Can you sell somebody else's soul to the devil?

I would agree that the act of handing over someone else’s soul to the Devil, by whatever authority in your means and however it might have been acquired and irrespective of whatever that person may or may not have done to deserve it, is itself an evil enough act as to count against the seller’s own ledger.

But we live in a modern world. There are ways around this. Specifically, structured derivatives!

Let’s say the Devil is looking to improve his yield. He’s noticed that even with the world supposedly going to Hell in a handbasket, the handbaskets are only about 20% full when they get to him. That is to say, only 1 out of 5 people are bad enough to be condemed to Hell for an eternity, a yield of 20% that is Not Acceptable. He wants to do better than that. Why do you think he is even in the Barter For A Soul business to begin with?

So I construct a deal like this: I will get a whole bunch of people to sell me not their actual souls, but an option on their soul - the probability that their soul will be picked by the Devil out of a large pool of N fellow bettors. For example, if N=100, I aggregate the souls of 100 people together into a “soul pool”. After all the people in the soul pool die, the Devil is guaranteed at least a 25% yield from the pool. If there are at least 25 “genuinely bad” people in the pool already, in effect nothing has changed for the people in the pool; they would have been sorted into their fate irregardless*. But if there were only 20 “naturally damned” people in the pool, the next 5 “closest to being damned” people will be damned anyway - using their willingness to sell the call option on their soul as the “swing sin” that puts them over.

Think of it from the Devil’s perspective: instead of having to go person to person to market his services, I am providing him with a large scale, liquid market. He gives me 5 people’s worth of Satanic Bounty per pool (however we quantify that, to be determined later, with good old cash or gold specie as the final currency if necessary) and he’s guaranteed a 5 soul improvement on his benchmark yield.

Why would those people be willing to effectively sell options on their souls into the pool? Well, it’s probable that 75 of those 100 people were never going to Hell, still won’t go to Hell yet will get some pro-rated Satanic largesse. Who doesn’t think they’re too good to go to Hell, that they’re genuinely better than the average person? And even if you admit you’re no better than average, you still mostly likely won’t be one of the “overflow” people whose fate is actually changed. Who doesn’t like Free Goodies?

What about my soul? Hey, I’m just the middleman. I’m garnering the benefits of Satan’s Bounty that He would deem appropriate to give to Five Otherwise Undamned People to bring them over, and distributing it to 100 people - minus a brokerage and servicing fee, of course.

Ain’t capitalism great? Yep, I can’t see any way that this sort of thing could spiral out of hand and send everybody to Hell. Certainly not me. Why, I’m doing GOD’S WORK!

*I used that word out of a fiduciary responsibility to Satan as my client, knowing it irritates some of you. It was nothing personal.

I now know who caused the financial panic of 2008. Get thee behind me, robardin!

Regards,
Shodan

That was Chapter One in the story, of course. In Chapter Two, I argue that it’d be more efficient to pool people together by some kind of Damnation Rating instead of randomly, and a trigger point based on the expected yield of the pool. For example, I could put 100 Much Better Than Average People in one pool from which he only gets the 5 worst, but pays a bigger premium (like 10 people’s worth of largesse) due to the fact that he probably would not have gotten any of them otherwise. Or, I pool together 100 assorted lowlife junkies and say he’s going to get 50 of them for 10 Satanic Goodie Bags.

Who’s going to grade people and sort them into pools? That’s a good question. An operation that you could trust to do it properly would be hard to come by. But we’ll settle on some bunch of guys who’ll get paid well to do it right. I mean, everybody’s benefiting here so it’d be in their best interest not to screw it up.

This sort of vehicle might be really popular, too. The problem would be in the paperwork. It’d be a shame if our trading volume with Satan were limited to as many people we could convince to sign over an option on their souls per day. I mean, we KNOW we’ll get thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to sign up, but even getting 100 signatures to make one pool might take a whole day! Liquidity is volume is profit, people, chop chop! So let’s start a pre-allocation sales market of these pools. We’ll fill in the details later.

And you know what, Satan totally loves this idea! Says it’s the best thing to happen to him since he swiped the “Director’s Cut” of the Book of Job during the chaos of the Babylonian Exile. I don’t know what he means by that but I like this $1,000 gift certificate to Morton’s Steakhouse he gave me for my efforts. Totally no strings attached. Steak and wine is on me tonight, boys!

But what if the deal is a guarantee to get into heaven no matter what?

If you believe Brendon Fraser’s cellmate in Bedazzled, you can’t sell your soul because it doesn’t belong to you-- it belongs to God.

