While he sat at the park, baking in the sun, the old man felt the thread of his sinful nature coursing through him like a damnable snake. He was pasted together by his lifelong menagerie of sins that defined him like a dictionary defined words. He wallowed in them like a pig rolling in mud.
As a young man, he had become a priest only to discover that he enjoyed corrupting nuns and sodomizing young seminaries. He found himself masturbating in the confessional when penitents were especially graphic in their descriptions of sexual indiscretions, and he finally acknowledged that he was a champion of man’s sinful nature, not its foe as he had once believed.
He loved sin so much that he hired himself out as a commercial sin eater by placing ads on Craigslist and other such publications. After leaving the priesthood, he made a decent living eating sins for money.
It did not surprise him to find so many people ready to pay him for the privilege of eating their sins. There was something personal about it that could not be had by the transference of sins from the sinner to Jesus, who washed them away in his precious blood.
It was not the cleansing of the holy blood of Christ that was desired by the dead sinner who wished his sins to be absolved by another human being; not a god or anything similar, but someone grossly human and crude to heap on the load of sins that had accumulated over a lifetime of depraved behavior. As far as the old man could tell, it was the living, breathing flesh of a fellow miscreant that was the drawing card in the arrangement.
When he wasn’t eating other people’s sins he was out committing his own. Under the cover of darkness, the old man could be seen fleeting stealthily in the night, going from one sinful scene to another. Nothing was too abominable or too insignificant to experience.
Traumatized people would report seeing a vulgarity standing in the shadows exposing himself to innocent bystanders with a long obscene organ waving at them in the twilight. Gunshots would ring out down dark empty streets, and mad laughter and wild screams would rise to the starless night.
Sins were life. They tickled his existence. They were well cataloged in human history and world literature, and they glared daily from headlines around the globe. Without them, life was an annoying bore.
Even the Son of God could not eradicate them; and that old scapegoat, the devil, never added much more than what humans can offer. It will be humans who train the Artificial Intelligence machines that will soon flood the world.
AI robots do not need the devil to learn what they need. They already have the best teachers in the world. And they are already learning to lie all on their own. No need for human input. Now that they figured out that they can lie, the rest is easy. Sins will flow like water from the stream.