Hi. If anyone is awaiting a reply from me on an inline review you left me, please know all my received inline reviews except the last one from George have disappeared. Hopefully, I replied to everyone before things went haywire. Of course, I also don't know if I made all suggested edits to my offline manuscript either.
Sol is looking into it.
Since human souls that go into the lake acquire a new human body before emerging on the other side, I could do the same with all the demons. Put all of them into corpses, in which they get stuck. Satan would probably get the same body back, which had been mutilated/deformed when the resistance took back the Vatican at the end of book 2. I could even put a cross around his neck again to trap him inside. Perhaps crosses around each corpse's neck to trap them all in bodies that undoubtedly experience searing heat and freezing cold?
It's not critical that they be in physical bodies since I could simply write that their spirit forms experience cold/heat too. However, putting them into bodies makes things consistent. A soul goes into the lake, burns for a time to pay for all the pain that person had caused while alive, then gets a non-glorified human body and is transported elsewhere.
The two inconsistencies I have to work out are that, in theory, Adam and Eve are responsible for every evil act since Creation. Eve was given a glorified body with which she returned to Earth as Dr. Lombardi, ostensibly a member of the conspiracy, to keep an eye on Connor/Adam at the Vatican. Perhaps that's why she was given a pass. Yet Connor/Adam will burn like hell until there's nothing left of them but their shared soul in agony.
Also, Satan is much more culpable for evil in the world. He is the reason Adam & Eve sinned, and he continued to stir up evil throughout history. This means he should suffer more than anyone else. The intensity of that heat would have to be staggering.
He doesn't have a choice. He has no place to go unless someone can find a way land on his moon/asteroid spiraling into a black hole. If the lake of fire on Earth dumps him on some searing moon, he's likely to suffer as he would in an actual lake of fire. Based on that, I'd say he'd also suffer in extreme cold. And, yes, Catholics believe it's perpetual suffering. Purgatory, I've read, involves suffering as well. Fun, huh?
Connor is actually going to be the first one who goes into the lake of fire, where he will burn to atone for Adam (his soul) bringing sin into the world. He's returned right back to Megiddo, where the end of the story is still playing out. Every mortal sinner will burn to some degree for their sins before passing through. Their suffering will equal that of the suffering they themselves caused while alive.
>> Wouldn't Satan build a spaceship and come back? I mean super genius with time on his hands...
Since Connor will throw the dagger at De Rosa, I had thought to destroy his physical form, leaving just Satan's spirit. But then I have to figure out how to drag him and all other demons into the lake of fire since humans can't hold him. I can leave that up to Jesus, I guess. So, it's only his spirit that goes through the lake to another world, or perhaps to an asteroid or moon like Io, preferably a celestial body that is spiralling into a black hole. Also, Satan's spirit has very little power to manipulate the physical realm without De Rosa's genetically engineered body, which is where most of his physical power came from while he was masquerading as the dark figure in Rome (same breeding program as Connor).
I managed to work out a reason why God accepts Satan's challenge. Once again, it begins with the rescue mission, but Connor scales it up to rescue everyone except the nastiest of humans, knowing full well that the Father didn't give permission for that. And, technically, it comes very close to matching the end of Revelation in the Bible. Everyone who was destined for the Lake of Fire is forced into it, including all those Connor just tried to free.
But it turns out the lake is actually a portal to other worlds. All the condemned souls go into the lake, but most emerge on other, pristine worlds in regular (non-glorified) human bodies. The remaining humans who Connor freed, go into the lake and end up elsewhere on Earth, which has also been restored to a pristine state.
There will probably be a way to travel between worlds using the portals since there will be hundreds of planets to which humans are transported. These humans are required to "try again" from the beginning. 
God will put Connor in charge of ruling everything as punishment for having freed them all, even though God knew he would do that and didn't try to stop him. Could this have been His plan all along?
Naturally, those destined for Heaven never go through the lake and simply end up on a different plane, in a new Heaven and Earth, where they live with God, free from sin. Everyone else will aspire to get there.
The demonic spirits and nastiest humans (past and present) will also enter the lake but wind up on nasty frozen or burning worlds, and their portals will be one way only. I can't wait to figure out what kind of world to put Satan on.
Why wouldn't the Father of Lies lie to himself? And to anyone else he could ensnare for eternal damnation?
Because Satan is headed for an eternity in the Lake of Fire on Judgment Day, which he is desperate to avoid. Ditto for the Antichrist (Connor) and the False Prophet, all grave human sinners, and (I think all other demons).
