For Further Study:
Five Wishes from Aging With Dignity is an interesting resource.
The Quest for the Holy Grail at the bridge of death.
A hopeful song about Heaven by Rance Allen.
One view inside the Fundamentalist evangelistic Halloween Hell House (warning disturbing)
Heaven and Hell by Hieronymus Bosch
Questions For Further Discussion:
Do You believe in Heaven?
Do you believe in Hell?
How does one go to Heaven or Hell?
How often do you think about death?
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February 8, 2010 at 2:08 pm
I personally do not care much for it. The remains can spread disease, or be served for a meal. I like life, even though some of my diet includes non-human creatures. Humans like to believe they are at the top of the food chain with dominance over the rest of creation, but unfortunately this was ruined in the Garden of Eden when a serpent was believed in the matter of the local menu rather than the resident owner-establisher. The owner of the establishment had warned them to leave certain things alone or the cost would be catastrophic. It even seems in retrospect, that the serpent wanted the place to himself. Nevertheless, the evicted occupants were not forsaken if only to have to make a garden of their own as part of the cost of disobedience. Modern opinions about the grim reaping, range from delusional fantasy that only the imagination can support, to the Resurrection of Jesus (and presumably others), to a simple termination of sustainable self=functionality. One view seems interesting which is not often offered, and that it is a simple separation of flesh and spirit with the flesh going into dissolution and the spirit into a union with a preexisting spiritual existence. The fact that corresponds to what is known is simply that children are the beginning node of the continuity of everlasting life for humans. We don’t bear children at our own birth. Jesus is not recorded to have been completely a part of the normal process, (virgin birth, no offspring) but rather the process with unusual details. As a Tragic Hero figure, he represents the spirit of human life with some of the details altered. (He was born and re-born in resurrection.) We know that mammals, reptiles, marsupials, (vertebrates) are all able reproduce before giving up their given life. Some pass that life on in kind, some don’t, but all had received it at conception. So what this means to me is a method of reckoning the facts of life by counting, and that not all are what they were. Thus, as for dwelling on the terminal phase of life, it is as unmanageable as it’s very beginning, and what is in between beginning and end is as the ways of the lights and bodies in heaven.
March 14, 2010 at 6:56 am
This I have to agree with as to the causes of untimely departure from life’s journey…
Proverbs 28
4 They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the law
contend with them.
Ecclesiastes 6
10 That which hath been is named already, and it is known that it is man:
neither may he contend with him that is mightier than he.
March 14, 2010 at 7:04 am
As a passing note on the subject; Jude 1
3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common
salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye
should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the
saints.