Originally Posted by anticipation (Post 736994)

The early Christian heaven seems to have evolved out of the Israelites fear of a Greek or Mesopotamian afterlife. Greeks believed that everyone, regardless of morality or social stature, went to Hades together and spent eternity just sort of wandering around doing chores for Hades, while the Mesopotamians believed that the afterlife was like a "house of dust", where everything was sort of intangible and in darkness. Of course Christians decided that they weren't going to the same place after death as their enemies, or anyone who they deemed of low moral character. Thus the idea of Heaven was created, so that early Christians could rest easy knowing that anyone who disagreed with them was bound for sandy doom while they would be perched up above with their invisible giant in the sky.

Originally Posted by The Unfan (Post 736999)

Going from one side of Heaven to the other is like going from Des Moines, IA to Reno, NV.

Originally Posted by toretorden (Post 736996)

Originally Posted by anticipation (Post 737020)

The Elysian fields have been widely misinterpreted as a the Greek equivilent of Valhalla, which it is in no way like. What I mean when I say everyone goes to the same place is that both the most immoral kings and purist peasants both went to the Underworld, where Elysium is located. Even Achilles, when he died, said that he would rather have lived in obscurity forever than to die young and famous. Greek mythology had no moral values, it had no central text, and it certainly didn't have the gods handing down orders like most Judeo-Christian religions. Most of the ideas concerning the judgement of man comes from Roman interpretation of ancient Greek myths. It's really only in Virgil's Elysium that we see the idea of a pleasant afterlife in Greek mythology.

Originally Posted by toretorden (Post 736959)

I would like to know where this description of heaven comes from. Growing up, I can't remember hearing anyone really describe heaven. The idea that you lose your memories and so on is all completely new to me.

Are there any "authorative" descriptions of heaven in the bible or is this all fantasized by believers?

Originally Posted by boo boo (Post 737132)

Yeah, Christianity did steal a lot of it's concepts, more than most religions I can think of. It's like the Family Guy of religions.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

From the early second century, we have a fragment of one of the lost volumes of Papias, a Christian bishop, who expounded that "heaven" was separated into three distinct layers. He referred to the first as just "heaven", the second as "paradise", and the third as "the city". Papias taught that "there is this distinction between the habitation of those who produce a hundredfold, and that of those who produce sixty-fold, and that of those who produce thirty-fold".

Originally Posted by toretorden (Post 737153)

Reading extracts from the bible makes it so much clearer just why there are so many different interpretations. :p:

The extracts Unfan posted were very descriptive. I thought I'd check up on wikipedia quickly to see if this city was mentioned elsewhere and I didn't dig around much, but I found this little piece in the article for heaven.



So here, although I saw no biblical source to support it, there are three layers which includes a city. I found the description of the city from Unfan's extracts quite intriguing actually and I thought someone must have tried to paint or illustrate it so I did some clever google searching .. Not much came up, but I found this!

http://www.tribulation.com/images/newcity.jpg

Which is funny because it's almost exactly what I had in mind after reading those extracts. :p: