The apostrophe stands for “A.D. ”) I don’t know how many Jews have lived in the last 1945 years, but it’s a lot. That many person-years worth of sin is going to mean one seriously scaped goat.

So that means, you just have to find the Ark of the Covenant, reconstruct the Most Holy Place, and get whoever’s in charge of the tribe of Levi these days to do the ritual. No time machine required. Then kidnap the goat, convert it to Christianity, and do the other ritual. The new convert rises as a new creation free of sin (in the process thoroughly messing up the parable of the sheep and the goats) and you’ve got a bathtub metaphorically full of more evil than has been seen in one place since the Crucifixion. Use it wisely.

And by “wisely” I do not mean point a squirt gun at the Pope.

WHEN LAST WE LEFT we were storing every sin committed since A.D. 70 by any Jew who was not also Christian inside a large bucket. It’s time to try more.

When you have an almost unprecedented amount of a thing, obviously you look for bonuses that stack. Several places in the Bible confirm that it’s possible to multiply sin (e.g., Isaiah here), but infuriatingly there’s no actual procedure stated for this.

The best I can find is a handful of lines from the Apocrypha, which is not canon depending on your denomination but is at least a really cool word. Sirach 3:11 says “they multiply sin who demean their mother,” which is nice and direct, but the person in question didn’t really have a mother. She was a literal goat, and probably not covered by any commands about respect for one’s elders. 23:11 says how to double a particular sin, but it only applies to oaths and doesn’t look very retroactive.

I think our best chance is in 23:16:
“Two sorts of men multiply sin, and the third will bring wrath: a hot mind is as a burning fire, it will never be quenched till it be consumed…” The first one is more interesting than the second, so let’s stop there. I don’t actually know what it means by a “hot mind” but actively trying to increase the amount of extant sin had better qualify.

So after you kidnap/rescue the scapegoat and uplift it to human intelligence, convert them to Discordianism or something first instead of Christianity. Something that’ll want to go along with this. Allow the multiplication to do its thing. (The Book of Ecclesiasticus didn’t say what the sin gets multiplied by, but it’s large enough that it matters when it’s an individual doing the sinning, let alone a civilization.) Then you convert them, get them saved by grace through faith, and steal the water after their baptism. Put it in the chemtrails of jets flying over your least favorite nation or something. Have fun!

If you’re wondering what was that verse’s second sort of man who multiplies sin: “a fornicator in the body of his flesh will never cease till he hath kindled a fire.”

In other words, it is actually an available option to start with an apocalypse-causing amount of violations of the law of God—

—which has to be one of the most horrible, terrifying, EVIL things you could possibly think of—

and MULTIPLY it

by SEX.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!

We’ve got two thousand years of accumulated sin so far, multiplied by an unknown but significant amount. Let’s exponentiate.

Everyone knows that God is a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their sons to the third and the fourth generation. And goats can have a lot of kids! If you have your super-evil goat start a new family line while still in its God-hating phase before being converted, we could be talking like 70,000+ sons. At this point it depends more on how many goats you can raise, ensoul, convince to maximize sin, and convert to Christianity than on anything hard like theology.

(Aside: Is the fathers and sons thing sexist? Not really. The word translated “sons” is really more of a gender-neutral “descendants,” and “fathers” mostly means “heads of families.” It comes across as “patriarch” because that’s what they had then. Since goat society is matriarchal, in Facts You Didn’t Know You Needed To Know, the genders would be swapped. But this doesn’t affect the plan here, so whatever.)

And of course, if you have enough missionary staff to reach each of the descendant goats, you can get the multiplications from mother-demeaning, hot-mind-having and/or fornicating in each generation. I’ve lost count of just how apocalyptically bad this is, but we’re in the ballpark of tens of billions of nation-years’ worth of sin? Got to be world-ending by now.

So does all this get you anything? I don’t know, maybe. You’ve got an evil leader with a large, even more evil herd, and in the Bible being a king means at least plot importance. (Don’t believe me? Look how many people are important only for being kings and not for anything that, you know, happens.) And there’s a relatively short jump from “king” to “god-king” to “god”: “king” (melech, M-L-K in a language without vowels) goes from Abimelech to Moloch, Melkor, mlekk, and former One Direction singer Zayn Malik.

One snag: when the ancestor-goat or anyone in an intermediate generation repents and turns to God, not only does their sin get wiped out but so does all their descendants’.  Theoretically this expires after a thousand generations, but you’re not waiting that long. To maximize the amount of used sin, you need to convince them to repent and be baptized from the youngest on up. Remember to reuse the same water for all 70,000 baptisms if you want it concentrated.

(If you do reuse the same water, the newly repentant goats and whoever’s performing the baptism might wonder why they’re using a very specific airlocked chamber and wearing hazmat suits with separate air supply. You probably don’t want to tell them! Getting them to do it anyway is a logistical exercise left as an exercise to the reader.)

Also, the other problem. If any of the goats die before conversion, by accident or I guess murder since this is sort of the most evil population in history, it’s probably bad. You made sure to engineer them to be easily manipulable, but intelligent enough to be responsible for their sins and repentances. If they die with their and their ancestors’ sins on their head… eternity of torment. Not good.

And of course, the specific variety of torment is a lake of fire. Which they’d go to because of the sin they inherited from their matriarch. Where sin-maximizing is exactly the thing she presides over. You would be boiling a young goat in its mother’s melech. Don’t do that.

Tags:

#oh look an update #puns #Christianity #overly literal interpretations #hell cw