Flavors of Christian Afterlife
American popular culture has a standard model of the afterlife in jokes, cartoons, and sentimental books such as The Littlest Ange l. After death, the soul is an image of the living person, the same age and often in the usual clothes, that rises out of the body like a mist. This soul maintains the deceased’s name, memories, and other ego-traits and remains kin to souls gone before. “I’m going there to meet my mother." The first stop is a lectern on a puffy cloud in front of the Pearly Gates, where Peter consults a guest book. Souls whose names are written there (theories vary widely as to who qualifies) are issued white robes, halos, wings, and sometimes harps. The unlisted are dropped, sometimes through a trap door, to eternal torment by horned red devils with pitchforks in a fiery underground pit. Heaven is a walled city floating on clouds, with golden streets where the souls of the saved hang out forever in the presence of God and significant others, blissful renditions ...