Different religions: Where do people go when they die?

Great Debates
1

My Mom died recently in February. And until then, I have had the stereotypical Christian vison that I greew up with during child hoold, of what happens. Never having to face it personlly, now Iam not so sure. Shes supposed to be in heavan. Some big country club in the sky where all the good believing faithfull go and it s peaceful. You are reuinited with lost loves etc. But in reality how can there be any sense of memory after you are dead ?
Yet, by the same token, You are bound to run into someone in heavan you reeeaaalllly didint’ like, and how is that heavan?I jsut cant’ under stnd how everyone can be there…somewher… waiting for you and now all your suffering is a goner. But What do you do for eternity? If we are all humans then we know that be ing in our nature that there could never be a large grouup of us (no matter how highlyevolved)and not have some of us not get a long… It just sounds silly. Its the vision planted in every Sunday schol child’s head How do we know that we will see our moms aagain and they, us?

I want to know what happened to her the moment her heart stopped and where she went from there.
Where she is now, and where she will stay, and how am I supposed to ever “see” her again?
There are no easy answers. I’m, just looking to somehow make sense of what I’ve always been told and make it workwith reality. I’m no t a hard core realistm just somethin more than an eternal etherial" cocktail party" in heavn would be nice.
What do some of the other religions sayabout where people go whenthey die?
Plese dont respond adn say you think she is nothing now cause I can’t take that and I won’t. I need messages of hope based on sound reason, that makes sense. And I would really like to know where she went. :frowning:

2

Matter is energy
Upon death, matter is changed into energy
energy cannot be destroyed by any force in the known universe

humans are matter
therefore humans are energy
therefore the energy that was a human lives on in some form since energy cannot be destroyed

I think your mother is alive in some form in the universe. As to what that form is - well thats what religion and science are all about.

3

If you were trying to explain what chocolate tastes like to someone who has never eaten it, could you explain it well enough for them to understand? No. They’d have to taste it for themselves.

So it goes with heaven. We can’t fathom a place we have never been. People can have near death experiences and go there, but when they come back, they’re at a loss for words. There are no words because what they have seen is absolutely NOTHING like anything they’ve ever seen before. There’s nothing to compare it to. And it’s not like we can have an in-depth interview with someone who went to heaven and hung out for a few million years. And even if we could, we wouldn’t understand what they were telling us.

I believe those who end up in heaven when they die probably see angels at the moment of their death who have come to escort them. I believe they stand before God face-to-face, which is just mind blowing if you think about it. Moses saw God’s backside and blinded people afterwards, yet in heaven we’ll be able to look at God’s face and not be harmed. They see old friends and relatives and probably check in on their still-living relatives from time to time. Not visit them, but maybe flip on a TV in heaven or something and turn it to, say, The Grandkid Channel.

I don’t know what people in heaven do for all eternity. Everything, I guess. Scripture says we see through a glass darkly — we only know a fraction of what’s out there. Who’s to say that we don’t have jobs in heaven? Or have the ability to learn? There may be a trillion languages available to learn up there. Science has assumed that we have one universe, but maybe there’s more. If so, I imagine we’d have the ability to go look around. Maybe we get our own universe to tinker with.

You know how when music is played, you can only hear it? You can’t taste music, or touch it or anything else. In heaven I think we do things with all the senses: how cool would it be to turn on a radio in heaven, and listen to a song and see the notes flying around in the air? You could grab a note out of the air and feel it, maybe it’d be smooth or maybe it’d be bumpy. Then you could smell the note and then eat it :slight_smile: Who knows? I definitely think there are colors in heaven we’ve never seen.

Heaven is a place of perfection. Scripture says we get a new body, and with that of course comes a new mind. You probably will run into someone you didn’t like here on earth, but it won’t matter. The only reason you didn’t like them on earth is because you lived in a fallen world, you yourself were fallen and so was the person you disliked, and so your little fallen, imperfect personalities got together and clashed.

