This is one of the chief features of the early Christian religion for the first 300yrs was the attention to the burial of the body in those extensive secret Roman catacombs & later above ground in consecrated cemetaries. Christianity is all about the body, something that you take for granted but have to keep reminding you?
The part about a second coming & bodily resurrection of the faithful is a nice fantasy but no cigar, pure idealism, a mental construct of that human milieu we call Christianity, but the greater reality is so simple & far more poignant than this obvious primitive control mechanism. This imagery of having your own planet as in Mormonism, the virgins of Islam, Christianity bodily eternal life, well you can see this is a hard fantasy for people to let go of, look at the rewards?
(And look at the control it offers the leaders/heads of the body too?)
Did i say primitive? Yes it was something that the common man had been hoping for since the first Pharoahs 3,500yrs before, why couldn't he be considered worthy to be judged & enter those heavenly realms...because life then without medicine, droughts, floods & disease often really sucked. (life was very hard for the common man, think of people that live by the Mississippi? )
"Christianity" was 1000's of years in the emergence, you could see that one coming a mile away. Those early Christians were the lower classes & slaves, dreaming a little dream the common man had been secretly harboring for all those millenia. |