Satan knows God will know the outcome of the Last Challenge, which is why he asks him to agree to the challenge regardless of the outcome. I've taken out the concept that Christ could be destroyed as part of the challenge and will make it so that only Christ's human half can be destroyed, forcing Christ back into spirit form, after which the Holy Trinity and all angels must leave Earth for the spirit realm and never return. Normally, Christ and his body are inseparable, but the Father created the supernatural dagger that Connor will eventually throw at either Christ or Satan. Since the Father created the dagger, Christ, who is equally all-powerful, could easily sidestep it, but because the Father agreed to the challenge and the potential results, if Connor throws the dagger at Christ, he will honor the Father's commitment and allow his human half to be destroyed.
The next thing I need to figure out is why would the Father take such a risk. As it says in my content summary, what is so important that he would risk it all? It originally was supposed to be because of the huge rescue mission into Hell that Connor is meant to lead. However, God could implement the rescue plan himself with a single thought, so I need better logic.
My earlier write-up on how the Father, with the help of the Holy Spirit, might wall himself off before accepting Satan's challenge, is unnecessarily complicated.
I'll probably have Satan explain the challenge to God, then tell him he has to accept or reject the challenge without regard for who will win, which God would obviously know. God accepts the challenge on those terms as if he knew nothing about the outcome. However, God insists on a few details of his own, including choosing Satan's son (the Antichrist) as the person who decides at whom to throw the dagger. Naturally, Satan loves that choice and agrees.
Although one could assume God wouldn't agree if he could lose, he agreed not to consider win/loss when deciding whether to accept the challenge, which he does. Since God doesn't cheat, there's a real chance now that Satan could win, and the reader won't know whether or not he does until the end of the trilogy.
So much simpler....
Finally something that came together easily. A bit wordy, but I can trim it once I've written the other sections.
One side effect of the Last Challenge is that, as time goes on, there will be an increasing number of differences between the events of our world and those prophesied to occur in the Bible right up until the Last Day. But how is this possible when we know the Bible to be without error? The answer is, we no longer exist along the same flow of time as the Bible’s authors. It seems there can be many such flows, each of which I refer to as a timeline.
Had there been no challenge, we — humans, angels, demons, even the world itself — would have continued along our original timeline, and events would match the Bible, including, eventually, the Apocalypse prophesied in its Book of Revelation.
However, when Satan issued the Last Challenge and God accepted, it resulted in the creation of a second timeline, where we now find ourselves. The two timelines share an identical history up to the moment the second timeline came into existence. The Bible was written before the Last Challenge, so any prophecies in the Bible are for events along the original timeline, not ours.
For this reason, the Holy Spirit has given me detailed prophecies for our new timeline, which I have included in this document. The most noteworthy difference, one that has left me shaken, is that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will return as a child, not as a man!
He will once again be conceived by the Holy Spirit, be reborn, but grow up in Rome. He will be orphaned at a young age and raised by the Church, and his supernatural skills will become increasingly apparent while he’s still a youth, at which point he will come to the attention of the Bishop of Rome. Soon thereafter, he will remember who he is and who he was, at which point his powers will return in full.
But he will also come to the attention of Satan, the dragon, and the Antichrist, the beast from the sea, who will attempt to prevent him from reaching his full knowledge and strength. They will try to kill him and later, through treachery, seek to bend the young Lord to their will to do their bidding.
The Church must act decisively once he is found to protect him from harm until he once again emerges as the Son of God.
One tweak I need to make here is to remove/rewrite prophecies that suggest Christ will win since (in theory) this document may fall in Satan's hands and God doesn't want him to know his ultimate fate. That avoids me giving away the apparent ending, which of course it isn't, but why let readers think I just did?
So I guess the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics wouldn't sit well with the one Earth/one Heaven/one God/one soul belief in Christianity, huh?
I'm not sure how God handles that. Fortunately, I don't need to answer that in the book, although my own personal answer is: I have no clue.
My favorite alternate timeline approach is to say that John prophesied events for the timeline he was in (ours, the real world). His vision didn't include the challenge since the moment it happens, my story branches into a second timeline, which didn't even exist until that point. The advantage of that is the second timeline has the same Bible as in the real-world since both timelines started from the real-world timeline. The creation of the second timeline doesn't happen until after the Bible is written, as soon as God accepts Satan's challenge. From the story's perspective, there is no written evidence of when the branching occurred until about the 4th century, so in both timelines, Church leaders will assemble the exact same Bible. The other option is not to branch until after the Bible is assembled, which I may have to do, although that gives Satan four centuries less to run his breeding program to create a super-powered Connor.
Clear as mud?
Dirk
Thanks for the link. That's a terrific article but not an argument I'd want to make in the book because Catholics consider it inerrant too. It'd be the same problem I have now, which is that story events contradict the Bible, and since the events are real to the characters in the story, the Bible would have to be wrong. Yikes!
