what good does death do for the dead?
Death frees them from the flesh and this earthly vale of tears (or is it a veil of tears?)
we should work to make heaven on earth -- live these lives as if they matter. because they do. the trick, i think, to living as a christian is to forget all about any afterlife and concentrate of living this one as best as we can, following christ's examples to the best of our abilities.
I've been reading today Be Still, It Is The Wind That Sings, a free pdf book by Arthur Osborne a disciple of Ramana. The book has a lot of interesting examinations of comparative religion.
one might say that religion has modalities, the vertical and
horizontal. Vertically it is man’s path to Beatitude or Liberation;
horizontally it is the harmonization of individual and social life
and is the soul of civilization. The vertical is the essence and the
horizontal the substance. Once vertical perishes the horizontal
becomes hollow within and is bound to decay.
Be Still, It Is The Wind That Sings pp 345
Ramana Maharshi - A Spiritual Giant of the Twentieth Century
I think Christian's do overly emphasize the afterlife. That might be because Jesus was killed before he had much time to teach. I think he did say somewhere that the Kingdom of Heaven was within. This is the vertical dimension or what Osborne calls the beatitude and what I refer to as the awakening function of religion. The horizontal or social support is important but it is ego based and that is inherently suffering. The solution to suffering is being free of the ego and that can happen Now.
lfen