[LottiFurmann]

Well Mooney what is the different between a man living in a one-room shack and a Rich man living in a 1000 room palace?

In a Nuke War, they both mean nothing.

[Beerinkol]

I forget where - it was probably a piece on the front page middle column WSJ; the 'light' articles. But it described a cross cultural study that asked the question 'what does heaven look like, how do you think it works?'

The answers came from a wide range of cultures. For example one common theme from India, from people who understood the question, was that heaven a huge bureaucracy with a big building with millions of people on line to go in and get things done. The analysis of this was that our imagination of concepts like heaven are shaped by our day to day understanding of the world around us. This sort of makes sense if you look hard at the Western European Protestant rural bucolic lifestyle of the last 150 years. Heaven is something like that but better.

(In the west, the Devil didn't become a 'devilish' character until the Black Death. Before that, in the art of the day he was like an angel. You can see this in Byzantic religious art. Last month's BBC History magazine had an article on this.)

[Ifroham4]

Well that's part of it. If your world is shaped by the structures and forces around you then your view of the other world is shaped the same way. In other words, heaven is not about what you want or think you deserve, it's about what you know and how you live now. I'm sure that for Medievel peasants heaven had something to do with getting fed and going to church and hearing nice music.

[Beerinkol]

http://www.aishdas.org/webshas/emunah/gehennom.htm

Ghennon doesn't seem so much a place as a condition or state.

[Paul Bunyan]

To me those are places that souls wind up because of something they did/did not do. Dante's Hell is not really a place but an apt condition of what you failed to do in life. Like Kafka's 'The Penal Colony' where the name of your crime is carved in your back.

Anyway I'm not a Talmudic scholar I only offer these as one way of looking at it as opposed to white clouds, harps-n-halos.

Anyway Satan gets all the good lines in Milton's 'Paradise Lost' so that view is that which is most Satanic is also most human. And Milton memorized the Torah and the Christian Bible so I'll accept that knew something about the subject.

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

postscript: there is nothing 'personal' about it. I think that is purely a Chrisitian convention. There is in Judaism no notion of an expanded or enhanced personal relationship with God upon death.