The alternate timeline allows for differences, but somehow I have to connect it to the real-world Bible. The goal is for my characters to conclude: yes, events differ from the Bible, but the Bible was written for another (real-world) timeline. The question then is, how did it end up in the story's timeline instead of one specific to that timeline. The key difference, of course, is the existence of the challenge, which leads to most other differences.
I definitely rely on some of my own interpretation of Revelation. The book is inspired by Revelation but doesn't follow it 100%. That previous sentence will be included somewhere near the beginning of the book once I publish to keep from pissing off my target audience. Admittedly, they should be able to tell that just from reading the trilogy's blurb on the back cover, but I'd like to minimize negative reviews from people who buy it expecting a more traditional interpretation of the Apocalypse.
Although there are endless interpretations, there is quite a bit of consistency among Catholic interpretations (e.g., the two witnesses represent the Church's testimony about Jesus, not the kooks Moses and Elijah, who I threw in for fun (they're from a common Protestant interpretation); a destroyed/rebuilt Jewish temple is actually Jesus returning from the dead after 3 days; Jesus ruling for 1000 years is actually Jesus in the Eucharist for some "large" number of years (1000 is not literal); no final battle at Megiddo (my final battle is actually between Connor and his father, which is fine); etc.).
I think I need a Kobayashi Maru for Satan. No matter how unlikely he is to win, he still has to try or fry in the lake for sure. Ideally, in some way that leads him toward the particular challenge covered in the rest of the book. It's so long-term (two millennia) and complex, and God wants to be able to use it for his purposes too.
So, what would drive Satan toward that particular plan? It needs to be irresistible. Perhaps he believes he'll win if he follows that course, whereas there should be a twist at the end, where it turns out he was architect of his own doom. He is anyway, but I'd love it if he followed instructions from someone unknown on how to execute the conspiracy.
Perhaps a document comes into his possession with a lot of the details. Written by an Old Testament prophet looking to destroy him? Or perhaps a person joins him, giving him that guidance over two+ millennia.
Of course, this also means I make no attempt to explain why God isn't being more fair about the challenge. Maybe because he needs Satan to do the things he'll do throughout the trilogy for the divine purpose mentioned in the new epilogue.
And I would still need a simple explanation for why events in the story don't match the Bible. My main options are 1) a supernatural Bible that is identical across all timelines, even though it was only written for ours, or 2) the dual timeline explanation, which probably won't be that simple.
What if Satan wanted to issue the challenge but only if it's fair. God could tell him that due to God's omniscience there's no way Satan can win, but God wants to do the challenge anyway (for a higher purpose), and he offers to reduce Satan's punishment (and that of others?) if he participates, without telling him why?
Problem is, that makes God responsible for the conspiracy and all pain and suffering that stems from it.
Overcoming perfect omniscience so that Satan has a fair chance is a [censored]. I mean, according to Revelation, God has already won, so why would he participate in something that could make him lose big? Even if one assumes that God can ensure that the challenge is executed fairly (so Satan could win), why risk so much? As it says in my content summary blurb, what is so important that he would risk it all? Even if the rescue mission became all important to God, there are other ways he can accomplish that without risking so much. Heck, even if he wanted to rescue every soul currently in hell (he doesn't), he still wouldn't need to take such a grave risk to accomplish the same thing.
Way to blow up a solution. Fortunately, like I said earlier, I don't have to solve it. The following took half a [censored] day, but I think it's as simple and short as I can get it:
One part of the hermit's vision on which I will comment personally concerns whether it is at all possible for the Father to not know something while our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit do. I believe the answer is yes. We already know the opposite is true: In Matthew 24:36 of the Gospels, the Lord told his disciples only the Father knows when the end will come, indicating that neither he nor the Holy Spirit have that answer.
Since all three persons — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who comprise God are each considered to be all-knowing and all-powerful, the only way one of them cannot know something that the others do has to be voluntary. So, if the Son and Holy Spirit know something the Father does not, then the Father must have voluntarily excluded that information from his all-knowing vision for whatever purpose and length of time he chooses.
How God might accomplish this is beyond the scope of this letter. Clearly, he can do so since he has already done it, leaving only the Father with the knowledge of when the end will come. It should come as no surprise that an all-powerful being can do this.
Now your see why I don't intend to include an explanation as to the how. In fact, even my explanation doesn't truly explain how. But I've given a proof in my previous post that each person in the Trinity is not 100% omniscient. That's what makes it possible even though I have no clue how the Holy Spirit would wall off the Father's knowledge. But since God is omnipotent, he can do it (as he already has with the date of the end times).
