[Don Myers]

"Once your metabolism ceases, and the electrical impulses no longer travel along your nerves, just what is it that you think continues to exist?"

I hate to use a hollywood movie to illustrate my belief, but it was the movie about a dragon, whose voice was Sean Connery. The protagonist asked the dragon why did he not just give up and die since he was the last dragon. The dragon said that he would not kill himself because he feared losing his soul.

[Lessismore]

his soul.

And what is that, exactly -- aside from the tautological "the thing that continues after death"?

[Skywalk]

I'm familiar with that passage. The problem is, the idea of an afterlife simply did not gain currency until a little before Jesus' time. Just as you can point to that line in the Bible, I can point to the fact that stoning over adultery had faded as a practice before Jesus' time, yet the Bible has the story about him intervening to save someone from stoning.

I don't debate there was a longing to dwell with God, and that the heroes of Judaism had special status and could live with God. I'm just pointing to the fact that an eternal afterlife was simply not a part of Judaism until much later.

As for Buddhist ideas being of Satan, that sounds ridiculous. Surely the idea that one man can bear the punishment for the sins of another, the idea of blood sacrifice are barbarities and of Satan, also? That a God would knowingly create imperfect beings and then drown all the world's living things despite the fact he could simply vaporize all of the truly evil ones, is the product of a primitive mind(unable to understand what omnipotence would really mean) ?