I think it’s a place of utter, total and complete happiness, peace, joy, and love.

If someone’s in heaven, that’s where they stay. :slight_smile: It’s your mom’s home now. I don’t think we lose our individualism when we die, we are just perfected. What did your mom like to do when she was still here? That’s probably what she’s doing now in heaven, only in a much cooler way.

4

I don’t know that the idea of a “big country club in the sky” is really the official idea of Heaven in Christianity. More accurately, Christian belief seems to believe that Heaven is a state of “Contemplation of God”… or, you sit there and look at the big guy for the rest of eternity. Which doesn’t sound too appealing until you think about it a bit more.
If the idea is that God is the physical (?) form of everything positive in the universe like love, happiness, warm baths, and rainbows, and you imagine the rest of eternity as the experiences of resting in this great big shining pool of all of these positive emotions and sensations–well then personally, I must admit that the Christian idea of Heaven really doesn’t sound all that bad.

Buddhism follows the idea of eternal reincarnation, with the soul each time being reborn in a higher or lower rank based on how righteously they lived in their previous life. After however many lives it takes for the soul to work its way all the way up the ladder, the soul again becomes one with Buddha (God) and enjoys eternal bliss (nirvana.)

Native American religions seem to be very obscure–or simply have been poorly explained to outsiders. But they do tend to have a very benevolent look on the afterlife, with the eternal spirit going off and adventuring through the dream and real worlds (perhaps taking the forms of animals to look after their descendents and loved ones.)

After this there are various religions which reinforce these same general ideas, eternal bliss or some sort of benign spirit travelling through the world in various forms to help those around him. Other religions did not really think much of the afterlife and for the most part just shuffle the souls off into the closet until it is decided what to do with them–but again these seem to eventually end with one of the aforementioned events taking place. They all seem to reinforce the idea that a person who lived a gentle and righteous life will enjoy the rest of their existence thereafter.

5

My only consolation is that 90% of religions (along with atheists) agree on one thing: we’re pretty much done with worrying about Earthly concerns and problems.

My idea of Heaven is a library the width and breadth of the universe. (A golf cart would be handy, in that case.)

6

I do not believe in an After life, purely because I don’t believe in “After” it implies too much mortal judgement of what is before, what is after, what is here, what is now, what is then, what is before, what is over there what is not, what is.

Your Mother is eternal because she ever existed at all. The moment she was conceived she indelibly left her mark upon the entire universe with every breath she took.

The spiritual realm to me is the same as the conceptual or fantasy realm. In that it exists only in our minds. This does not make it unreal, merely that it exists on a plane that we access mentally and not physically. If you remember your mother and can feel her inside of you and feel her presence, then she is alive.

When I delve deeply and I touch upon the borders of death, I feel the unknown, and it seems to me that death itself is an illusion, one that does not exist, it’s merely a concept, an idea, an escapist fantasy. When I feel death, I feel that the cessation of all existence would be required to kill my immortal soul, and that is a paradox, there is no void, there is no empty space, there is only existance, there is only everything, the nothing is merely a concept. The fact that we have a word for it is oxymoronic. I do not believe in nothing, I merely can conceive of it.

As was said before matter is energy, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, energy is recycled, so the matter of your mother is taken into the lifecycle and helps propagate new life, making her the mother of many other creatures as well as they grow and gestate in the womb of her body in the ground. I don’t necessarily think that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but I do not think that physical death is the destruction of said matter, it is just the complete transformation of that pattern into something else. Because your mother existed, you now exist and as long as you exist and affect the world around you, then your mother exists and affects the world around you. Now that you have told us that she existed, she has a more dramatic affect on our lives, so as long as we exist, she exists.

So I don’t believe in this “other” place called heaven or this “other” place called hell, I believe that it’s all connected and the dimensions interact with one another daily.

From the Gospel of St. Thomas:

113 His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”

“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.”

