Help me not fear heaven/hell

[The Grand Nudger]

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Perhaps the theological narrative of heaven and hell, then, is a melodrama meant to express this basic and mundane fact of earthly existence, and not a story about two divine kingdoms in the otherland?

Are there any other narratives of faith that you think might be representative of this kind of storytelling?

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It could be, but because of the uniformity of the concept, it could also be our understanding of a universal truth that is intuited or it could be so ingrained in who humans are it's a defining characteristic.

Two ways of saying the same thing, there's no "but" there.    

Either way, you have to live and act in the now, not what could be.  I'll think about other narratives if you'd like to discuss them, right now I need to get back to work.

Yeah, you get back to work! 

 I don't agree though, that the egregiousness of a sin changes it's value (or weight) in relation to an objective moral authority.

-egregiousness of -act-.

If not putting down the toilet seat is a sin then skullfucking a kid is something else and much larger.  I think that it's clear that we use the term sin to refer to something more than minor lapses of judgement and inconsequential transgression.  

The greek concept of sin, from which the christian movement derived much of it's own notion, made this very explicit.  Sin wasn't just missing the mark.  It was a particularly offensive category of thought or action..conscious and voluntary and..in an important way, explanatory for that sinners current shitty circumstance.  In this, at least, it was distinct from innate depravity, what the christians eventually came to conceive of as "original sin", though they did think that a person could do it accidentally. By, for example, not knowing that the thing x that they voluntarily and consciously did was sinful. The gods would punish them all the same.

Heaven help some wanderer who picks the wrong flower in a sacred grove, right?

We may be innately depraved such that we stare at some girls ass when she walks by on the street, but if this carries the same weight or value as skullfucking a child - then we aren't even approaching the vicinity of an objective moral appraisal of weight or desert. It may be an article of your faith that no sin is more egregious than the other, or that the egregiousness of an act doesn't indicate it as sin whereas some other is not.... but that's just another item of baggage you carry around with you as a product of a bunch of schmucks negotiating with each other on a legalism that they found useful for their own earthly ends at a point in time long past.

I suppose it's worth noting, to close these comments, that the very word in magic book that refers to this thing "sin", hamartia.. was a fatal flaw leading to the protagonists tragic end. A tad bit more serious than chewing with ones mouth open, made all the more ironic in that before this it actually was used to denote a missing of the mark. Christian theology dilutes the moral content in order to condemn even a sainted babe as a sinner of some sort or another, and so requiring absolution by the most bloodthirsty means imaginable. This spiraling off from any lucid or nominally rational account of the thing is what makes the christian notion of sin contemptibly ridiculous, not any failure to have originated from or ultimately refer to some true thing about human beings and human existence, or even the factual absence of some god. Even if there were no gods there would be sins, and if there are sins that set can;t possibly contain every negatively valued act, and even if the punishment for all sin is the same it would still be the case that the natures of the acts themselves are different - reducing the christian notions, yet again, to explicit claims of immorality and barbarism.

Objectively speaking, ofc.