(January 23, 2015 at 3:38 pm)Xeno Wrote: I don't know. I find the idea that there is nothing after death much more comforting than the idea of judgement including possible eternal damnation.
Yes, but what about all the other possible afterlives? Like Valhalla, where you get to go into battle each day - if you win, you get to return victorious, eat a huge feast, screw lots of wenches, and drink yourself into oblivion. If you lose, you simply die, then you wake up the next morning and try again. It's like the ultimate real-world RPG, with infinite lives!
Or reincarnation, where you get to experience all sorts of different kinds of lives.
Or Universalism, where everyone goes to Heaven and god's not mad at all, that was just a story someone made up.
I suspect that the first afterlife stories were free of the whole "wrath of gods/judgement of souls" thing. That came later, as a tool to control people when nobody was looking.
