Heaven & Hell and the afterlife through my eyes...

So this does not come from any preacher, or church, or even the Bible, but is strictly my gut feelings and my vision of what might happen & take place on the other side after death.

I can envision us going to this gigantic & enormous type of waiting room or pergatory that is a nice nuetral place, but where there's nothing going on that would be considered heavenly or hellish and may just resemble a big loooong field or green valley. And there will be millions of souls wandering there but the only ones that take shape or form are the souls you knew or were familiar with while here, and it is those souls that you will feel comfort in seeing and hangout with as you wait for your turn to go before the Lord. Now during this wait I believe that you will be required to watch let's say a spiritual dvd of your entire life step by step, and be shown and told what you did right and what you did wrong and what you could have done better. And while waiting I believe you will be able to be spiritually present at your own funeral or to check on others that are still here. So this is what you will be doing in my opinion in God's waiting room when you die, and during that time you will not be guilty or innocent of anything and there will be no conflicts or questions answered yet either.

But NOW..........once that part is over I believe is when you start getting called out to stand before God to answer for your life, and to have any and all questions that you've had since a baby clearly answered. And to me those who were faithful and pure and honest get sent on through to bask in all of the glory and warmth and incredible blessings that heaven has to offer, and those who were truely evil and rejected God their entire lives will be sentenced to the lake of fire and the pits of hell, and to those who were kind of on the fence and who loved God and tried to obey his commandments but kept screwing up & starting over, you will be sent back to that waiting room to wait and ponder and evaluate everything you did and to think about all that God just revealed to you. And that will be your punishment or lesson for kind of straddling the fence but continuing to try, and this is where I think I am headed for once my time is up.

 

I don't share your perspective and not because I don't believe in a higher power.

We (some of us believe) don't take our consciousness with us when we die so the after-life can absolutely not be a human experience.
The one you describe is a totally human experience with human emotions, concepts and thinking.

If I die and wake up with human consciousness...that would be hell for me.

 

Just my opinion & vision Corona and what I will be expecting to experience when I die, and all of us might think differently but this is what is in my heart and is what I will believe in from now on.

 

I think you're right....you need to believe that which empowers you and keeps you going. I don't negate your perspective; just mentioning that mine is different. Neither one of us died and came back so we don't know for sure what happens.

 

Exactly; and nobody does know 100% so none of this is up for debate no matter how many Bible verses you throw at me, or what the church might think or say. This is based on all of my experiences in life inside and outside of the church, and is something I have quietly prayed and meditated about alone many many times and it's the vision & gut feeling inside of me that makes the most sense.

 

My mother used to say her vision of hell was being forced to review/think about every mistake you made in your life for eternity.

 

That's what I think I'll be doing in Pergatory for awhile before eventually making it into the kingdom of Heaven.

And according to the church and the Bible there won't be any fence straddlers or medium ground believers making it into Heaven, and if that is the case then the majority or most of us are going to hell. Because if you are not completely a pure, clean, and holy person but at the same time you are not a dark and evil person either; then that means you are a fence straddler and middle ground person which most of us probably are.

 

I'm the last person on this forum to do that. I don't have any memory for verses or Church dogma.

 

Oh I wasn't speaking of you Corona, but more about some of the Bible barkers that I am fully expecting to bombard this thread with Bible verses and quotes in the next day or so.

 

I find this interesting Chris.

Did you read any books on the afterlife? if so, what books and which influenced you most?

 

Nope not much of a reader; but I have read the Bible front to back(it took me about 5-6 years though)and have listened to many many sermons as well as people talking about their own near death experiences, and I take all of that and mix it in with my own gut feelings and that is how I envision it all taking place.

 

You would have liked Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It's a tough book to read but speaks of this journey through purgatory and hell.

 

The scene you have played out, has been mentioned to me before.

I am uncomfortable with the idea of being judged by some higher power. To have a God tell me, I've been a right A-hole and banish me to hell for my sins, is laughable.

What I will tell people is this. I abide by a code of conduct that resonates with me. And if I do anything bad, like I have many times, I get a horrible pitted feeling in my stomach. I take this as a message, to say that I did wrong and need to put things right straight away. This instinct feeling is something that you could explain away as some guardian angel keeping me on the right track.

 

To each his/her own Bluesky and we will all stand alone when we die, so it's up to you or whomever on how you wanna leave this world what you hope to find on the other side.

 

About all I might venture forth to say at this point is that it is plain to me that if I found myself cast into a wordly reality such as the one we find ourselves, and with no help given to me from somewhere outside of this realm, I do not believe that it would be possible for me to some how reason or extrapolate, or divine, given only what I can see here, what might lay ahead in another realm, one that I have no basis for even guessing that exists. How people can think they can divine the answers of what may or may not lie ahead, purely by reasoning from what they see in the natural world, is beyond me to understand.

 

I guess call it a hunch or an intuition Henry, but whatever you call it it's just how I feel and envision the afterlife to be and again nobody really knows that is still walking around today.

 

For what it is worth, and this may surprise some of you, I do not believe Hell is a place of eternal torment, certainly not torture. I believe it is at least a figurative place, but perhaps even a literal place, where any remnant of the souls of the lost, those containers containing life spirit contaminated by sin, are utterly destroyed, never to return, never to be resurrected. Until a soul is actually destroyed, death to the soul, God could resurrect it. Once it is destroyed, that would not happen. Here is what I understand:

1.Man is made from the dust of the earth and became a living soul, an identifiable quantum of life, individual from all others, with the breath of life from God, the giver of all life in the universe, Whose life is Spirit, Holy. Man's soul inhabited by the Holy Spirit cannot die. God's Spirit is life itself. Because it is life, there is no death in it. It therefore cannot die.

