I'm surprised no one else drew this conclusion, but the random effects of the angels in this story were reminiscent of the effect of ta'veren in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, if you imagine the world as a fabris that is being woven into a pattern, then ta'veren are people (threads) who affect the weave by their very presence. The main purpose of this is to cause big changes in the world. In the history of this world, there is a King Arthur like character who was a ta'veren because he made drastic changes to the world around him. Other threads in the weave bend to make new patterns by their very presence. Besides causing huge changes like the downfall of empires or the rise of a religion, or other big events, there are also lots of smaller random effects. A child might fall out of a 4th story window and hit paving tiles without a scratch, but a man might trip on a stick, and die upon hitting the ground. It's sort of a magnification of luck. The good and the bad still happen in "normal" proporations, but the good tends to be really good and the bad tends to be really bad in the presence of a ta'veren.
Anyway, on to the story. I didn't like this story at all, which is a shame because I love the discussion of philosophy and theology, but this one didn't do it for me.
The title alone biased me against it. It seems like it's telling me what I should believe in, which annoys me. And that cotinues throughout the story. This entire world seems to have been built to show that "this is how things are" and I just don't buy into that.
The biggest reason of all is that when miracles become mundane events that happen everyday and we can all see what hell is like, then theology becomes a science of measuring these measurable events rather than deciding what unknowable things like the hereafter are like.
Also, there was just a lot of really dry summary. I listened to the point that they started telling the story of the 3rd person before I gave up, so it was quite a while, and it was all just summary of stuff that clearly happened in the past, none of the characters were particularly compelling, and it just went on and on and on.
The reader really did not help. He sounded bored. Which certainly didn't help my opinion of the story, since I'd already thought the dry summary boring.
So they can all see Hell, and it's just like everyday life, but without physical ailments, and without the randomly visiting angels? Compared to everyday life, that sounds friggin great! So what's so hellish about it? Heck, if I lived in this world, I might be tempted to commit suicide at a young age just so I can get away from the angels! And going to Heaven is just the privilege of going to hang out with the deity who you've never been in the presence of? So Hell is the absence of Heaven, basically, but if you've never been to Heaven, is that really terrible?
And most of all it was just really really really long. The part I listened to only conveyed about 5-10 minutes of actual information, if it had been compressed to such, I might've kept up the interest to listen to the rest.