WELCOME TO HELL
by Lucifer B. Satan, Lord of Hades
THE DEVIL
Translated from Demon-ese by Kevin T. Rice
Greetings, souls of the damned. Welcome to Hell. In the words of Dante Alighieri, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." I am Lucifer, your host. Allow me to introduce you to my Staff. You and they will get to know each other quite well over the next one hundred trillion years before the next staff rotation.
This is Socrates. He is my Chief of Staff, and he is in charge of all the heathen intellectuals who in life dared to practice the Damnable Art of Thinking. He was condemned to spend eterenity here for that, and for his Dreaded Homosexuality.
This is George Washington, my Chief of Infernal Security. He was condemned for his membership in the Freemasons, and for being a leader of a political revolution against tyranny, a sin condemned in Romans 13:1-2. He will be keeping all of you in line here. You would be wise not to cross him. If he or his assistant, Gandhi (damned for his Hinduism and civil disobedience) get wind that of you are practicing the holy and sanctified art of war as upheld by Jehovah in the Bible, the God who "is a Man of war" according to Exodus 15:3, they will report your activities directly to me, and I will take swift, decisive punitve measures.
This is James Joyce, condemned for leading a sinful life of fornication with his live-in lover Nora. He runs the Library, a place where you can spend all the free time you wish reading all terrible, censored, forbidden books that the people of God tried to prevent you from reading all your lives. There is a whole floor dedicated to erotic and sexually explicit material. Also, J.D. Salinger and Mark Twain each have their own shelves, and if you want to meet them you can. They are both down here.
This is Charles Darwin. Those of you who wish to engage in the sinful Art of the Oppositions of Science, as condemned in 1st Timothy 6:20, can register with him to make use of Infernal Scientific Laboratories. This is Bertrand Russell. He rules a section of hell reserved for atheists. It should surprise none of you that Russel is here, nor will you be surprised that his assitant is Charles Ingersol. They were both very verbal in their condemnation of religion and war, and as such, were Damned Blasted Heathen deserving of their own territory here in the Nether Regions of the Universe.
This is Aleister Crowley. His life also merited him to rule a layer of hell all his own - a level devoted to the Dark Occult Arts of Magic and Sorcery. Finally, meet my Minister of Anti-Evangelism, Mageria. She was the High Matriarch of an African village that no longer exists since it was torched and utterly destroyed by Evangelical Christians in the 15th century. When they arrived on her shores and demanded that she and her people all reject their ancient religion and worship only the god they brought with them, or be burned at the stake, she refused, and instead, in her last act of defiance, she smashed the crucifix the invaders' leader had been carrying. Her last words as they ran her through were "We will not worship your demon-on-a-stick!" Naturally they could not understand her, but her actions spoke louder than words. But I understood her, and I was delighted when she arrived here.
Now that you know us, and we certainly know you, it is time for your damnation to begin. This will be year daily schedule - 6 hours of obligatory Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth, 6 hours of obligatory Burning in a Lake of Fire and Sulfer, and the other 12 hours are free time. You can do whatever you want as long as it is sinful. Nothing holy or godly like war, in fact, I hope you will forgo violence entirely. I also forbid you to burn books (as in Acts 19:19) or to engage in other anti-social atrocities of a similar vein. I hope most of you will spend most of your free time engaged in the most despised of all sins - sexual freedom. Love each other freely and often. And enter hell with my blessing and God's cursing, to spend your well-earned eternity separated from Him.
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty! We are free at last!" - Martin Luther King, Jr. (he probably also found his way to eternal damnation for the sin of resisting political oppression)