Inventor wrote:
If God is going to judge, it started before 2,000 years ago. It started before the Old Testament.
That brings us to the Egyptians, the oldest judgment of souls story.
There was a keeper of the doorway, none enter the afterworld but through me, who was not the head god. Head gods had better things to do. Head gods let middle management vet people for being worthy of the afterlife.
The Greeks had the boatman in the ferry, Christians Saint Peter at the gates of heaven.
The Egyptian test was measuring you against you. A female god took your heart, as they all do, and weighed it against a feather. If your heart was as light as a feather, you gained the afterworld. If it weighed more, a crocodile headed god with a jackal body ate you. The end.
There was a cheat sheet in the 125th Chapter of the Book of the Dead. Things you had better answer yes to.
I have put no gods before the gods of Egypt.
I have honored my mother and father.
I have not stolen.
I have not lied.
I have not born false witness.
There were about ten questions that you had to get right. They were republished in some later book.
There was some wiggle room, if you killed a parent who was attacking the other parent, it canceled out.
If your heart was a light as a feather, the rest were but guidelines. Preservation of the body was because after the afterlife, you would be reborn Egyptian. It was not rebirth in the same body, it was a marker that you belonged in Egypt.
For the Greeks everyone entered hell, once crossing the river Leathe, Forgetfulness. Some did not make it to the river, and bribes for the boatman were part of the death rites. Once in hell, all memory of who you were faded, what you were in life, till nothing was left but the core of who you are. A life was nothing but a set of clothes a soul put on and discarded. Then after some period, a timeout, being sent to your room to think about it, you were reborn.
Good men were reborn Greek Citizens, women always women, and slaves slaves. Heaven was the realm of the gods and never a mortal.
Sumerians had separate afterworlds. The Black Haired People who worked the fields, became shadows in the ground that faded away in time. They returned to the mud that the gods had made them from. The gods, would move into the next life, and graves show they were joined by all of their servants, musicians, guards, in their tomb.
The Vikings had the same custom, where people would chose to join the dead to rebirth in the next world. The closest to Viking heaven was reserved for those who died in battle. Valhalla. It was above earth, but much below the home of the gods.
The Tibetans had a fully defined afterlife, again with self judgment. Your spirit will be released from the body, you will pass through darkness. Both peaceful and wrathful deities will try to gain your attention, ignore them, do not hope or fear, remain detached. They are spirits trapped in the void, do not join them. They have been denied rebirth.
After forty days passing through you will drawn to a couple copulating, and will be so small that you become a single cell. Who you are drawn to, will be by your Karma, to be reborn at the level you have earned. It is your reward and punishment combined. Each life is a another step in learning. A weakness that holds you back will return with each life until you learn the lesson, and master it.
Even if you learn all lessons, become enlightened, and ascend to a higher plane, break the cycle of birth and death, it is not forever, it is good, the time between births is longer, but the wheel of life will draw you back to be reborn again. Being enlightened is but the first step on the next level of existence, and there is more above that.
Through many lifetimes we learn to live and become aware of a speck of the godhead within us, that can raise us in awareness to enlightenment, which brings another awareness, far above us there is a godhead, something beyond description, something that has to be experienced to be known. We can never reach it, but we are drawn to try.
The consensus is there are souls that are refused entry to the afterlife, but most are and then they are reborn. I have met people who should be eaten by a crocodile headed jackal. Some are self judged, ghosts, who do not move on.
If we think we are the perfection of god, we miss the point of life is for learning. Finding our flaws seems the purpose of life, and they without error, are lying. Lying as we know will get you eaten by a crocodile headed Jackal.
I think it a reasonable system, where some souls self select out of existence, and atheists would be better suited to the actual afterlife of historic description, than those who will be expecting a white gown, wings, harp, halo, and personal welcome from god. I do not think they will pass the feather test.
We will all find out.
Very fascinating. I remember reading about some of these things in my intro to religion class. I'm of the Judaic orientation, I find all of those human takes on the afterlife only fascinating in how they differed from the Judaic take. Personally, speaking for myself, I prefer to not know anything about the afterlife and what it entails, and other then the fact that one post reality(heaven) is better then the miserable one(hell), its details don't concern me in the slightest. I think that's a much healthier approach, and for most of their collective experience, I think the ancient Israelites were the same way. Sure, Abraham was "gathered to his kin," and there was always a general sense of some post-reality in ancient Israelite society, but that was really only codified in the diaspora with Maimonides and his 13 principles, much much later, as an ode to logic that belief in a God suggests an afterlife, and if there is a better place to go to after this reality, then logic also suggests the existence of a hell. A mountain of assumptions, sure, but my point is that it wasn't until much later that these things were fleshed out.
I personally see that as the failing of the pagan world, and that of even the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam. I think a healthier view is to just know that a heaven and hell follows this lifetime, but placing greater emphasis on a God that sees what you do, and judges you on how you treat others. Not on how you treat him, or how you treat yourself, but how you engage others around you
The stridently religious center their lives around where they'll end up in the next life, and the stridently secular live as if this is it, and I think there's a good compromise to be had somewhere in the middle.
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It is not up to you to finish the task, nor are you free to desist from trying.
18 Aug 2015, 4:50 am
being that I'm closer to the end than to the beginning, I hope to know for sure when I meet the entity or a representative thereof. 
I believe that god just IS, and I believe we are all a part of IS.
