What happens after death?

The soul waits in the grave until the resurrection; then the record, the scale, and Paradise or Hell. Children go straight to Paradise; those who never heard the message receive their own fair test (Qur'an 17:15).

Consciousness ends; there is no afterlife. The person continues only in what they leave: children, works, memories, and effects on others. Epicurus taught that this is nothing to fear — where death is, we are not.

Unknown. Survival of death is neither affirmed nor denied; most agnostics judge the evidence for an afterlife weak — Hume's essay on immortality is the classic statement — and live as if this life is the one they are sure of.

The soul goes to God's presence or away from it; then, at Christ's return, the dead are raised bodily and judged (John 5:28–29). Catholics add purgatory — a final purification for the saved — which Orthodox and Protestants do not teach.

Classical Judaism affirms that the soul survives, faces a purifying judgment (traditionally capped at twelve months for most), and awaits the resurrection of the dead and the world to come — while the texts stay sparing on detail and the weight stays on this life. Reform Judaism generally teaches the soul's immortality without bodily resurrection.

Rebirth: the stream of consciousness continues into a new life — human, animal, ghostly, hellish, or divine — according to karma, with no soul carried over. For the fully awakened there is no further rebirth; what nirvana after death is like, the Buddha refused to describe, saying the categories no longer apply — like asking where a fire goes when it goes out.

Rebirth: the subtle self leaves the body and takes another — human, animal, or heavenly — according to karma, and heavens and hells are themselves temporary stations, not final destinations. Only moksha ends the journey; the liberated, the Gita says, never return.

The soul is reborn according to its deeds unless, freed from ego by the Name and by grace, it merges into God as light into light. Heaven and hell appear in the scripture as passing states within the cycle, not final destinations.

It makes no claim about death or what follows. The question belongs wholly to religions and philosophies, whose freedom to answer it — in worship, print, and teaching — the secular state is bound to protect.

On the mainstream view, death is final: the person ends. What continues is influence — the lives one touched, the work one leaves, and memory in those who remain.

It does not say. Death and what may follow are left wholly to each citizen's religion or philosophy; the liberal state's duty is only to guarantee that freedom to the last.

It has no teaching on death: feminists hold the beliefs of their own religions or secular philosophies, and feminism adds nothing to them.

Honestly: nationalism does not say; it has no teaching on death, and its followers keep their religions' answers. What it offers instead is remembrance — the fallen live on in the nation's memory — and Anderson observed that its cenotaphs and tombs of unknown soldiers speak of immortality without naming any afterlife.