Cycle of Life to Death. 3

Post 2 -> And as "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23), death became the universal fate: "Therefore as sin cameinto the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men" (Rom. 5:12). Christian theologians spent the best part of two millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3-4).Among early Christians delay in the promised Second Coming of Christ led to an increasing preoccupation with what happened to the dead as they awaited the resurrection and the Last Judgment. One view was thatthere would be an immediate individual judgment and that instant justice would follow: the deceased would be dispatched forthwith to hell or paradise. This notion demeaned the impact of the great prophecy of a collective mass resurrection,followed by a public mass trial on a gigantic scale. Moreover, it deprived the dead of any chance of a postmortem expiation of their misdeeds. The Roman Catholic notion of purgatory sought to resolve the problem; regulated torture would expiate some of the sins of those not totally beyond redemption. The view was that the dead just slept, pending the mass resurrection. But as the sleep might last for millennia,it was felt that the heavenly gratification of the just was being arbitrarily, and somewhat unfairly, deferred.As for the wicked, they wereobtaining an unwarranted respite. The Carthaginian theologian Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, outlined the possibility of still further adjustments. In his AdversusMarcionem, written about 207, he described "a spatial concept that may be called Abraham's bosom for receiving the soul of all people." Although not celestial, it was "above the lower regions and would provide refreshment to the souls of the just until the consummation of all things in the great resurrection." The Byzantine Church formally endorsed the concept, which inspired some most interesting art in both eastern and western Europe. Conclusion. Summary and in the final analysis, our view of cycle of life to death appears rational and realistic. Human Soul is that cosmic particle in our body that survives after death and it transmigrates to a new life or is released from the bonds of existence. While in the early Vedic texts it occurred mostly as a reflexive pronoun oneself, in the later Upanishads it came more and more to the fore as a philosophic topic. Itmade other organs and faculties function and for which indeed they function and it underlies all the activities of a person, as Brahman the absolute underlies the workings of the Universe. Of the various systems darshans, the Samkhya Yoga and the orthodox school of Vedanta particularly concerned themselves with the emancipation of the Soul, though the interpretation varied in accordance with each system's general worldviews. -RNK