Eschatology is useful for the study of how human cultures have envisioned life after death.
When it involves judgment, eschatology violates the principle that only God may judge us.
Thus, depictions of heaven and hell are sacrilege used to control, influence and motivate people who may be led to believe their lives are more worth living when they follow the doctrines of cultures whose religions make strong use of such motifs.
If a person's life is worth more because the fear of hell and the desire for heaven after death motivates her to choose God, then such a person's motivation is based on spiritual ignorance about the purpose of heaven and hell.
However, if the fear of hell and desire for heaven leads her to become one with God, and let Him into her heart, so that she realizes how worthy to God she is from her birth until this moment in time, then her motivation is based on spiritual awareness.
The purpose of heaven and hell is to instruct us about how cultural beliefs about life after death reflect our fears about what we have done in life, and whether that would affect our spiritual life after death.
This forms much of what eschatology is.
How close a person has gotten to God that he knows Him to be in his heart, from birth to death, helps by using eschatology in a manner that respects God's role in life after death.
For eschatology only depicts the spiritual life after death, not the corporeal life before death.
If God created me from birth, and my soul, then the cruelties depicted in the various hells are sacrilege because I cannot see why God would require what he has made to be harmed repeatedly as punishment for not believing in Him.
Why should God harm a piece of Himself?
Likewise, if God should give me a new body and put me in a place where I live forever when originally I was a part of Him, I do not see why I must remain separate from Him when He is always as close to me as my heart.
Would it not just be easier for me to let my soul become one with God through meditation and be done with it?
Thus heaven and hell are merely states of mind created by careful examination of eschatological works of various religions.
They distract us from the spiritual truth that each of us is created by God, that the soul is "God in the heart", and that we return to God at death.
Think of God as the ocean. Each soul, a drop of water. Many drops become a trickle, a stream, a river. And to the ocean all rivers flow. Likewise, all life flows on that endless cycle of birth, living and death.
Are not then heaven and hell metaphors to describe that journey?
Perhaps each drop of water returning to the ocean is heaven. The mind boggles at the possibilities of ascribing different points of life's journey as hell.
In any case, eschatology only works in religions with a strong sense of good versus evil.
Yet it fails to work when the spiritual truth about man's existence and the soul as the creation of God is revealed.
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