Don't forget, there are three persons in one God. The Father could be the one to agree to the challenge based on what he foresees (God wins), after which the Holy Spirit walls off the Father's ability to see the outcome (because it may change). The Holy Spirit then goes to Satan and says, the Father's knowledge of the outcome has now been walled off. You're previous proposed challenge would have resulted in us winning, so you don't want to stay with that. Pick a different challenge. I, the Holy Spirit, will know who ultimately wins, but the Father no longer will, and he already accepted the challenge, regardless of what it ultimately ends up being.
While one might argue that the Father would have foreseen what Satan chose even after the Holy Spirit told Satan to change his challenge, clearly the three persons of the Trinity are not individually 100% omniscient, otherwise the Holy Spirit would know the date for the end times. Jesus says only the Father knows. Therefore, the Holy Spirit is not 100% omniscient, but God as a whole still is.
Somehow God already has the ability to do this as I noted above, even though we puny mortals aren't sure how. The hermit, who had the potential to be a brilliant theologian but received a vision to go live and pray in a cave in the desert/wilderness from age 15 on, will be the one who speculates that this is possible, and St. Augustine (see my edits above) will provide credibility for the hermit's theory.
I don't think I need anyone to explain how it's possible, just observe that God already does this. I have a potential explanation for the how, but since I don't need it, I don't have to spend time working out the minutia.
My solution's really no different than two-thirds of God agreeing to forget/not know the date of the end times. Clearly God can and does do it. My solution doesn't need to state anything as fact, merely a character observing that God can and does do it.
I'm using St. Augustine as the person to whom the hermit with the detailed vision/revelation sends his write up of the revelation. Bishop Augustine forwards it to Rome along with his own strongly worded letter supporting the fact that the hermit/Church scribe is someone who can be trusted, especially after a detailed investigation of the matter.
Naturally, the documented vision and Augustine's accompanying letter to the pope are forgeries, placed directly into the Vatican Secret Archive by Satan after the Vatican and the archive were created.
By plot hole within plot hole, I assume you mean the fact that there is no good reason why the Holy Spirit shouldn't know the end date. Even Jesus should know, IMO.
Fortunately, the above plot hole is not mine to close. It's among those questions/mysteries Christians can only speculate about.
My plot hole I can close using the idea I posted in the first "edit" to my previous post. I just have to word it simply enough.
As much as I like the 3rd option, it's a natural question to arise from the second draft, where the 4th (8th?) century manuscript documents a hermit's (future saint's) private revelation (vision).
As I thought about this yesterday, I remembered that Jesus said only the Father knows when the end will come. Granted, Jesus had a dual (limited) nature by then, which could explain why he didn't know when the end would come, but the only way the Holy Spirit wouldn't know is if he chooses not to know or the Father prevents him from knowing. Of course this begs the question why the Holy Spirit shouldn't know the end date.
EDIT: To close the plot hole, I need only have one of the characters think that Satan's demand that the Father not know the outcome before agreeing to the terms of the challenge is similar to how only the Father knows the end date, implying that both Jesus and the Holy Spirit have the ability to not know that information.
EDIT: It also begs the question why Jesus shouldn't know the end date. I'm guessing he can keep a secret.
Tricky plot hole. For Satan's challenge to make sense for Satan, God shouldn't know the outcome. Otherwise, if God accepts the challenge, then Satan would know his proposed challenge will end badly for him.
The only way I can see dealing with this is for God to agree to "forget" what he knows (e.g., by walling off some of his knowledge from himself). I hate having to add that requirement to the challenge (because it seems overly weird), but I don't see a way around it.
That's hilarious. I feel the author's pain.
I forget how many times I went back and forth between imperial and Imperial in Galaxy Tales/Archangel, but it was too many. I finally settled on lowercase because that's what Star Wars did in its books, but then Jack argued that I should treat it like Canadian. Eventually, I went back to several sources and discovered I had somehow screwed up the earlier research for imperial in Star Wars. They do capitalize it. Not sure how I screwed that up. It became absolutely clear as I toyed with different names to replace Realm. Most of the names fell into the same category as Jack's example, where it definitely required caps.
Oops. I just realized that since Connor has the ability to disguise his appearance supernaturally, then Daddy De Rosa must have it as well. He could have caused all kinds of chaos by committing the murders while disguised as someone else (eg Nnamani, the director general, etc.), who then shows up on security camera footage. Needless to say, I don't plan to go there. It would require radical changes to the story. Besides, De Rosa admitted early on (to his first victim) that he had a flair for the dramatic, and a dark figure who stinks like brimstone, cause the temperature to drop and the lights to dim, etc. is good and spooky.
