I've always been interested in the concept of heaven and hell in early Christian history and had been fascinated by the various interpretations of these ideas over the centuries.
One of things about this book that I found interesting was that the concepts of heaven and hell are not to be found anywhere in the Old Testament of the Bible. It is purely and more recent idea although there have been some very ancient pre-Christian competing views about possible afterlife but had nothing to do with the ideas of eternal bliss or damnation. Those are later Christian dogmas made to control people with threats of pain or paradise.
There is a lot of interesting commentary on ancient beliefs and philosophy. Personally I do not believe in heaven or hell and my views of an afterlife are a little more complicated than that Christian either / or. I also found that I would never want to be around people who live good decent lives only because they fear eternal damnation rather than being good and doing the right thing because that is how they want to treat other people and be treated as such themselves. Not being a good person only because you personally want to go to "heaven" instead of "hell".
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