Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Friday, May 09, 2008 )

NEW YORK (AP) — Sunday morning, in an announcement that startled the theological community and Wall Street, representatives of Heaven and Hell said that they would pursue their long-rumored plans to combine forces and become one entity. The plan was intentionally unveiled on Sunday, God’s day of rest, and also a time when the executives could avoid upsetting the closed stock market.

“We didn’t want to scare anybody,” said a lawyer for Satan.

According to the executives with both heaven and hell, the decision comes at a time when the new corporate climate demands consolidation and right-sizing to secure a healthy profit and long-term growth. Insiders say that the executives of both entities had to look at their common business: that of souls.

“Just look at the spreadsheets,” says one insider. “Both heaven and hell have the apparatus to accept or dispense with souls as they see fit, and combined operations would make that apparatus 10 times more efficient than either entity by itself.”

“What’s good for hell is good for heaven,” said God the Father, in a written statement sent by fax to the major wire services.

Speaking to an audience of skeptics, executives announcing the merger said they could accomplish the venture without layoffs.

“The world population is booming,” said the Angel Gabriel. “Pretty soon, the baby-boomer generation will be coming to the twilight, and then you’ll see a bull market in religion–a lot of people repenting at the last minute. Blubbering. That sort of thing. You can bet that it’s going to be a busy judgment day for us.”

Satan, also known as Lucifer, also known as The Beast, the angel cast out of heaven, concurred with this assessment of the economic future.

“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, God and me,” says Lucifer. “We decided that the moment had come to put aside our parochialism–the arguing about whose light was the true light–and take a good, hard look at what our business is. The bottom line is, we trade in souls. We both need souls. It’s just left for us to weed out the good from the bad.

“I can’t wait for the baby-boomers,” he added. “There will be a lot of tares in the vineyard for me to pull, so to speak.”

Satan added that he goes by many signs, and he offers consumers wealth and power. In the future, he also plans to offer knowledge, in a joint agreement with the Lexis-Nexis Corporation.

United States anti-trust regulators are meticulously scanning the merger plans for inconsistencies and anti-competitive practices.

“For the most part, the corporations’ intentions seem fair-minded and competitive,” says Ira Witkin of the U.S. Department of Labor. “But there are certain worries we have. For instance, why do bad things happen to good people? Is a person born without the ability to make moral choices necessarily an immoral person? If God is the way, the power and the light, what came before God? Do we really need a concept of evil? … There are a lot of unanswered questions here.”

Independent analysts in the stock market see this merger as just one more in an ongoing U.S. economic restructuring–the same reorganization that turned the Big 8 accounting firms into the Big 6. The same trend that saw the big fish Chase Manhattan swallow Chemical Bank.

“We can’t think of this in terms of just America anymore,” said the Angel Gabriel. “We have to think globally. The fact is, Mephistopheles is not our enemy. China is our enemy.”

“As far as the merger of Heaven and Hell, I don’t see this as part of a trend,” countered attorney Gary Weiss. “This is not a new idea. The plan goes back at least to Milton and Blake. And it’s not about corporations, really. We have to think about the consumer. Think of the person sitting there, waiting for transubstantiation. Right now, he’s got to wade through all of that red tape, all the while asking, ‘Am I going to stew in my own feces, or aren’t I?’ With this new entity in place, we’re hoping that maybe we can squeeze more people into heaven, because with the new system, souls will conceivably be purged by the fire of Earthly torment–the torment of their desires. That’s the way I see it.

“But let me choose my words carefully,” he added. “We’re not trying to shut hell out of the picture. We will always need Hell.”

Weiss describes himself as a non-practicing Jewish man.

The plan at this time is that owners of stock in Heaven–namely, those who pray and who have been baptized–will have their stake bought back by God. This new capital will be used to buy stakes in the lost souls of others. The plan raised hackles with some of heaven’s investors.

“You can’t just sell souls like that,” said John Calvin, a French reformer and theologian who has been dead since 1564. “At least you can’t sell souls for less than $100 a share.”