Uh, you’ve been on this plane of reality for the last 25 or so years, haven’t you?
45 years I guess.
Some things don’t interest me, apparently Star Wars being one of them(is that what its from?)
Christian or not, I’d go look for Jesus while I was up there. I mean, He was a “good person”. I’d love to strike up a conversation with Him. Maybe even teach him how to play chess (badly)
::wonders if the afterlife has translators, as her 1st century Aramaic and Latin are a wee bit rusty::
That reincarnation is a major pain a large point of Hinduism, right? Trying to escape the cycle of death and rebirth is the goal, as I understand it. I am open to being corrected by someone who knows more. So, if I as a Christian, end up in “one of the pagan” afterlifes (afterlives?) I have to agree with Seige and the Hindus that I really don’t want to have to go through this all again. It would not be hell, but it sure wouldn’t be heaven (eternal bliss, joy forever more).
Wow.
Since I don’t know what I was expecting, it seems to me that it might take me a while to understand just what happened.
Then I realize that my beloved Lord and Savior is . . . dead.
It’s difficult to even express how deeply sad that would make me.
But, eventually (and we seem likely to have a lot of eventually coming our way) I have to be here, and “live” here. Perhaps it might be true that I am enough of a Christian to live as Christ would have me live, even if He was not there for me. I can only hope that that is true.
So, in the Elision Fields, or even Valhalla, I would try to act as I have tried to act here on Earth. To try to love each person I meet as if that person were the Lord Himself. To try to be what He is, in my heart, in the world as I find it. In the end, even Jesus Himself told me that Faith Hope and Love were the only things which will abide. Perhaps they will have to abide in my heart, and the hearts of those Christians in Nirvana. But abide they shall, if I can be the man I know that I should be.
I vastly prefer Christianity with Christ. But if I must choose, I choose Christianity, even if I am denied Christ. Good is good. Choosing to act by those same principles which resulted in my reward in the non Christian Heaven must be acceptable, since I am here.
And by the way, no one wants to spend eternity listing to me sing hosannas, or anything else.
Tris
I’m with Thea Logica. If there is a Heaven, I essentially imagine it as a timeless mystic union with God. Basking in the full glory of his love, feeling that same love for all the rest of creation, a sense of oneness and connectedness. I would think you wouldn’t really experience time per se. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing where you could count seconds off to yourself. It might not even be the sort of thing where individual identities were preserved.
Hell then, would essentially be the opposite. A sense of utter alienation from God and creation, an inability to feel anything positive about or from anyone else. Just a terrible aloneness and emptiness, adrift in a cold and uncaring void.
My personal preference would be for Heaven on the weekends, Earth on the weekdays. You gotta mix it up a little, so you appreciate how interesting the mud-and-struggle of Earth is and how wonderful the monotonous bliss of Heaven is.
Tris - Wow. You get my vote for the most eloquent, touching answer here. Maybe you can just write the hosannas and someone else can sing them.
People seem to have an idea of heaven as an actual physical place, somewhere up in the sky, and hell as somewhere under their feet. You can’t get to heaven by flying in a rocket ship (though that would be an interesting sci-fi story) and you can’t get to hell by digging a really deep hole.
Granted, we speak this way because none of the words we have can describe something that is outside of our experiences, so we have to resort to metaphors about flowing fountains and horny virgins. Basically, heaven is a place of eternal joy and communion with God, which is kind of hard to really imagine. And hell is a place of separation from God, which is also hard to imagine, since we spend all of our lives surrounded by God.
Anyway, I think Valhalla would be a miserable place to live in for eternity. Get this, the warriors spend all day fighting and hacking each other to bits, then at the end of the day, the dead spring back to life and everyone’s wounds heal. Pretty cool, right? As someone who practices martial arts, I admit having an opportunity to do nothing but hone my skills all day is intriguing. But think about it some more, all you do is fight, then die, then come back to fight some more. It sounds kind of like a soldier’s idea of hell, where the war never ends and no one’s tour of duty ends. And you’d be feeling pain, too, and I’m pretty sure most of us would go insane after the 20th time they got disembowelled. Miserable place, like I said.
To address Steve Wright’s question about the Viking afterlife, initially the Norse divided up the afterlife into Valhalla and the other place (I can’t be sure, but I think it was called Nifleheim). I think it had eternal winter or something. Later on, and clearly influenced by Christianity, they added a third place, where virtuous people could go, without having to be major warriors.
The Celts believed in reincarnation, so that rules out their afterlife. Ditto for Hindus. Lemme see, who else? Oh yeah, the ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife (the Kingdom of the West) was pretty much like the living world, as evidenced by all the stuff that people were either literally or symbolically buried with. The Chinese also believe the same thing.
