Abstract

People have always had a considerable interest in the possibility of an after-life; some undoubtedly motivated by fear of death and others by a hope for a kind of cosmic corrective justice whereby the deserving sufferers in this life finally get their just rewards and the morally pernicious and evil also get theirs. Clearly, many cultures have believed in an afterlife, for they elaborately prepared the corpses of the dead and saw that useful goods were put in the deceased person's tomb or burial urn. Such beliefs persist, with many contemporary religions believing both that there is an after life and that one's status there will be determined by the moral character of one' earthly life