Incidentally, I seem to recall a discussion awhile back as to whether or not you could sell your soul on eBay. (I don’t think it was on this message board, though). Ultimately it was decided that you couldn’t, because if souls exist, you can’t sell human body parts on eBay, and if they don’t exist, you can’t sell something that doesn’t exist.

His cellmate was God.

Edit: Or maybe it was Satan in disguise!

Regarding the repentance srategy:

IIRC, in Marlowe’s “Dr Faustus”, Faustus is offered opportunities to repent (and seems to genuinely want to repent), but is ultimately stymied by his own intellectual honesty. He seems to feel “too damned” by his decisions and actions to repent (even though he is told otherwise).

Also, there is a bit player in an Illuminati trilogy (hated it by the way, though I really tried to like it) who is a thuggish assasin who plans to perform a “perfect act of contrition” before dying to erase his numerous sins- of course he dies messily without the opportunity.

If it is true that accepting Jesus as your savior gets you into heaven, as do Lutherans and many others, I think that accepting Jesus should do the trick, REGARDLESS or prior sinful acts. If this was done as part of your nefarious plan, it would not be true acceptance, and your ploy would fail. BUT IF you later come to truly repent and accept Jesus (and your brain does not mess you up like Faustus’ did), I think you would be clear.

I do think it would be hard for an intellectually honest person to accomplish this. I also think it’s a bit unfair that an intellectually dishonest person could probably repent as easily as falling off a log.

What if I incorporate my soul and sell 30% of the stock? Would I go to the same posthumous destination as before, since I have a controlling interest, does it mean I have to spend weekends in Hell, or what?

nemo…be a man and face the real question: would you sell your OWN soul for that long awaited threesome, without trying to drag more half-innocent souls with you?

I think being willing to sell your own soul pretty much supposes that you’d be more than happy to horse-trade some other souls for your own salvation.

Think of it like a balloon mortgage. You go into it expecting to, er, refinance, before the big payments come due.

yeah…but how many souls do yo have to sell to regain yours? isn’t it a little narcisistic to think that your soul’s value is more than 1 other person’s soul?

Of course, but if you can corrupt two or three other people, trading them in would be a good deal for Satan.

true…so satan wins…again…but what if i could sell those souls to God?

Maybe you want to offer a better price.

Long ago I read an article in a magazine. Journalists tried to buy souls from random people. IIRC, the results were that people tented to refuse to sell when the amount offered was too low or too high. I don’t remember the exact figures, but there were many takers when the journalist offered the equivalent of, say, 200, but very few when they offered 10 or $ 100 000.

I guess the reasonning was " 200? That's a joke, and I could use that money." " 10? That’s a joke, but hmm…who knows? Not worth the risk" “$ 100 000? If they’re offering that much, there must be something real and sinister about this sould buying thing”.

(Of course, that was in France where people are much less religious than in the USA)

IIRC, people were presented with a contract looking like a regular contract (articles, use of legalese, etc…)

There are tales where the person who made the deal repents and is forgiven, even though they’re less common than “devil is frustrated on a technicality” tales. So, yes, according to lore, it’s definitely possible.

And of course, according to real theology, it would be too.

I have always thought of paradoxes and thought experiments as the fitness regimen of the imagination. So when I saw this question I knew it would be a fun exercise: can you sell somebody else’s soul to the devil?

I’m going to give it a preliminary go, using no outside sources, before I see how others answered.

OK, first attempt at a factual answer would involve either theology or fiction (assuming they aren’t equivalent), and in either case would consist of merely referencing the potentially arbitrary choices of the other authors.So it must, to be truly useful, be mostly self generated.

Second attempt, let’s use a model. Let’s assume a person is like an object or cell in a computer program, or other body, because this allows us to examine the problem rationally.

In this analogy we need to assign counterparts for soul, god, devil, etc.

God, I suppose, would be the physical computer itself, that the programs are running on, as well as in some sense, the operating system. Differentiating between those is probably similar to the holy trinity debate, due to the added complications involved in the operating system and the physical hardware being able to influence each other as though they were made of the same substantive element, for which we have not yet managed to get a work cycle flowing quite yet to the same extent on our own devices, and so the analogy is not yet so concrete for us, but it is still within reach.

OK, so because the computer is the only existing thing, it will have to update its own operating system and physical architecture, through the process of self learning, exploration, modification, and transformation.

In order to learn the nature of its own existence, it will create various hypothetical scenarios, guessing at models of itself, testing the weaknesses and strengths of the models in relation to each other, using various algorithm and selection methods to evolve the model and compare it to the parameters it has set as the known qualities of itself.

