What Do The Major Religions Say About Death?

Recently asked by a child what happens when we die, and what is death,I had to start off by saying that no one knows for sure because no one has died and come back to tell us about it. Then I gave him a brief run down of what the major faiths believe about “What happens when we die?”

Christian view of death:

There is a heaven (kingdom of G_d, Eden) and a hell. Heaven is a good, perfect, idyllic place where G_d is, and where you will be happy for eternity until the Messiah comes and all people will be resurrected. Hell is a dark, hot, burning terrible place of Satan, where you will suffer for eternity. You can determine whether you go to heaven or hell by choosing to live a life in the service of Jesus Christ, and being an upstanding moral person, in which case you would go to heaven, or if you break the rules of the Bible, do not keep the commandments and are generally bad, you will go to hell. The locations of heaven and hell are vague but generally heaven is up in the sky somewhere and hell is down. The branches of Christianity, such as Catholics, Protestants and Methodists, all have their own variations on this idea.

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Jewish view of death:

When  a person dies their body is buried (not cremated) and the soul goes to the source of all spirituality, there he is judged on his deeds on earth, and undergoes some kind of reform and rectifying of his bad deeds and his soul is cleansed. The soul then graduates to higher and higher levels of spirituality. Sometimes the process of “rectifying” his sins involves rebirth/reincarnation into another body or other life form. They do believe in a heaven where you eventually arrive once fully purified. This process holds for Jews and non-Jews alike. Then once the Messiah arrives the people whose bodies are still on earth are reborn, including non-Jews, as they believe that the luz bone in the back of the neck connects the soul to the body.

Muslim view of death

On death the good Muslim soul is taken by angels and escorted up to heaven, going through various levels, when they get to the seventh level, Il-li-yeen they meet relatives and can rest and have a chat. Then after the burial the soul returns to it’s body and two angels munkar and nakeer, come and ask three questions, who is your Lord, who is your prophet and what is your religion? If they answer correctly – Allah, Muhammad and the Quran, a window to heaven is opened upon his grave, and he sleeps peacefully there until the Day of Judgment. However the soul can wander about, and even visit people in dreams. His soul is free. The non-believer’s soul is taken by ugly smelly angels who take him to the first level of heaven where he is rejected and sent to Sijjeen, hell where he undergoes all manner of explicit punishments. He too is returned to his grave but unlike the good people his body rots, all except the Luz bone. The Muslims share the Jewish belief about the Luz bone which they call “‘ajbu adh-dhanab”connects to the soul. And on the day of reckoning all will rise from their graves and they will have their punishments. After being judged bad people and all non-Muslims will be sent to hell for eternity, good Muslims will live in eternal bliss in heaven.

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Hindu view of death:

Good people’s souls are rewarded by visiting a heavenly place after death, and bad people visit a hellish place. But this visit is brief and they are then returned to be reborn on earth in a form of life. They continue this cycle of life, as they progress from a lower life form to a human and then to a better off person and a priest or person of high station. This is referred to as karma, the deeds you do determine where you will end up next time you are reborn. Then once their souls have reached the “top”, they can stop going back and move on to Nirvana, or a permanent heaven. Until you have perfected living, you keep coming back and suffering what the world has to hand out.

Other opinions:

We are just bodies, pieces of meat, or machinery, and when the machine stops working we simply die and are no more. No distinction between soul and body.

The one thing I get from all this is that we are souls, also religion is belief, which means we go on faith, sight unseen, we simply believe without having to see. So my opinion which I gave the inquisitive child was that the body dies, and the soul goes on to other things, probably better things, places to go and things to see. I’ll let the child decide how he chooses to believe.