The study of the concepts of death

in various religions prompts

additional exploration in me.
Naturally, I cannot fit all of the
aspects that I find intriguing, but I
will mention several of them and
try to connect them in a coherent
journal entry.
I find it most interesting how
human societies tend to come up
with the idea of the temporal
nature of death due to the cycles
of seasons and the day and night
that they witnessed continually. In
Egypt, for example, the Nile and its
flooding that brought fertility to
the land of its people was the
symbol of resurrection. The life of
Egyptians depended on this cycle,
and I do not find it surprising that
they tended to link the former and
the latter and consider them to be
similar.

Naturally, Egyptians never saw

people become revived, but the
issue can be easily resolved by
assuming that the alive were not
admitted into the land of the
afterlife. The Egyptian concept of
death can be described as the
journey, which was performed by
the soul of the human being as it
was transported to the better
world that was ruled by Osiris
together with venerable ancestors.
As a result, Egyptians simply
needed to come up with the set of
laws that could grant them the
admission to this land. These rules,
while they were concerned with
proper behavior, also placed great
emphasis on the magical rituals. As
a result, improper burial meant
that the soul would not be able to
rest in Egyptian peace.

Similarly, the idea of the immortal

soul that cannot perish and needs
admission to a better world
occurred in Christianity and Islam.
In Christianity, for example, the
central figure that symbolizes
resurrection is Jesus. He died, and
he was resurrected; moreover, the
sincere belief in him is the path
towards the resurrection of other
humans (Agai 2). The early
Christian Church did believe in the
idea that the Second Coming
would bring all the dead back to
live together with their bodies. In
fact, this idea was the reason to
noticeably less elaborate burial
processes of Christians.

When compared to the pyramids,

Christian funerals are much more
modest, but their initial idea of
faith being sufficient for the right
to live after death caused criticism
even among Christians
themselves. It is not surprising,
therefore, that eventually the faith
was complemented by just and fair
life. Similarly, such a combination
provided good Islamic people with
the right to live in the paradise.
Opposed to the paradises of the
two religions are their hells meant
for those who have only little faith
and committed many sins. Thus,
the evolution of the concept of
death, resurrection, and afterlife
provides humans with a “choice”
of what they are going to do when
they die.