I suppose those afterlives wouldn’t suck, since it’s pretty much already what I live in. But I guess it would suck for me personally since my relatives don’t believe in that afterlife, and so they wouldn’t think to burn paper money for me to spend according to Chinese belief, making me a homeless bum in the next world. I suppose that would mean that in the Chinese afterlife, the rich and middle class are all traditional-minded Chinese, whereas the vast majority of poor people would be comprised of the rest of us. This is assuming I don’t end up in Chinese hell, which is pretty much the standard demons and fire one.
My relatives also wouldn’t think to bury me with money to pay the ferryman with, leaving me stranded on one bank of that Egyptian river (whose name I can’t remember).
As for the Japanese, I believe their beliefs are similar to the Chinese. Bad people are sent to Lord Emma-o’s place (hell, in other words), where they’re cooked in a giant stewpot and eaten by demons. Or maybe just tortured in general. And good people get to live with their ancestors, which I suppose wouldn’t be too bad for me, though I’m sure there are a few weirdoes who’d creep me out. Unless and/or until they get reincarnated. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if this is a Shinto belief or some amalgam of Shinto and Buddhism.
I can’t remember anything the Romans and Greeks ever said about the Elysian Fields, though the Hades/Pluto underworld sounds like a depressing place. It’s implied, anyway, what with Hades moping around all the time and resorting to kidnapping to land a wife (was it Persephone?).
Speaking as an Egyptian-style pagan, I think ‘that Egyptian river’ you’re talking about is the Styx, and Greek. 
Reepicheep, I’m afraid you misread me. I said that if my friends’ idea of the afterlife is right and we are reincarnated, I would welcome it. First of all, as far as I know right now, it would be God’s will, which I am still obligated to follow. Second, it would be an opportunity to grow in knowledge and service. There are things I’ve done wrong in this life, and wrongs I’ve been unable to prevent or even ameliorate as much as I’d like to. I’d like another chance at that.
My own beliefs are more nebulous because I’m dealing with something I cannot know and I’m not supposed to concern myself with it. Jesus’ death was either sufficient atonement, in which case the afterlife is covered, or it wasn’t, in which case, I’m not sure what I can do about it, and I don’t know where I’d begin.
CJ
Whoa . . . wait just a danged minute, there, IWLN. Who said God’s not into classic rock 'n roll? He made David Lee Roth same as he made Wolfang Amadeus Mozart, for pete’s sake.
Surprised, but not disappointed or feeling as if it was “hellish”.
I don’t know what could possibly be waiting beyond death, but aside from the christian hell, the one place I wouldn’t want to be is the christian heaven. Just the idea of a perfectly blissful existance for all eternity makes me wretch.
I enjoy the good points in life because they contrast the bad point. Eternal bliss would become eternally mundane, and then eternal disappointment if there was never a bad feeling to contrast it against. And to counter the idea that we’ll become beings who could comprehend an enjoy it… well, that being wouldn’t be me.
Humans are forged of pain, loss and sorrow. Its what shapes us as the joy in our lives allow us to grow. To become something that isn’t capable of feeling pain… That would be unbearable.
And I think that’s the answer to why we are here. We live a life with pain and happiness, good and evil, before we go on. If I never feel pain again, I will always be grateful as I experience joy that pain is no longer a part of my life. The contrast to eternal bliss(which I think is a little extreme) will be the remembered experiences from here.
When He made David Lee, He was in a humorous mood.
Lilairen, the Greeks copied many things from the Egyptians, the same as the Romans copied from the Greeks. You’ll notice that there’s a Thebes in ancient Greece, as well as a Thebes in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian one came first. The Greeks also tried to present their gods as Greek versions of the Egyptian ones.
However, I may have conflated the River Styx with Egyptian beliefs about the Nile. Briefly, the west bank of the Nile was seen as the side where the land of death was somehow closer, and people tended to be buried there. I suppose I got the ferryman thing muddled up with it. Who knows, maybe that’s how the Greeks got their idea for the River Styx.
I agree, he did; but he truly tests my fortitude and patience with the crap we sing in church right now. If I am indeed a “wretched sheep”, I certainly don’t think it’s anything to sing about. 
I have never heard of a ferryman to reach the Duat; I’m marginally likely to have done so, as this is my religion we’re discussing here. Facing the forty-two judges and Wesir (Osiris) and avoiding being consumed by Ammut for being a nasty piece of work, yes, but a ferryman?
If you want to complain about relevant things your relatives would forget to do for you, complain about them not giving you a good map and the set of spells and good luck charms that make it easier to find the Hall of Ma’at rather than blundering around in the West getting lost.
Yeah.
lynn73!
My sister in the Lord, and one of the few other christians here.
Nice to see you.
Heaven is for fellowshipwith Jesus.
You don’t wanna be with Him, don’t come!