Spirit and former-dictator Josef Stalin ruefully observed as Mr. McVeigh was given complimentary feather-care products and promotional coupons by an angelic welcoming committee, "I don't know why everyone is making such a fuss. I killed a lot more people than that amateur. In fact, next to God, I hold the record up here – check the board." This comment elicited a vociferous challenge from spirit and former-fuehrer Adolph Hitler, leading Archangel Michael to send the former-heads-of-state to separate cumulonimbus to cool off.

"Well, I don't like speaking ill of the newly dead," said spirit and former-kidnapper Giovanni Garibaldi, "and I'm not getting holier-than-thou – even though I obviously am or I wouldn't be here – but it makes me nervous to have all these mass-murderers up here. True, they can't kill the dead, which may be God's perverse idea of punishment, but it's not as if they are otherwise pleasant to be around. And someone like Timothy McVeigh, who doesn't strike me as being the sharpest knife in the drawer, can cause a lot of annoyance up here trying to kill people. It could be 800 years before he realizes the futility of it. I mean, I don't want to go to the mailbox outside of my mansion in the God's Glory every morning wondering if there is a pipe bomb in there. No, I can't die, but feathers singe and take a millennium – I timed it – to grow back."

Other members of the Christian community were more strident in their anger over the Lord's decision to forgive Mr. McVeigh. "I know those are the rules," said Pastor Jeremiah Tartuf, of Glory To The Lord on High And Mighty Assembly of God Church, in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, "but it would have meant more to His true followers down here if He had showed a little more of the bloodthirstiness He is famous for in the Old Testament. You know, He whets our appetite for a pound of flesh in the Old Testament, only to tell us to turn the other cheek in the New Testament. It's not mine to question, but it smacks of bait-and-switch to me! We were all walking around Butcher Hollow happy as pigs in waste that this McVeigh fellow was being sodomized and tortured by demons in Hell, and this news that he is in Glory, frankly, has spoiled our weeks as True Christians."

In a press release apparently issued to quell dissention, the Lord's press secretary, quoting the Lord, issued the following statement: "First, I want to thank the United States for the entertainment. Obviously, when I said "vengeance is mine," I didn't mean to claim any exclusivity. On the contrary, I was simply leading by example. I went to all the trouble of giving those disappointing creations of mine on Earth tips on whom to kill. After all, there are so many of them who deserve death and it gets tedious being the only One doing the killing. I just wish I hadn't made that promise in Genesis 8:21 about never offing everyone with a flood again. After all, why single out a few when none is without sin? But those Israelites were so quick with a piece of papyrus that they wrote that promise down before I'd really had time to think about it. Anyway, We (Me, Jesus and the Bird) are big fans of America up here, as most of the other countries on Earth have gotten too squeamish to kill civilians – well, unless it's another country's civilians. In any event, all of you know the rules. All you have to do is ask for forgiveness – and it shall be given. This Biblical by-law was developed not out of any leniency on My part, but simply to free up the backlog of forgiveness requests that developed 2,000 years ago."