Like when I say to myself: “I’ll post to my blog at least once a month.”

Today I started reading The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. It’s a collection of 100 short stories, woven into a tale about a group of people who leave Florence for a palace just outside the city in order to escape the medieval plague known as The Black Death. They don’t have much to do in their new home except enjoy themselves, and a big part of their enjoyment comes from telling stories to one another.

The first story, like most stories, has a moral to it. The moral is: good intentions are everything. God can see into your soul, and he knows if you mean it or not. Catholics pray to saints when they want help and forgiveness, but how do you know which saint to pray to? It doesn’t matter, as long as you pray in the way you do for the right reasons.

To illustrate his point, the storyteller, Panfilo, tells a story of a truly evil man who became a saint. In his life he was a thief, a glutton, a murderer, and more. But on his deathbed he lies to a priest, pretends to have only committed minor sins – accidentally overcharging a customer once, cursing his mother one time – and to be deeply and inconsolably sorry even for these small lapses. Not only does the priest declare him to be absolved of his sins, but at his funeral he tells everyone what a saintly man he was in life, and soon this man is called Saint Ciappelletto.

As the storyteller points out, unless some secret act of real confession took place, then Ciapelletto was never in fact absolved of his sins and would, according to the medieval understanding of Christianity, be still now burning in Hell. God has the final say over that. But it is in the hands of mortals to decide who is and is not considered a saint, and Ciapelletto, through his deceit (so the story goes), managed to become one. Why wouldn’t God provide a sign that Ciapelletto was no saint after all? Why let an enemy of God be considered holy? The answer is: because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that those who pray to Ciapelletto, or to any saint, do so with pure and faithful hearts.

In the story it is a man, the priest, who decides on the saintly status of Ciapelletto; so in history it has been human beings who decide on the laws of religion. Did God guide them in these choices? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s all the same to God what rules people set up in his name. Some of these rules no doubt help human beings find peace and purpose and become better people; others less so. But the real thing of interest to God, if he exists, would be the human soul. And there are billions of those, each one infinitely different from every other, and each one responding in their own unique way to the fancies and follies that they find in the world as a whole. How could there be only one path to salvation? Why need there be if God is good and infinite?