When someone dies, God sends them to either Heaven, Hell.....or Earth?

[everythingafter]

Apparently, when someone dies, God sends a person to Heaven, or Hell depending on how they lived and who they worshiped. But what about ghosts and spirits? Does God say "You were a good person, but you were evenly a bad person too. So I'm gonna keep you on Earth as a spirit until you become one or the other."? And please don't say "I don't believe in ghosts" because this topic isn't about whether ghosts are real or not, even though evidence supports the idea of ghosts being real.

When someone dies as I understand it, he's not a ghost or anything else. He then is immediately shuffled off to whichever destination was appropriate based on his belief (or not) in Christ. There are a few instances in the Bible of formerly dead humans reappearing as spirits but so far as I know, these instances seemed constrained within the parameters of the Bible, where, as we all know, all kinds of crazy shit happens. These cases have no bearing on current religious practice or thought, other than to simply amplify the exceptional tales of the Bible.

From a Christian (or at least Protestant) standpoint, there are no such cases of an equally good and equally bad person. It's one or the other based on whether one believes or not. The Catholic purgatory is probably more along the lines of what you're referring to. That's the spiritual "holding pattern" for souls.

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So basically, Christians don't believe in ghosts because they think that a person dies and goes immediately to hell or heaven. It seems to kind of change their rules of heaven and hell when bringing in ghosts into the process. I was once told from my church pastor back a couple years ago that ghosts didn't exist because of the idea of God sending people to heaven or hell immediately after death of a person. That's a horrible explanation regarding the existance of ghosts though.

Well when we leave the physical world and begin talking about the spiritual realm and God, ghosts or anything else aren't out of the equation. That's one of the problems with religion. Any unusual happening, medical miracle can all be happily explained away with one word: god. So, I think many believers wouldn't necessarily say there are no ghosts. It's just that they aren't terribly relevant to the message. God, they would probably say, could, if he chose, have ghosts wonder around earth or do anything else, but the important thing is whether one believes or not.