WolvenOne wrote:I should note that the entire Adam and Eve thing, well, a lot of people take it seriously but it's highly likely that it's a metaphor.
I got my nose bitten off on another board for answering the Adam and Eve question in a similar fashion to that...
Anyway, here's what I understood when they inculcated us in parochial school. I'm not a Christian but before I converted to Paganism I did a *lot* of reading and theological self-study, asked a whole bunch of questions and did a whole bunch of thinking. I'm weird that way...
As it was explained to us, when you die, you don't go anywhere, you sleep in a kind of stasis until Judgement Day. Whenever that's supposed to go down; they didn't explain it other than "it could be tomorrow, it could be the next day, it could be anytime" but definitely agreed it was in the future.
On Judgement Day, they further said, Jesus would split the human race into two groups, the evil ones on his left and the good ones on his right. Who are the good people? Why, Christians, of course.
![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/eyeroll.gif)
And you've all been baptised and go to church, so you got nothing to worry about!
So once the people have been stratified, the good people all follow Jesus to Heaven and the bad, goatlike people all go to Hell because they deserve it. Heh.
That's what we were taught. Naturally, they kept things simple and didn't deal in ethical questions because we were still in our single digits, so basically we got a storybook told to us like it's fact: basic Fundamentalism. Never mind that the largest part of the Old Testament and a goodly part of the New Testament was written in Aramaic, which is a poetic language and not to be taken literally. But much of what's popularly regarded as Heaven and Hell (and Purgatory) in popular culture came from Dante Alighieri's <i>Divine Comedy</i>. The Bible says nothing about Purgatory, and as for Hell, there's no mention of torture, flames, et alia. That's from <i>l'Inverno</i>. The Bible says that Hell — <i>Sheol</i> in the Hebraic — is a place of darkness, silence and stillness; in short, it could be interpreted as the grave. In short, God doesn't resurrect you, you just die and stay that way and that's it, death is the end and no afterlife.
BTW, that's what the Kemites believed happened if you were buried without being mummified or had your grave memorialized, or if no-one mourned you. You just...cease to exist.
So, anyway, back to the Catholic Fundamentalism...being a bright kid, I went home and asked my mom, "What about the people who were born and died before Jesus came along? Are they going to Hell?" That didn't quite seem fair to me. She told me that they don't go to Hell, they go to Purgatory (again, from the Divine Comedy, not strictly in the Biblical Christian doctrine).
Purgatory: a place where you go temporarily and your sins get cleansed away and then you can go your merry way to — wherever. Okay, this could be a good thing. A round of therapeutic Boom Shiva is rarely amiss.
Now to go in a slightly different tack...I've heard the doctrine where humans were one metaphysical "race" and angels were another, so a human could never become an angel. The way we understood it, when the good people went to Heaven after Judgement Day, they became light and merged with God. As I understand it, that's what the Hindus believe, too, your ashes are scattered in the Ganga at Kashi, all your sins throughout all your lives are forgiven and you merge with Atma, the Supreme Being. Many paths, one goal, I guess.
Now here's where I get Christian doctrine stuck in my craw. So long as you seek forgiveness, and go to the sacrament of confession, your sins will be forgiven — whatever they are. In other words, you could do something like rape, torture and mutilate-murder a child but if you flagged down a priest, asked for absolution and said an Act of Contrition, then your sin would be wiped clean and you'd be reinstated into God's Love and assured Heaven. Ahhhhmmm...call me a justice fanatic, but there's something about that that makes my "That Ain't Right" light come on...