Most believers have a optimistic view of the afterlife, believing that they will enjoy a

pleasurable existence with friends and loved ones in a place called heaven. Although
many believe in a place of punishment called hell, they do not believe they will live
there. They believe that they will live in heaven because the power of their belief, or the
promises of their religion, that they will go to heaven. Yet is that wishful thinking?
Traditional beliefs in heaven and hell hold that that people have no choice but to reap in
the next life the fruits that they sowed during life on earth. As Jesus taught in the
parable of the sheep and the goats, this lies chiefly in how much they loved others and
cared for the less fortunate.
Immortality of the Soul
Main article: Philosophy of religion
From the standpoint of philosophy, there seems to be no logical ground for believing
that there is life after physical death, yet the very nature of human consciousness seems
to contradict the possibility of its annihilation—at least this is the way nearly all cultural
traditions have perceived it. Hence, philosophers have sought to ascertain whether the
universality of the belief in the afterlife is a remnant of primitive worldviews and the
expression of wishful thinking, or the expression of the intuitive awareness of a higher
reality.
Christianity and other religions that believe in a personal God, also believe in the
absolute value of the human person as a partner—no matter how finite and
inadequate—to that personal God. This naturally implies the belief in human
immortality, whether for all humans or only for those who choose the right path of life.
For Eastern religions that hold to an impersonal Ultimate Reality, confidence in
existence beyond physical death is based upon their perspective that the mental world
is more "real" than the illusory material world. Hence, death of the body is only an
illusory end; personal existence continues as its essence transmigrates or
is reincarnated into a new form.
Soul and Body
The form immortality takes is of debate. Does the individual soul maintain a separate
consciousness, or does it merge with the cosmic soul? If it maintains a separate identity
and consciousness, then is the soul clothed in some sort of spiritual body? All folk
beliefs in the afterlife describe spirits as embodied beings. However Christian and
philosophical doctrines are more equivocal, due to the influence of Plato and Descartes.
For Plato, the essence of reality lies in the bodiless human soul. When the body dies, the
soul lives on eternally in the world of ideas. This vision of the eternal soul implies that it
has no body or shape of any kind and is limited to a point of consciousness. Descartes
similarly drew an absolute distinction between the physical world, which has extension
in time and space, and the world of the mind, which is without any extension. This
philosophical position creates problems for most conceptions of the afterlife, and other
problems as well, for instance how to conceive of the link between thinking and action.
For Aristotle, mind and body are two sides of the same entity. He therefore believed that
the soul dies with the body. This is the position of modern materialists. Thomas
Aquinas sought to reconcile Aristotle with the Christian doctrine of immortality and
stated that the soul temporarily survived death before being reunited with the physical
body at the resurrection. Philosophically, this solution has been considered rather
artificial and involving a deus ex machina.
Spiritualists and mystics have repeatedly advocated a third position, the survival of the
soul in some sort of immaterial body. The eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and
spiritualist Emmanuel Swedenborg has offered one of the most complete explanations
from that perspective.