Satan Now Buying Human Souls Online in Russia

Sometimes there are pieces of news that I can only explain with the frivolous mood of internet users and bloggers during this holiday season. Today’s news is from Russia where we are still getting ready to begin celebration as we mainly celebrate the New Year here and the Orthodox Christmas will only be on the 7^th of January. But it looks like some of the internet users are already beginning to enjoy themselves online with the latest idea being to trade human souls via blogs and forums.

The thing is that multiple online Russian-language resources now feature ads inviting people to sell their souls for an undisclosed amount of money to be agreed upon by the buyer and seller. The number of such ads appearing in blogs and on forums is enormous - Google offers almost one million results for the search phrase “buying a soul” in Russian.

While it may sound like a funny joke at first (I personally thought the post I read was an early draft for the 1^st of April published a few months earlier by accident), in reality it looks like a very disturbing trend with the followers of Satanism inviting young (20 to 35) people in certain regions to sell their souls to Satan. The prices vary from mere $20 to $1,000 depending on the background of the souls’ owners.

Many of the visitors of the sites and blogs featuring buying souls ads consider the offer to be nothing but a joke where one gets a nice amount of money (if one’s soul is qualified as good enough) as a part of some innocent game. But unfortunately it smells too bad to be a joke and while I myself tend to rarely believe in various mystical things in this particular case I feel there is something terribly bad going on with this online trade.

After agreeing to the deal, the young men participate in a strange ritual where they transfer their souls to Satan in exchange for the agreed amount of money. And only later they realize this whole thing could be far from a joke or a game with many of them eventually arriving to their local churches with complains about not feeling well and constantly suffering from nightmares.

As a result of these complains and the number of online ads appearing, this situation is now a huge concern both for the Orthodox church and the local police as they are looking for the people buying souls - those people posting the ads tell they are mere middlemen in the transactions.

I have always been a strong supporter of the freedom of speech online but I have a feeling that there are things not to be made jokes of - and a human soul definitely looks like one to me. And while so many things that happen to appear on web pages can easily be interpreted as jokes, in this particular case I have a feeling such ads should be filtered out and moderated - just in case some more people think it’s funny to make a joke of their souls.

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