the counting problem
On the day of judgement total virtues and sins of everyone will be counted, if the number of virtues exceeds sins, we will have earned ourselves heaven and vice versa. That’s how the purpose of sins and virtues was explained to us, it was simple to understand. All you have to do was score as highly you can each day.
The only problem is after some time as the count of virtues began to rise in your mental ledger, it introduces a certain complacency. You gradually learn to put God on hold for a while to indulge, safe in the knowledge that your overall count is still positive, as long as you make sure that you end each of the days on a positive balance, by the time you will die, you will have earned your way into heavens.
The concept when elaborated further also holds true if you finish more than half of the days of a month on positive virtuous balance, you will still end up in heavens. So weekends were sorted for good two days of indulging versus five sober days. It was a killer plan, a win all situation, though only for some time!
There is one catch, how to keep an accurate count as the difference between your daily count of virtues and sins start to diminish, after all, it would be such a pity to lose out on heavens when your personal count is 60/40, but in actual, it is 40/60.
the cat dilemma or weight problem
There was a story that I read sometime afterwards: “Once upon a time there was a sinner woman, who has never done a good deed in her life. One day she happened to pass by a thirsty cat by the well, she took pity on it and drew some water to quench its thirst. Shortly after that, she died, and God blessed her with heavens and forgave all of her misdeeds.”
There was also another version of the same story of a pious woman, who did not attend to the thirst of a cat, was therefore condemned to hell.
Two very simple stories, but they totally changed the layout of a well worked out plan, the focus has now shifted from the quantity to quality of virtues and sins. It’s not the count but the weight that matters most.
Until that point all I needed to do was, just enough to creep my way into heavens, while also enjoying the indulgences along the way. The cat dilemma introduced the “law of weight”, what actually mattered was the weight of each virtue and sin. Holy God! How one could possibly measure the weight of one’s act, there is no way its possible.
If you study religious literature you find out that certain sensitive factors such as context, circumstances, personal belief, intention etc determine the weight of your acts. it’s not humanly possible to get the weight calculations right. I simply gave up and comforted myself in the hope that someday I might come across a “Get of Jail Card”. But you know it in your heart that this card does not work in this way.
I realized I had absolutely no strength of belief within myself, no concrete belief in the existence of God. Most of what I regarded as a true and strong belief turned out to be one based on either promise of reward or fear. I had no idea which virtue could be the “Get of Jail Free” card, or which temptation would render everything else meaningless.
So in principle, the same tools were at the disposal of Anti-Christ too, fear and reward.
Neomodern 