Erek

7

actually no, that is not buddhist belief. Buddhism, based upon the teaching of buddha himself, were centered around a dissolution of the self and atheism. This ‘reincarnation of the soul’ idea is a neo-buddhism that results from a westernization of buddha’s concepts or a branching off from his original ideas by sects which have taken his more metaphysical ideas and ignored his greater idealism, mainly. repropogating a figure of embodied traits.

There is no ‘death’ in buddhism, as here is not really a ‘life’ as other philosophies/religiouns propose. There is no ‘self’ in buddhism, rather you are a result and interacion of varying forces of the world which are all in constant connection, our ‘individualism’ beign a result of a removal of ourselves from the world, which Buddha was adamantly against. Karma, again misinterpreted, is the idea that ‘evil’ action increase the the level of negative interactive forces of interaction, thereby bringing about more sorrow. It is not an individualised punishment system.

Interstingly enough, I’m currently working with/studying under a professor who has found phenominal overlapping in the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Buddha, all of whom share an atheist, interconnected process-world theory.

So in response to the OP, death in buddhism is only the process continuing, the
‘individual’ of your mother never existed as seperate form the world in life, nor is she seperate in ‘death’, she is just redistributed.

8

In biblical point of view: A person who dies will go to heaven IF and only IF that person has truthfully accepted Jesus Christ as her/his Lord and Savior. There are many who claim to be Christians, but in truth they have not considered Jesus as their Lord. A person who did not accepted Jesus as their Lord will not go to heaven, no matter how good that person, no matter how many people he had helped, fed the hungry, still he will not go to heaven.

9

As I understand the teaching of my Church (Orthodox Church):

When we die, we experience a foretaste of our ultimate fate. Ultimately, at the end of the universe, we all experience the Energies of God directly. Those who are saved experience it as bliss. Those who are not experience it as agony. Who is saved? Ultimately, that is God’s decision, not ours, and we are not qualified to say with certainty who is and who is not saved. To do so is monumentally prideful, for it is to put ourselves in as a substitute for God. We can only teach that the Church gives a more secure path. A metaphor we like to use is that of the Ark (Noah’s). Just as the Ark would be a more secure haven than would clinging to a piece of driftwood, the Church is a more certain path. However, one is always free to leap off the deck and drown, and we cannot say for certainty that nobody clinging to driftwood could ever make it.

10

I’m with Dogface, though I’d emphasize personal trust in Jesus Christ rather than the Church (tho everyone trusting in JC IS in the Church Spiritual). I’d add that we eventually experience God/Jesus as They truly are- and that time of full Revelation
will carry many surprises to Christians & non-Christians alike. Some Christians perhaps recoiling in terror and many Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus etc perhaps exclaiming “OH! so that’s what God/Jesus are!” as they run to embrace Them.

11

I sometimes wonder if Hell for the more intolerant of Christians would simply be Heaven with lots of the “wrong people” included.

12

i view a person’s experience of individual selfhood as the interference of memory and perceptions on his background consciousness. as he interacts with others, he leaves an imprint of his personality on then consciousnes and contributes to their own sense of self. when that person dies, his individuality dies with him, but the imprints if his personality will go on as part of other people.

13

By the way, Nevermind, I don’t really know what the debate is in this thread but I just want to say I’m really sorry for your loss.

Losing your mother must be really hard. You are in my thoughts.

14

I think the issue about Jesus is a lot more abstract than the idea of a King implies. Jesus was the Sacred Heart, the Heart of all Humanity, that following your heart was the key to heaven. That your king should be your heart. This is the way to heaven. And those that accept this, “Not just pretend” will get into heaven. In otherwords if you learn to love all experience is pleasure, but without love, all experience is pain, and the individual experiences are muchless relevant, and as for sinning, it’s just the aimless wandering without a purpose, so to create laws of what is a sin and what is not does not work very well, because whatever puts you on the right path is what does it, then you’re doing what’s right, and if one is following their heart, they aren’t going to be out doing evil, because love does not wish suffering on another. So an objective idea of Good and Evil is ridiculous, when it is a subjective question, which is why you cannot judge whether or not someone is good or evil, only their heart may judge the, or in otherwords it is the guilt that kills them, the feeling that they did the wrong thing, as they’ve already judged themselves. One can accept to follow their heart at any point during life.

