Father Robert Benson tells us why God created the afterlife: not for our judgment but for our particular and individual happiness

Trouble not your minds with the Church's vain and boastful threats of spiritual disaster because you fail to accept with credulity its foolish claims... [God] is man's greatest and truest friend, not his dreadful judge. He is not a merciful God, for he has no mercy to give. Mercy only exists as between men upon earth. He has no justice to give. That is only as between man and man. He has no pardon to give. For that, too, is only as between man and man. He has no great flaming, torturing hell in which to cast poor souls for small sins committed. That is a hideous invention of the Church.

• Albert Einstein: “I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.”

He has formulated no petty rules and commandments, the breaking of which will inevitably bring down His wrath upon you. They are the inventions of Orthodoxy and its learned doctors. He has no wrath, ever. That is the invention of the same stupid churchmen. What, then, you will naturally ask, has God to give? This, my friends, has He to give: His eternal affection for you which is expressed in His divine will that you shall attain to the greatest happiness in the whole world. He would wish that you could be filled with that happiness during your earthly journey. But He knows that that is not always and in every case possible. So there exists a gigantic spirit world which possesses all the possibilities and provides all the opportunities of gaining supreme and lasting happiness.

That superb prospect is open to every single soul, without exception, who has been born upon earth. There is no man on earth who can alter that superlative, proud dispensation, either by canon law, by ecclesiastical edict, or by pontifical maledictions; nor by the invocation of a thousand creeds, by the opinions of all the doctors of the Church, past and present, nor by pulpit fulminations of whatever degree of vehemence... Remember always another sublime and eternal truth: that all the spirit realms are open to the whole race of humanity, and that faith or religious creeds can have no say in the matter... We, who have come back from these beautiful realms to tell you something of our life and our lands, are oft-times called emissaries of the devil. What the Churches would do without their great friend, the devil, it is hard to know...

• Editor's note: Father Benson is saying that, with Satan and the Church, "the Joker is wild."

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