Avoiding the trap

It  is… difficult to take the afterlife and the resurrection seriously when there are many theologians who contest the nature of the second death or otherwise soften hell into being a heaven you do not like.
Or when they insist that the challenges of Hades as a seductive bed of eternal sleep are actually successive portals of judgment where only the prayers of someone holier than you can boost you through the justified accusations of an entire host of demons.

The challenge of the faith in its primitive form is simple.
Hades enchants you into not wanting to wake up.
It does it by offering you three illusions:
sustenance, doubt (or to be more precise, belief in God's frailty)
and demigod status if one chooses to stay and serve god of the dead.

These illusions entice pretty much everybody—except Christ, as the gospel goes.

So folks who do not want to fall into the trap of eternal sleep
need to:
a) build up personality independent of creature comforts—
do not identify who you are through your material encumbrances,
b) believe in the power of God,
c) be atheistic to any competing deities who offer you godlike status so long as you remain in the fleshless void of the dead.

— Jacob Aaron Gorny,

commenting on my post What can we expect?