Even if I got in, heaven must be boring as hell, says Rogerson
By Stephen Gibbs March 13, 2006
WHOEVER sent Roger Rogerson (a convicted Australian ex-policeman) a Bible with the note, “Where will you be in eternity?” might have assumed he would be armed with an answer to what the afterlife held. He had, after all, sent several souls ahead of him to take a look.
But while Rogerson would like to think there was a heaven, he does not expect to get in. “I’ve been pretty naughty over the years just being myself,” he says. Less than a month after being released from his second prison stint, Sydney’s most notorious ex-policeman has predicted how St Peter would react on finding him at the gates of heaven.
“He’d probably send me back,” Rogerson told ABC Radio last night. “I deserve to be sent back.”
Rogerson long ago tired of questioning about the old days – being asked if he shot anyone outside the line of duty or if he was corrupt. But in an interview for the Sunday Profile program he spoke of his spiritual beliefs and post-jail attitude to life.
Now 65, the grandfather of seven revealed he had been sent a Bible while serving a year in jail for lying to the Police Integrity Commission. “I had a bit of a read,” Rogerson said last night. “It was a modern version from America called The Message Bible.” But he did not know who had delivered it to Kirkconnell Correctional Centre, or exactly why. He had checked with his two daughters and their husbands, who were all “quite religious” – one son-in-law is a minister in the Church of Christ.
“They assured me that they would have sent me a Bible had they thought I would read it but they thought it would be a waste of time. It had a little note in the back there, you know, ‘Where will you be in eternity?’ So obviously it was [someone] worrying about my future.”
Rogerson was raised a Protestant and went to Sunday school. He still believed in “a God of some description” but was not a religious man. He did not know what, if anything, awaited a man when he had died.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d like to think that it all happens, that you go up to heaven and have a nice life up there, but then I look at the practical side. I think of all the millions and millions of people that have lived since Jesus was on this Earth – where are they now? Are the good people in heaven? They must be sick of living in heaven by now; you’d think it would get boring. I don’t know.”
(Three of those he may think of are the late armed robbers Warren Lanfranchi, Phillip Western and Butchy Burns.)
“They’re all the things that I look at, but my daughters tell me I shouldn’t look at it that way, and my mother assures me I shouldn’t, but I suppose I’m a pragmatic sort of a person.”
He would like to hear something more than Kerry Packer’s report after his 1990 heart attack: there’s nothing there. “If Kerry Packer had said, ‘I saw a nice white light that I was heading to’, I’d be off to church.”
“As I said, I’m no white knight and I never pretended to be a white knight but I suppose you could say that I don’t really deserve – there’d be more deserving cases to go to heaven than me.”
As for those he may have sent towards that white light, shooting criminals had been work. “I mean, you were given a gun to protect yourself and use it to effect the arrest of a fleeing felon. That’s what it’s for. Maybe they should use it more often.”
And he might be off to church, but not confession. “No, I wouldn’t ask for forgiveness, no. I’d cop it on the chin.”
Related Articles:
- THE NEW EVANGELICALS: HOW CHRISTIANS ARE RETHINKING ABORTION AND GAY MARRIAGE
- Theologians, like parents, are invited to be humble as well as (frequently) ignorant…
- The Jesus Driven Life
- INCARNATION
- Virgin Birth: ‘God degraded Mary?’
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.
Discussion
No comments for “Even if I got in, heaven must be boring as hell, says Rogerson”