Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend money are doomed to spend eternity in a pit with filth up to their knees. This is not the verdict of some radical, online, anti-capitalist echo chamber but of the second-century Apocalypse of Saint Peter, an early Christian text in the form of a graphic tour of heaven and hell, ascribed to the leader of Jesus’s apostles, though not actually written by him.
It offers scant comfort too for those who have sex before marriage: their bodies will be torn to shreds in the afterlife. And for women who have the temerity to plait their hair to make themselves look more attractive: they are damned forever to hang by that same hair over the eternal flames. The point the anonymous author was hammering home to his fellow believers (it might of course have been a woman, but there is something so misogynist about the 21 punishments laid out that I can’t believe so) was a simple one, and all about fear.
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