2.Fallen man is that way because his soul became contaminated with ungodly spirit, Holy Spirit displaced, and thereby became “mortal.” Therefore without a mechanism for salvation, man will die, body and soul. The spirit returns to God. Death is now the default.

3.Fallen man does not have an “immortal soul.” Therefore man's soul, or identity, his individual distinguishable container of life, will cease to exist. His life spirit will ultimately return to God, Ecl 12:7. In this way, life is never lost, only transferred. God giveth, God taketh away.

4.The first death is a painless, unconscious sleep. (No awareness of time.) When one awakens from such a state, it is like no time passed.

5.Death, meaning those who remain asleep after the judgment, and the place that death resides, that being Hades (perhaps Sheol), itself will be destroyed in the Lake of Fire, a second death, along with Satan and anything that is ungodly, the lake of fire likely meaning the earth, consumed by boiling waters purifying all, during its renovation by fire.

6.Jesus Christ died, was buried, and then rose from the dead. Those who believe in Him most assuredly will not perish, (ie. eternal death, soul extingished in the Lake of Fire), but will have everlasting life, through Jesus Christ, who died sinless, whose soul is therefore pure, and Who can therefore transfer His life Spirit to anyone whom He chooses.

7.)No one comes to the Father accept through the Son. So no one is given entrance to Heaven and the new earth without the choosing, and therefore the judgment, of Jesus Christ. I do not believe that there is no chance that someone who does not believe in God through Jesus Christ in this life will not be given the chance for eternal life, but if he or she does, I expect it would be by virtue of other believers, believing and praying on his or her behalf to come to repentance, or perhaps other criteria, as judged solely by Jesus Christ. Jesus is the gatekeeper. I am not, and cannot therefore say or judge. The apostle Paul says that a believing spouse sanctifies an entire house. That may mean that the door is more open than even that might indicate. I do not know. Either way, before the earth's renovation by fire, those who are saved by God's grace, in the sole judgment of Jesus Christ, will be caught up in the clouds to meet Jesus, after which there will eventually be a new Heaven, then inclusive of a newly renovated earth, free from all sickness, disease and sin, then an earth that will be within the Kingdom of God, and not Satan as it was before the Garden of Eden. Eden will be restored, permenantly, free of sin and sickness or strife. And the perfect aspect of this is that each of those who is saved to live in this newly renovated earth will be there out of his own free will, desirous only to do God's will, as pronounced by Jesus Christ on earth, and thereby remain free from sin. All worldly concerns will have been removed from this new earth. And "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things [including the lake of fire] have passed away. And He that sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And he said to me, “Write: for these words are true and faithful.” Revelation 21:4-5

8. I presently expect that the Garden of Eden was an outpost, if you will, of Heaven, planted on earth, earth then occupied and controlled by Satan and his minions, earth meant to be increasingly placed under God's dominion by men (God's greatest creation, made in God's image), men whose souls possessed spirit from God's Spirit, an image of God's Spirit, with full free will as God has, that is, until it that spirit became contaminated by Satan's spirit. At that point, God's greatest creation itself needed to be saved from Satan's fate, which fate is certain and irrevocable death, as described above.

Am I right? Probably not in everything. But To believe any of this, I must believe that I'm at least partially right in it. But that does not mean that I am. This is just what I make of these things, at this point in my life, having done whatever meager work I have to try to understand these things. And only because Chris made a thread called, "Heaven & Hell and the afterlife through my eyes..." do I offer it for whatever it may be worth.

 

It's very important to you to be right.

 

I respect that viewpoint Henry and feel whatever beliefs get us through this world and into a glorious afterlife is ok with me, wether that is based on the Bible, religion, or our own interpretations of what might take place.

 

I will agree with you; I believe it is important to be right in what we say. Because only when one turns out to be right can others trust us. If one has a track record of always being wrong in what one says, then no benefit can come from trusting his or her position. Trust is an important aspect of life. If one cannot trust what another says to be true, then others cannot make decisions relying upon that truth. Just look at contract law. Individuals agree that each other are expressing their right intentions. Each other relies upon those stated intentions. Only in doing so can anyone agree in good faith. To deal in good faith one must be 'right' in stating one's intentions. But because I believe it is important to be right, and this is where I believe you are going, also, if I see something that I previously believed was true, and which I state, which turns out to be false, not right, then that part of me that believes it important to be right must correct me, and me, others as to my mistake. I expect that you believe that I am mistaken much more often than I admit. Maybe I am wrong to expect that. But yes, it is important that all of us tell each other what we believe is right, and then back up what we say. You might have noticed by now that many times I do not just state an opinion. Instead I derive that opinion, like I am doing here. Having derived it, it is much easier to back up any opinion, and it is easier for those who disagree to tell exactly where the disagreement might have germinated. And for these reasons, I do place a value on actually being right. Don't you?

The difference between you and me, at least so far as I can determine so far, is that I believe that truth is not subjective. Without putting words in your mouth, from what I can determine from our conversations of the past, you believe that truth is relative to the observer or speaker. But see, as much as that makes sense to you, if you are correct, I can never trust that anything you may purport as truth may actually apply to me. So I cannot rely on anything that you say. But if I am right, and truth is not relative, but is universal, then you can trust what I tell you and you can rely upon it to make your own personal decisions. If truth were relative, no one would ever be able to enter into a contract. Our system of laws depend upon truth being the same across all parties. So yes, for all these reasons, and more and more, I just cannot see that truth, as in universal truth, and therefore being right about what is truth in what one says to others, is anything but vital in a human society.