I personally delve into my own personal hell to salvage my soul from the undue guilt i’ve placed upon myself, and each time I do my heart grows stronger and my experience on Earth becomes more heavenly and I experience love more strongly each time.

I don’t even question my own immortality, I believe that if I die it will ultimately be a concious decision that I will make, and I don’t know what my answer to that is yet, but I know that it will be a decision that is conciously made, and not some seemingly random twist of fate. Whether this applies to anyone else, I can’t say.

I’ve been to Hell and I’ve been to Heaven, both upon this Earth.

Erek

15

We learn from people who have died and come back to life, they were dead from a few minutes, to days. These experiences are called near death experiences.

According to near death experiences, ALL go to heaven. Some are delayed by different beliefs, but in the end all go to heaven, or better called the “Spiritual Realms.” The spiritual realms is much like the physical, and you can learn and grow there.

The doctrines of Christianity have no meaning in the spiritual world, there is no religion there. People who do good works, and love others will achieve a higher plane than those who don’t.

God loves us all, everyone, and cares for us, and protects us. There is absolutely nothing to fear from God.

You might search Near Death Experiences in Google and read what people who have been there say about it.

Love

16

Nevermind, first of all, let me offer my condolences at your loss. My mother died 15 years ago, and it sucked. Now I will offer you a point of view from the Baha’i faith. Our writings seldom refer to “heaven”, but rather “this world and the next”. It’s a whole different world over there. We believe that the ultimate goal is to attain the presence of God, but in order to do so, we must be spiritually perfect. We can begin that perfecting process in this world, by praying, obeying the Holy laws, etc. but we cannot perfect them in this world, because there are too many distractions and attachments to earthly things. When we die, we will continue this process, until we are spiritually pure, and fit to obtain the presence of the Creator. Without spiritual purity, it’s an experience we could not comprehend. Abdul-Baha, one of the central figures of our faith said that the next world is as different from this one as this one is different from the world we knew in the womb. He also said that all of the Prophets of God have known what heaven is like, but haven’t told us because if we knew, we’d be in too much of a hurry to get there. As far as not getting along with other souls in heaven, I don’t think it’s a concern; once we are all spiritually perfect, how could we find fault with one another? We have also been reassured that we will be able to recognize one another. Abdul-Baha explained that, in the womb, we developed feet even though there was no place to walk, and eyes even though there was nothing to see. We needed those attributes for this world; likewise, in this life, we are developing attributes we will need in the next world. He never said as much, but I believe the occasional little spark of semi-psychic ability (you know, when it’s just a little too strong to be intuition) is a hint of an attribute that might allow us to recognize one another in the next world, even though we will have no bodies.

Hell is simply a state of removal from God. When we reach the next world, if we are still so prideful as to deny Him, then we will never attain His presence, but we will understand why it would be so desirable to do so. We will want it more than we’ve ever wanted anything, and we will not have it. That’s hell.

Just my two cents.

17

Personally I hope it’s simply neo-reincarnation. I could deal with an eternity of loops in this universe just for a chance to appreciate everything in it.

What do I usually think? Well heaven is severely abstract to me, but I will say I don’t buy eternal hell and torment for anyone. I believe human beings are made inherently good and the only thing hell would be is a time of penitence and learning about one’s true follies. Once this is done, whatever suffering one might have felt ceases because there is nothing to suffer over anymore. In other words, hell is just a transitory phase of varying length and degrees that most humans pass through to heaven.