Quotes About Afterlife

A Chipewyan guide named Saltatha once asked a French priest what lay beyond the present life. 'You have told me heaven is very beautiful,' he said. 'Now tell me one more thing. Is it more beautiful than the country of the muskoxen in the summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful. If heaven is still more beautiful, I will be glad. I will be content to rest there until I am very old.

The Sibyl informs him that it is, in fact, quite simple to get to the world of the dead. The problem is getting back:

How awful is it to be dead? It would be better to be the lowest, most impoverished, slave-driven nobody on earth than to be the king of the dead in gloomy Hades. And there is no turning back and no way to improve one's lot. That is the fate of virtually all who die.

The Old Testament says no word about either eternal bliss for the righteous dead or everlasting punishment for the wicked. The poets praise God, instead, for allowing them to stay alive for a while longer, making it possible for them still to praise him.

Probably most people who read the Bible think of Sheol as a Jewish kind of Hades, a shadowy place where everyone goes and all are treated the same, a banal and uninteresting netherworld where nothing really happens and people are, in effect, bored for all eternity. But in fact, in most passages of the Bible where Sheol is mentioned, it may well simply be an alternative technical term for the place where an individual is buried—that is, their grave or a pit.

the rivers Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus flow into the Acheron.

dread three-headed hound of hell, Cerberus.

That is, by showing what happens after death, the texts emphasize what matters in life, providing insight into the purpose, meaning, and goals of human existence so as to encourage certain ways of being and living in the world: attitudes, dispositions, priorities, commitments, life choices, beliefs, practices, public activities, relationships—in fact, almost everything involved with being a sentient and conscious human being.

The authors of Job and Ecclesiastes explicitly state that there is no afterlife. The book of Amos insists that the people of God suffer because God is punishing them for their sins; the book of Job insists that the innocent can suffer; and the book of Daniel indicates that the innocent in fact will suffer. All of these books are different, all of them have a message, and all of the messages deserve to be heard.

Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation "RIP" ("Rest in Peace"). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: "I was not; I was; I am not; I care not." The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

New Testament readers are frequently disappointed to find that the Christian Scriptures say little about the nature of the soul or its survival in an afterlife. Instead, church authorities base most of their teachings about the soul on Greek philosophy, particularly on the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

You wonder about that sometimes, you wonder what happens when you die in your sleep. Do you carry on dreaming, does the moment of death expand to fill the void so that the dream goes on forever, or does it just fade to black? And if it goes on forever, does it matter whether the dream was a pleasant one or a nightmare? Would one be heaven and the other hell?

Los que fueron masacrados huyeron a su manera. Huyeron hacia algo que había mas allá; el cielo o en el peor de los casos la oscuridad eterna. Ellos fueron los afortunados porque los que quedan atrás están en el infierno.

The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.

Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one's existence;

Even the emotional comfort of a belief in an afterlife can go both ways. Would life lose its purpose if we ceased to exist when our brains die? On the contrary, nothing invests life with more meaning than the realization that every moment of sentience is a precious gift.

If there are junk yards in hell, love is the dog that guards the gates.

A lover in life will be a lover in death, a lover in the tomb, a lover in paradise, a lover on the day of resurrection.

Heaven is not a place for those who are afraid of hell; it's a place for those who love God.

When you're dead, you don't breathe, you don't see, you don't feel, you don't love.

The love we do not show here on Earth is the only thing that hurts us in the after-life.

I believe when I leave this Earth because I love the Lord, I am going straight to heaven.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where.