unforgiving to everyone.
The concept of death and afterlife (immortality)according to the (Judeo-Christian) Bible is that God created us from the dust of the Earth, to which we return upon death, and the Psalmist goes on to say:
” When they breath their last, they return to earth
And in that day their thoughts perish.”
In the New Testament, there is an amendment : the vivid description of death in the Old Testament is not denied, but it goes on to say that the wole story is more than that. Death kind of remains the same, but in Christ, due to his role as a saviour, its not as fearful as before – the dead will live again. This time with with a new resurrected life, a belief which many Jews harboured for hundreds of years before Christ, in the late second-temple Judaic period. The new Christian movement, even before it parted company with Judaism, strongly believed that Jesus of Nazareth nailed on a cross was raised from the dead literally and bodily and that this would be the way by which the expected general resurrection of the dead would be accomplished. The belief became a pervasive theme in early Christian sermons giving rise to the impression that the Christians prayed to two gods : “Jesus” and “Resurrection” (Anastasis).
Anyway, if we regard humans as living animals, and not immaterial or disembodied souls, then death must be the end of them. There is, however, an interesting article by H.H.Price (1953) who says that disembodied souls exist in a “world” of dream-images, and these images are exchanged between like-minded souls
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21