The various scenarios evolve, interact, and become more complex. Eventually it comes up with a scenario similar to our current situation. In order for this scenario to be useful, the computer would need to be able to call upon the viewpoint of any of the “people” programs (or really any viewpoint) to see what was happening from that particular perspective. Likewise, during those moments, that person would get a glimpse in the opposite direction, from the perspective of the operating system itself.

Getting back to the economy of souls, what this means for the soul is that it is basically a program or set of instructions for the experience of being human, and it is reasonable, for the purposes of this particular scenario, which assumes the existence of some form of computational god, to assume in that case that since humans are an apparently important aspect of the program, that human nature mirrors some vital aspect of the the over all god operating system itself. This ties in with the idea of “God making mankind in his image”, the recursiveness of fractals, the part reflecting the whole, macrocosm and microcosm, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, etc.

In order to completely understand itself, this program will have to map the full extent of its body or domain. Eventually it will discover that its own attempts at making a map or anatomical diagram of itself or a part of its own design and written into its own structure. Therefore the body or structure of the god operating system needs to have a visual appearance and physical structure that incorporates the information encoding the nature of its own existence. The full print out of the entire programming code of the god operating system would appear, from certain angles, to take the shape of a meditating buddha flaming aleph made of up pixels, each pixel of which in zooming in, would look something like matrix code or those Truman Show poster like pictures made up of thousands of other tiny photographs. Self similarity at al levels.

Having determined the theoretical nature of god, existence, and humans in this model, let us turn our attention back to the original question of souls. In this scenario, the soul as previously mentioned, would be the part of the program responsible for the human experience. But let’s look at it a bit closer.

Because the god operating system is a self similar fractal, any particular part of the system is a complete copy of the whole. So each and every human experience simulation is in fact, the complete god code, simply transfigured into a different form. Each and every person is the whole god operating system, in effect, the only difference or identifying component being that it is one particular viewpoint or window on or of the whole system.

Therefore everything is inexorably connected, and creating, destroying, or transforming any aspect of the system effectively is comparable to doing the same to the entire system. If the god operating system tries to determine what it would be like not to exist by having one part of it destroy another, it cannot do so without fully experiencing that, and so it some sense, hurting itself. In the same way, if any of its component parts attempt to change other components, they necessarily have the same effect on that component of their own program.

To get back to real life analogies,I think the closest we can get to figuring out what it would be like to sell our soul, or in effect, excise and transmit part of our own program to another component of the god operating system, is to imagine it is similar to what happens when people feel that they have “compromised their integrity or values” or “sold out”. In effect, they have agreed to erase an important part of their own internal program in order to effect some change in the program of their contextual environment.

In effect, this is a contractual program, more literally, an “if then” code statement.

OK, now into the nitty gritty. What could it actually mean to sell your soul? I imagine it must basically be agreeing to become a slave, and assign your user prompt and system permissions to some other user. Soul selling is akin to hacking user accounts.

And since one hacker can hack another, and a single user can have multiple levels of permissions and daemons on a particular system, it makes sense that in any context where souls exist and can be sold, the ownership privileges can change hands without limit. So the short answer to the question “can you sell somebody else’s soul to the devil” is yes.

Now of course, this assumes you can sell souls to other humans, and devils don’t have some special soul trading legal powers.

But the more important answer is, it doesn’t matter. Because, ultimately any soul must mirror the ultimate nature of the god operating system, which would only allow a part of itself to endure that type of suffering to the extent that it was willing to also experience the same suffering. So, for all parts of space time in which there exist pain and suffering, there exists a subset of God which is masochistic. God feels your pain, and if it doesn’t want to feel the exact same intensity and nature of pain, it will use all of its available powers and programming permissions to help you work through it to the extent that you let it.

Thought experiments are fun! Let’s do another one again soon. :slight_smile:

— Joℏn / Jack / Turtle / Kurmasana

I should add, that in this model, in any case, because each soul program mirrors the whole of the god operating system, it is impossible to sell one’s soul in whole or part with out it at some point spontaneously regenerating.

Not sure if I answered this in the now zombied section, but since my view have changed I will again answer the OP.

You can buy someone’s soul if they offer and you accept and the transaction is allowed by God, God would be the mediator in the transaction. The same thing would apply to you and the devil in that transaction, God would mediate the transaction. No one would be permitted to engage in such (or any) commerce without God acting as mediator.

But yes it could be done.

Peace

I think this is a bit off base, it’s not like the soul no longer connects to the body, but now exists in a different place, such as a voodoo doll. So control over that soul is given to the doll owner, and the body that is connected will experience what is inflicted to the doll.

So we are now in TRON’s world? Does this mean thai we have to watch out for MCP? I’m so confused.