Welcome to Gaia! ::

im just curious and would like to know wat other ppl think

thats pretty specific, but ok. u die,wat happens?wats ur religion say about it? do we go to a place of peace or r we just sleeping

In Buddhism there is rebirth, and there is Nirvana, which ends the cycle of birth and death. There are also a lot of heavens and hells with varying degrees of goodness and badness, but none are permanent.

Honestly, I'm not concerned with it. The Methodist church kind of operates under this idea that if you live a life seeking God you will have a good and fulfilling life. The goal is for this life to be rocking, not any emphasis on getting into Heaven. Heaven is basically just the icing on the cake. I have never heard a sermon about hell in any Methodist church, and heaven is usually only mentioned in passing.

I'm currently reading Rob Bell's Love Wins right now, which has been pretty controversial on the Christian world. He's basically rethinking the ideas of heaven, hell, and salvation within Christian theology. I've only read the heaven section, but he basically suggests heaven is here on this earth, only in a perfect, diverse, all loving all embracing world. I'm really enjoying the book though. Even if I may disagree with some of what he says, he at least gets you thinking.

Really, the bottom line though, is I have faith God will take care of me after death. I'm not in control, why should I worry.

So in other words, he believes heaven is a parallel universe here on Earth? Interesting..

Ah, so the world is slowly becoming ideal, and will become heaven in what is sort of kind a happy version of the Rapture, while heaven itself will never have existed until the world becomes ideal. Interesting...Does he happen to say what he thinks an "ideal Earth" would be like? Like "world peace" and such?

Hmm, interesting. I've always been interested in what people and beliefs' deferent Heavens are like. Most of the time what people think it's like is what they feel they lack in this life. Kind of like the way monster/horror movies can show us what we fear and take it to extremes (e.g Attack of the 50-foot Woman: Feminism, King Kong:African Americans, Godzilla: Natural Disasters, most likely Tsunami/Earthquake since he came out of the sea and destroyed buildings, Zombie movies biggrin isease/Plague, etc) and how a lot of good sounding things could turn out very bad if they were to happen (like "no fear" for instance, I studied about a person who had a condition were he had no fear in my Psych class. He would do things step in front of a bus easily because he had no fear of dying)...Anyway, I just think that people's ideas about the afterlife show some really interesting things about society in general.

So he believes that once someone dies, they have one more chance to become Christian, or that even after they spend some time in Hell or wherever they can still become one?

Yeah, I feel the same way. I remember a religious joke that went something like this:
A person dies, and goes to heaven, where a heavenly guide directs him towards a door within a long row of doors. "Go through that door, and don't look at what's behind any of the other doors!" The guy asks "What's behind the other doors?" and the guide answers, pointing to each door "That one's for the Christians, they think they are the only ones here, that one's for the Jews, they also think they are the only ones here, and that one over there is for the Hindus..." and so on. It's funny how some religious people insist their religion is the only right one...Generally I think that each religion has it's own heavens and hells (i.e Christians go to Christian Heaven, Jews go to Jewish Heaven, and so on) , because a lot of the various religious concepts of the place, are too different, and accomplish different goals, to be the same place for everyone of every religion, unless that one place is full of alternate universe-like planes or separated in another major way .

Hmm, reading before I fall asleep generally makes the ideas/story stick with me, and I end up having weird dreams. xd

Hell being hot was invented by Dante? I didn't know that...I guess he played a big role in shaping the "pop culture" view of hell...I knew that Satan having horns was based on the deer gods the pagans (then, the most flourishing, standard religion) worshiped, from a history channel special, but I haven't though about how big a role Dante's Inferno had.