My next step in religion was going to be morality, I hadn't thought that much about life after death. Well it's an odd thing. It seems like some of those ancient elaborate burials they were thinking of life after death, and certainly the Egyptians were the elaborate burial kings, I think it was just the kings who got life after death, but then they were gods even when they walked the earth. But I don't think that religion went down to the guys hauling the stones for the pyramids, I think they probably believed something else.
I don't know much about Viking religion, to the wiki:
In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is a series of future events, including a great battle, foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors.
That doesn't sound so hot, especially with only two human survivors. But that's like on earth, couldn't they be going somewhere else after they die? And speaking of somewhere else, isn't heaven kind of an odd place, in that everybody appears to want to go there (though, as has been noted, nobody wants to die), but exactly what is going on there? m Details are scanty. All the cool stuff in cartoons with halos and wings and robes and walking around on clouds is pretty much made up. There is a line about many houses, the implication being that they are good ones, and I believe gold is mentioned frequently, but the main sense I get is that it is like one eternal church service, except for some reason, maybe because you are dead, it will be fun. Well not fun, there is something devilish about fun, maybe not good clean fun, but as we all know, good clean fun is no fun at all. Or as the wags like to say, it's only fun until somebody gets hurt, and then it's real fun.
Anyway it seems to be just hanging with God, and more hanging with God, and more of that, and it isn't like God is doing anything, since I think everything is over. I'm sure somebody in this forum will tell us what happens to the Earth once we are all risen, or are bathing in those rivers of flame. But I think hell closes up after the last judgement or whatever.
Which brings me right back to the resurrection, which I last saw in my rear view mirror, but then Groundhog day is just around the corner/ I don't go to many funerals, I prefer the memorial services where there is beer and wine, but I don't recall the preacher ever saying Old Joe is mouldering in the grave right now and he'll keep on mouldering until the Last Trump (har, and we are only on our first, maybe we will have to suffer through his lupine offspring and their lupine offspring before the Lord has had enough of this crap), and then maybe he will get into heaven.
No, they say, he is in heaven right now, looking down on us, smiling. I think most people believe you go to heaven or hell (hell is a little iffy) and that's it. I reckon that is the way things went before that council decided, by a narrow vote I hear, to add that odd duck Revelations to the bible.
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