Horse 976 - Hell's Bank Notes

A$1 = H$1,396,258,145,748,515,125,269,147,239,972,778,225.26



In classic Taoism, people believe that souls in the afterlife need to pay for or atone for their time on earth and so by burning money, this is provided for them. Curiously in both Cantonese and Mandarin there is only one word for the afterlife, so when Christian missionaries originally warned them that as a consequence of sin, that people will go to hell, the Chinese thought that Hell was the proper English term for the afterlife.

There are a few things that can be drawn out of this, the most obvious can be found at Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Few would argue against the idea that a worker deserves his wages. It is pretty obvious that what you work for you should be entitled to. I think therefore that one of the saddest but yet most profound truths in the world is that Sin is a paymaster and most certainly pays wages.

The idea of printing money to pay for a soul in the afterlife I think is well... silly. How much money do we logically need to print? Even simple logic tells you that if you start printing off currency, then the currency hyper-inflates as is the case in Zimbabwe (or possibly current economic policy in both Australia and the USA)

Even if the policy did work and you weren't inflating the currency, do you really think that either the Jade Emperor or his counterpart Yanluo, Duke of Hell, would accept mere money as payment for a human soul?

Logically it would follow that the only way that you could pay a penalty for sins committed would either to gain what you've worked for, that is death, or possibly if you could find someone else to blame, get them to die for you.

That idea in itself is pretty crazy. It could be possible that you might find someone who'd be willing to die for a "good" person, but would anyone be prepared to die in place of a sinner? Since all have sinned, then that'd leave the whole entire of humanity pretty well much in a hopeless and quite pathetic state considering it all.

Perhaps there is something to be said for Hell Bank Notes after all. Contained in them is the utter futility that people think that they might actually be able to pay off God.

But the gift of God is eternal life?

Gift maybe, but as with any gift of an import it cost something to buy that gift. God does give to those who turn from sin, eternal life. It is His gift, conditioned on refusing to be on the payroll of sin anymore, but ironically through Christ actually collecting the wages of sin, which is death.