"There's... a lot to unpack here... was my explanation this confusing? I was trying pretty hard but maybe it sounded like this to you and I need to go back over it... How do you go somewhere after you literally physically die?"

"I think I mostly got your explanation," the SF writer said, "but it's totally possible I misunderstood something that is going to bite us in the-- I mean, that's going to cause problems later on. Okay, so, humans have two parts-- we have a body and a soul. The soul is the part that does thinking and morality and stuff and it's eternal and nonphysical. When we die, our bodies become corpses, but our souls go on to Heaven or Hell. At the end of the world, our bodies and souls will join back together and we won't die or get sick or old or have impulses to commit sins."

"You don't have brains?" asks the theologian. "- do your bodies not decay when they die?"

"We have brains," the SF writer says. "They're sort of a... soul-body interface, I guess? Like, if you get brain damage, it's harder to do things, but I wouldn't think that affects the actual soul. Bodies decay when they die. The body we will get is a new, spiritual body, but it is expected to generally resemble us physically and so on."

"So you don't rejoin them, you get replacements that still look like you. And you'll be mentally altered somehow, so you no longer want to do or - think - things that - God told you not to?"

"Yes! Like how we were supposed to be in the beginning. But only the people who have accepted God into their hearts. Everyone else goes to Hell, which is a place of eternal suffering and torment separated from God."

"You know, I bet Voa can take immigrants as long as they don't want to have children."

"Immigrants... from Hell?" the SF writer says.

"Yes. It, uh, it might be a problem that they're dead, but if they don't have bodies it seems harmless, they could go - somewhere - shall I call the Governor over to get that set up right away -"

"Souls in Hell-- and Heaven for that matter-- are incorporeal and we do not have the ability to meaningfully contact them or arrange for immigration procedures. Our primary source of information about Hell and Heaven is God Himself, when He chose to live on Earth."

"Right. Uh... I'm sure you've already considered this but I'd be remiss if I didn't ask - have you considered that it might be dangerous, for you, to talk to aliens, because of your problems with thinking the wrong thing? I'm sure you all have a lot of practice being very careful, but we don't, and if one of us says something that inspires a - sinful thought? - I wouldn't want to get you in any trouble."

"Don't worry about it," the SF writer reassures, "humans commit dozens of sins a day. That's why entry into Heaven is based on accepting God's forgiveness, not based on not sinning-- He knew we couldn't! And you understand why we want to send missionaries. We're worried that you commit sins but don't know that you can accept God's forgiveness, so you might go to Hell."

"Uh," says the theologian, "I'd been taking your claims so far to be about humans. I don't really see any reason to believe that this sort of thing happens to Amentans, at least not in our own jurisdiction, I suppose if some of us move to Earth we might have to deal with all these problems you have."

"You wouldn't necessarily know," the SF writer says. "The only reason we know is that God told us! Otherwise our world looks absolutely identical to one in which none of this happens."

The human theologian makes a grumpy noise. 

"Well, uh," says the green, "God didn't tell us. You're telling us, but you're telling us about things that happened to you. We think with our brains, and don't have experiences after we die, and so on."

"You might have lost the records of Him telling you, or maybe He never told you in the first place, or all sorts of things," the SF writer says.

"I don't think we can assume that something we have no record of happened in Amenta because it happened on Earth," says the green. "And I'm not sure why that would seem like an inference you could make - it doesn't work the other way, you never invented castes - maybe you're using genders as castes -"

"The gender-as-caste thing seems right to me," the SF writer says. "The genders have different aptitudes, different educational systems, different occupations both historically and at present... See, God created our world, and we're not sure that there's any way for a world to come into being without God creating it."

"There's actually a theological argument which implies that if other worlds exist then God must have created all of them--" The human theologian begins to explain Plantinga's ontological argument.

The green makes a face, and makes more and more of this face as the argument wears on, but doesn't feel the need to interrupt it with clarifying questions. She just says, "I don't think that goes through," when he seems done.

"Was something confusing? It's a bit tangled, I can go through it again--"

"I'm sure," the SF writer interrupts, fearing another half hour of Plantinga, "that the argument will be easier to follow if you give her a book recommendation!" 

"That sounds great," agrees the green. "Maybe it'll - make more sense - written down."

"And maybe you can recommend some books of theology for us?" the SF writer says. "I think sexual ethics and pollution are going to be the things that are hardest for us to reconcile, especially since caste is sort of like gender."

"My own book is about caste but I can recommend some things on sex and pollution - sex isn't a core theology topic but some people focus on details including that one - let's see, Targena's Fourth Winter Book - it's aimed at older kids, but that might be the right level of basic? Kids who are about to spring for the first time and suddenly find sex relevant. And there's a chapter on it in Riade's Overview of Theology of Care. For pollution the text I assign students these days is Mirovor's Introduction to Delicate Subjects and my daughter liked Scrollmaker's Pollution Handbook for a less university level take."

"I think the best way to explain sex," the SF writer said, "is that for us sex is a topic treated with as much delicacy as pollution is for you, and with as much likelihood of accidentally causing offense. For example, 'so-and-so's grandfather is a sex worker' for us is sort of like saying 'so-and-so's grandfather is an undertaker' for you, if undertaking were a job anyone could get into if they had sufficiently bad luck and poor life choices."

"- they couldn't, it's a caste-locked occupation and they wouldn't have clean grandchildren wandering around polite society, but, uh, all right. We can try to screen greys who you might come into contact with for that, if you like? How many generations out, it might start to be difficult if they can't have fourth cousins in the trade. We don't want to oblige you to interact with anyone who bothers you, I'm sure the Governor won't mind swapping Anda for someone else..."