Life after death.

[thesummerqueen]

I guess he went to bed or something. I'll be back after I get the checks straightened out, go to class and the gym. If he still hasn't answered which he'd prefer, I guess we'll have to do both, which means unless he prefers to do the looking himself I'll have to lay out what all the different sects of Judaism believe as far as the messiah and afterlife, because you see despite all of us having a propensity for curly hair and a habit for bitching about the quality of the food, we don't all believe the same things.

Sort of like Christians.

Actually, there was a pretty interesting article in Evolutionblog, I think (could be wrong) about how half the people id'd as Jews now are actually atheists? It only took a few thousand years, but I guess we're all seeing the bullshit.

Stucky, here's a quick run down of what I was told as a conservatively raised Jew (who later went to a reform temple): When you die, people move on. When the messiah comes back, he takes you up to god. There's a lot of waffling about what happens up there, and not a lot of coherent answers. To help the messiah find you, some people put a bit of dirt from the Mount of Olives in their caskets, which is funny because most traditional jews don't get embalmed so I guess the messiah gives you a whole new body. Or you end up looking like the golem in X-files.

Life is about living. Most modern Jews, from what I gathered, believe God put you on this earth for a reason, and life is the object of existence, not death. I said they don't have much of an afterlife, because even now they don't - certainly not in comparison to christianity, which seems to care only about death. I swear I saw an explanation of this somewhere, but I can't find it right now and probably have it on my home comp. Either way, if I were you, I'd not look at Jewish sites when it comes to the *history* of their beliefs. Jews are pretty notorious for bullshit. Same as Christians, we're just savvier at it.