"Oh, yes. It got everyone out of Hell who was in at the time and sped up God's recharge substantially."

"Recharge?"

"So God used to be next thing to omnipotent, but then she noticed that this one little planet, Earth, was evolving life, and she was alarmed by the idea of a person existing in an impermanent form, so she set up the soul system, but that took a lot out of her, and she's been trying to regain it ever since so she can fix things like poverty and disease and so on."

"Oh. Uh, the world seems pretty good on the poverty and disease front, too, not perfect but... Is that God's work or is that just people?"

"Mostly people, actually."

"This gives me hope for what industrialization will do to my world." She is not sure if angels are capable of compromise so she should probably not mention just how impactful it will be before she's figured out if it's best to import all of the knowledge now.

"Yes. Try to be careful, though, there were--rough patches. There still are."

That sounds pretty capable of compromise. "I imagine so. Read about some of them, but... My best estimate is that my world is technologically similar to your late classical or early medieval periods. Even if done poorly it would leave almost everyone better off, I think. The main problem would be if it makes it harder to break open hell etc. or if that takes a long time and the population boom just funnels more people there."

"Yes, quite. Especially if your Hell isn't as choosy."

"They are. One in ten, between them. As a lower bound."

She shudders.

"This is possibly not the best topic of conversation. I am going to fix it but it will take time and dwelling on how horrible it is will not make me more efficient. Solutions are better, you think this Christ person wouldn't be recreatable in my world? Because we have too many gods or just no-one who could access the 'room' or something else?"

"I don't know if your gods work the same way."

"They may not. At any rate I suppose active opposition from the evil gods would complicate it. My current plans are incomplete and very inelegant, if you had any ideas that were considered and rejected that might work better in a different world."

"Most of the ideas we came up with we tried. A lot of them turned out badly."

"What did you try?"

"So the thing is that human and near-human attention increases recharge rate, which is why religion is a thing. There were--things implemented to try to garner more attention. Some of them were, uh, unethical in retrospect."

"...I can see that. I think my gods work similarly in that respect, worship makes them stronger... Did it work, at least?"

"Mostly!"

"We have no sufficiently benevolent gods, so that's not on the table even if it could be done more ethically." Yet, she doesn't say. "Anything else?"

"Well, the previous Christ also issued a set of moral teachings intended to get people to behave better towards each other, but that...didn't stick as well as we hoped."

Didn't stick, really. This is her surprised face.

"We were expecting it to be less than universally followed! We were less expecting the holy wars!"

...and this is her actually surprised face. "You get holy wars by accident? As far as I know we only get holy wars when gods actually, you know, want them."

"We get people who want wars for other reasons using religion as an excuse."